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CHAPTER
II
IMAGES OF
VIOLENCE
It is axiomatic that in dealing with the long histories of great empires and
nations such as Russia, Britain, Germany and Spain we should come across events
that arose both our admiration and censure, the latter especially in the context
of past wars. Turks, with their own long historical background, and associated
with the Ottoman Empire in many contemporary western texts, have also had
numerous victories as well as defeats which have resulted in scores of
casualties and losses throughout history.
However, while some peoples are usually remembered and praised for their
heroic victories, others such as Turks are for some reason continuously
portrayed as appalling stereotypes of cruelty and barbarism. As a consequence of
such a negative attitude Turkey can still be found depicted in the last quarter
of the twentieth century, albeit with some nuances, as inhabited by people who
committed atrocities to others, especially with regard World War I, although
Turkey was actually one of these countries who suffered immensely on the side of
the defeated at the end of the war.
A number of twentieth century texts about Turkey reproduce previous
historical, cultural and religious stereotypes and introduce new ones stemming
from several twentieth-century events such as civil wars between the Turks and
ethnic groups in Asia Minor, mainly Greeks and Armenians during the First World
War. Contemporary accounts still contain pejorative reminiscences of Turkish
brutality with reference to the Crusades and subsequent bloody clashes between
Christian Europe and the Muslim Orient. These images are often juxtaposed with
sensuality and over-indulgence, with a revival of nineteenth-century perceptions
of exoticism and pornography in relation to the harem, and with an implicit or
explicit comparison of Islam and Christianity in association with arts, culture,
architecture and aesthetics as discussed in chapter one. The new dimensions of
historical Turkish cruelty which appear in different forms vary from accounts of
massacres or genocide to systematic torture by police and unbearable prison
conditions, repulsive descriptions of Turkish people, even heroic figures, and
emphasis on drug and antiques-smuggling and espionage.
As one of the common characteristics of twentieth century texts such as The
Towers of Trebizond, In Xanadu: A Quest, The Eunuch of Stamboul, The Mask of
Dimitrios and Journey To Kars, the historical image of Turks as brutal, violent
and bloodthirsty, is introduced through fictitious characters or the travellers
themselves. Macaulay presents this image through Aunt Dot and Father
Chantry-Pigg:
Aunt Dot did just say that, when it came to bloodthirstiness, murder,
torture, violence, and all that, it seemed a pretty near thing between
Byzantines and Turks; often all, as she pointed out, both the Comneni and
their conquerors were Asiatics, and deeply devoted to cruelty. Look, she
said, at the way Mahomet II had massacred or enslaved the Christian Greeks
of Trebizond(1).
A
similar identification of Turks with the Ottomans, who are supposed to have
committed atrocities to the West, in The Towers of Trebizond comes when the
history of Trebizond is described: 'the Ottomans, sweeping in with their
healthier and more robust strain, armed with the vigour of Islam, had built up a
new and noble regime, too destructive' (Towers, 75).
Another negative attribution is made describing the eradication of both
Byzantine antiquities: 'Father Chantry-Pigg said his piece about Turkish apathy
and squalor having let this noble palace and citadel go to ruin, as all
antiquities in Turkey went to ruin' (Towers, 74), and Byzantine addiction to
magic, notorious wizardry and alchemy:
The arrival of the down-to-earth, matter-of-fact Ottomans, who were
neither clever nor imaginative, and thought wizardry wrong, had driven it
underground, to be practised privately and lucratively by the Greeks who
remained in the city after the Turkish massacres (Towers,
139).
Discussing Macaulay’s writings about the Turks, J. V. Guerinot
points out that her historical interpretation of the Turks as savage is
presumably the main factor in her lack of sympathy for the Turks. Guerinot
remarks:
Turks she dislikes and Goths, those disgusting savages who roamed
over Europe sacking other people's cities, who are so praised by German
historians, and who ought never to have left the Vistula(2).
Through associating the idea of indifference and historical stagnation with
the Ottoman Empire in Journey to Kars, Glazebrook moves into another stereotype,
that of Turkish brutality and tyranny. He considers the Ottomans as invaders and
destroyers in the first place:
The very buildings and ornaments which Pericles had set up at Athens to
celebrate Europe's turning back of the invading tide of Persia at Plataea,
in the fifth century before Christ, had tumbled into ruins under the sway of
another Eastern invasion by the Ottomans(3).
Glazebrook
tends to recreate the traditional stereotypes of tyranny which have been backed
up with almost the same historical episodes of brutality, massacre and
sensuality in association with the places he travels through. While he passes
through the Balkans in the early pages of the book, he reminisces about the
sensuality of some places, where 'the barges of pashas fluttering with the silks
of veiled Circassians, their slave-pulled oars dancing in the watery light'
(Journey to Kars, 14), and the brutality of others:
At the time of chief interest in it, the whole of Yugoslavia and
Bulgaria (as well as Albania and much of Romania) were provinces of European
Turkey. Repression and massacre followed frequent rebellions. At Nis the
Turk built a tower of human skulls, to overawe the Reyahs, or Christian
subject-race (Journey to Kars, 17).
In Bulgaria he returns once again
to Turkish tyranny in the Balkans during the second half of the nineteenth
century: 'on a hillside about twenty miles to the west of my train, in the May
of 1876, Turkish irregulars butchered or burned five thousand men, women and
children as a measure to suppress a Slav rising at Batak' (Journey to Kars,
197). Another story of massacre relates to a Turkish pasha slaughtering the
inhabitants of a city in referred to by Skene, the nineteenth-century English
traveller who is supposed to have witnessed it:
First the slaves lost their heads in face of the storm's fury and ran
about in packs screaming with terror; next the guests began to hesitate
miserably between fear of the elements and fear of the pasha, until one by
one they had shuffled away into recesses of the rickety old building where
lightning whitened tatters of curtain and the moaning of the wind was
engulfed in long passages and empty halls (Journey to Kars,
198-9).
Later he moves on to Aksehir, a middle-Anatolian town, and
refers to Layard's description of the town in 1839: 'this barbarous and unclean
habit of leaving the bodies of horses, camels and other beasts to rot in the
streets prevails in most parts of Turkey' (Journey to Kars, 79). When he
continues eastward to Kars, the ancient town on the Russian border, he comes
across military check-points, as Turkey was under martial law after the 1980
coup, and in order to emphasise the threatening appearance of the Turkish
soldiers he inserts another historical episode of Turkish brutality to a Russian
soldier during the war between Russia and Turkey in the late nineteenth century:
The battle was at its thickest and hottest, when three Turkish soldiers
pushed a wounded Russian officer back from the parapet, and followed him
over it to dispatch him with their bayonets. Major Teesdale, seeing this act
of barbarity, vaulted over the breastwork, cut down the foremost Turk with
his sword, and called on the Russian, in French, to surrender as a prisoner
of war (Journey to Kars, 129).
To reinforce the view of Turkey as
mysterious and hostile territory through reference to Ottoman rule, he evokes
history or his imaginings about the past. Watching a parade of schoolchildren in
Trebizond, from five years old up to eleven or twelve, marching in step to a
military band, he notes, 'whose martial music seemed to me to be thumping and
blowing the little feet along the road like the kicks and cuffs of armed men
herding crowds into order. A drought of the tyrant's breath chilled me as they
marched by' (Journey to Kars, 153).
Apart from establishing a range of negative images of the harem, Eric Newby
reminds his readers of Turkish cruelty inflicted upon the Greeks by Ali Pasha
during the Greek War of Independence(4). Introducing
hair-raising examples of Ali Pasha’s brutality not only against his Christian
subjects while he was the governor in Greece, but also to his family members and
relatives as he himself murdered his brother, Newby seems to imply that Ali
Pasha’s initial incentive is his mother:
Whether this is true or not, his mother, a remarkable woman,
deliberately brought him up to be both cruel and cunning and with a
remarkable capacity for biding his time until the opportunity presented
itself for taking what was usually a hideous revenge on those whom he
considered to have wronged him or obstructed his designs. It is said that
his mother murdered his half-brothers in order to have more to settle on him
(On the Shores, 155)
As regards the reproduction of the
historical image of Turkish brutality in connection with a particular locale,
Istanbul, the imperial capital of the Ottoman Empire, attracted many writers as
the setting of their mysterious stories of savagery. In other words, Istanbul is
represented as a mysterious and exotic locale more than any other Turkish
setting e.g. the historical city is used as the setting for two Nick Carter
novels. The hero Carter is reminded of a Marlene Deitrich song about the city in
The Turkish Bloodbath (1980), and he designates it in Istanbul as a 'squalid,
teeming, dynamic nexus between Europe and Asia'(5), suggesting
that Istanbul is 'a natural magnet for intrigue and for the inevitable
concomitant of intrigue which is death' (Istanbul, 20). Carter describes various
historical 'palaces', 'kiosks' and 'yalis’, such as the haunted Kiosk in Black
Amber which is now used as the laboratory for producing heroin as well as the
residence of the smuggling family, and which reminds the reader of terrible
stories about the execution of women in the harem, put into sacks and thrown
into the deep waters of the Bosphorus.
The negative reflections of Istanbul in thrillers and travel books such as
From Russia With Love (1955), Black Amber (1965), When I Grow Rich (1962),
Journey Into Fear (1966), Diplomatic Death (1961), and On the Shores of
Mediterranean (1984) are created through particular references to
different historical parts of the city, like the Bosphorus, the Palace and the
Golden Horn, and there seems to be a close identification of these places with
different stories ranging from exotic harem intrigues to suicide and brutal
punishment as implied by Phyllis A. Whitney in Black Amber when she says that
'the Bosphorus has always been a receptacle for ugly secrets'6. In another part
of the book she also adds:
There had been one such Sultan who had made a thoroughly fresh start by
ordering a hundred concubines tied up in sacks that were well weighed with
stones at the feet, and gathered and tied tightly below the chin so that no
struggling would be possible when they were dropped into the Bosphorus
(Black Amber, 114).
In Forsyte's designation of the city interwoven
with both Turkish brutality and his biased religious comment, Istanbul seems to
be a 'City of Cats'(7):
I've never come across a place like it. But it isn't because they live
like animals. They put down poison for the dogs in the street. It is because
Mohammad made cats sacred. Like the cows in India. They won't even drown the
kittens. But they'll leave them to be run over or to starve to death
(Diplomatic Death, 180).
Later on, he introduces a brutal anecdote
about the city with reference to the Seraglio:
That’s Saray point. Tradition says that is where the garrotted victims
of the intrigues of the palace and the harem were thrown into the sea...The
later sultans had the recognised right to strangle all their brothers on
their accession in order to prevent possible rebellions. Mehmed III executed
all his nineteen brothers in one day...So you can see that it is not a great
problem to dispose of one body in Istanbul (Diplomatic Death,
220).
In order to emphasise the mysterious disappearance of
Dimitrios, a wicked character who is presumed to have committed various crimes
in The Mask of Dimitrios, the narrator makes a reference to the cruel image of
the Bosphorus:
‘A fisherman pulled his body out of the Bosphorus last night. It is
believed that he had been knifed and thrown overboard from a ship. Like the
scum he was, he was floating’(8). In
another part of the novel this image is ironically repeated in association
with Dimitrios’s wickedness that ‘there are a few more like him who should
float in the Bosphorus’ (The Mask of Dimitrios, 25).
Eric Ambler
in The Light of the Day (1962) tells us that: 'In fact, one of the Sultans got
bored with the whole harem had had them all dumped into the Bosphorus(9), and
continues to give details through a character about the internal brutalities of
the Seraglio during the hero’s touristic visit to the present Museum:
The Ortakapi Gate is a good introduction to the ‘feel’ of the Seraglio. “It
was here at this gate that the sultans used to stand to watch the weekly
executions. The sultan stood just there, you see the block where the beheading
was done. Now, see that little fountain built in the wall there? That was for
the Executioner to wash the blood off himself when he had finished. He was also
the Chief Gardener. By the way, this was known as the Gate of Salvation. Rather
ironic, don’t you think? Of course, only high palace dignitaries who had
offended the sultan were beheaded here. When princes of the Royal house were
executed - for instance, when a new sultan had all his younger brothers killed
off to prevent arguments about the succession - their blood could not be shed,
so they were strangled with a silk cord. Women who had offended were treated in
different way. They were tied up in weighted sacks and dropped into the
Bosphorus. Shall we go inside now?” (The Light of the Day, 117)
Similarly, Joan Fleming reminds the reader of the prevalence of negative
stereotypes through a Turkish character in When I Grow Rich (1962): ‘We Turks
have made a habit throughout history of throwing anything which is of
embarrassment to us either into the Golden Horn or into the Bosphorus’(10). In
addition, she reminds the reader of the historical technique of brutality
through Hadji as he finally kills Madame Miasme:
For years he had had a suitable large sack ready-made almost to measure,
and for an equal number of years had marked the large pieces of basalt rock
he would use for the operation. It had been a matter of five minutes to do
what he had visualised doing, so often; her body had gone into the water,
her head protruding from the tied neck of the sack in the old, old way. He
had kicked her down the water steps and now she lay, a distance of not more
than two feet from the bottom step, but a long way down; food for the
Bosphorus (When I Grow Rich, 212).
As has already been the case almost
in every detective novel, the one way of execution highlighted in many novels is
the murder, especially of women, by throwing them into the Sea of Marmara in
sacks full of stones. When the housekeeper's dead body is found several days
after of her mysterious murder in Diplomatic Death (1961)(11), it is
easily noticed that 'the body is not eaten by crabs because it was in a sack
with some big stones inside (Diplomatic Death, 220).
Rathbone also uses the popular Bosphorus stereotype as an execution point in
Diamonds Bid. When Jonathan comes across the dead body of his friend Thomas in
his hotel room he panickingly asks himself: 'What could I do? Buy a trunk, put
him in it and get a hamal to ditch it in the Bosphorus?'(12). In
Istanbul, Glazebrook repeats similar barbaric connotations associated with the
Bosphorus, suggesting that 'my feelings were like those of a Turkish woman in a
bag about to be thrown into the Bosphorus (Journey to Kars, 202), or 'beyond the
Pass lies the dread East, with its frisson of license and cruelty, where women
in bags are thrown into the Bosphorus' (Journey to Kars, 202).
Besides the historical stereotypes of Turkish cruelty and brutality,
twentieth-century travel accounts refer to incidents of genocide, massacre or
ethnic cleansing which are supposed to have happened during the First World War
and after. The image of Turks massacring Greeks, Armenians and Kurds during the
early decades of the century is implicit or explicit in many travel accounts and
thrillers in the twentieth century. For example, it is discussed in The Orient
Express (1922), The Mask of Dimitrios (1939), Pascali's Island (1980), On the
Shores of the Mediterranean (1984), and In Xanadu: A Quest (1989).
Some travellers such as John Dos Passos take a more neutral stand in
reporting different stories about the nature and implementation of the massacres
(Orient Express) whilst other travel writers such as Frederick Prokosch and
William Dalrymple imply that only Greeks and Armenians were systematically
murdered by the Turks. During his long journey from Istanbul to Damascus
subsequent to the outbreak of the First World War, when most parts of the
country were invaded by Western Allies, John Dos Passos met Armenians and Greeks
who maintained that their parents and relatives had been slaughtered in
different parts of Turkey; from Samsun and Trabzon in the North to Adana in the
South; from Erzurum and Van in the East to Izmir in the West. But a similar
accusation is made by Turks and even Iranians: ‘It was there the Sayyid found a
Persian who kept a shop. He was a Musulman, and told how the Armenians had
massacred and driven out the majority of the Mohammedan inhabitants of Erivan’(13).
When Ambler gives a brief history of Izmir at the beginning of The Mask of
Dimitrios he refers to bloody clashes between the local inhabitants of the city,
especially between the Turks and the Greeks, which are believed to have resulted
in numerous examples of savagery on both sides during the period when the city
was captured by the Turks (September 9, 1922). Initially, he points out briefly
that the Greek atrocities started when they retreated from the city that had
already fallen to the Turks:
In the early hours of an August morning in nineteen twenty-two the
Turkish Nationalist Army under the command of Mustafa Kemal Pasha attacked
the centre of the Greek army at Dumlu Pinar [Dumlupinar] on the plateau two
hundred miles west of Smyrna. By the following morning, the Greek army had
broken and was in a headlong retreat towards Smyrna and the sea. In the days
that followed, the retreat became a rout. Unable to destroy the Turkish
army, the Greeks turned with frantic savagery to the business of destroying
the Turkish population in the path of their flight. From Alashehr [Alasehir]
to Smyrna they burnt and slaughtered. Not a village was left standing. Amid
the smouldering ruins the pursuing Turks found the bodies of the villagers
(The Mask of Dimitrios, 30).
But the whole story of massacre and
savagery turns the other way round on the same page with detailed descriptions
of slaughtering and looting by the Turks:
Assisted by the few half-crazed Anatolian peasants who had survived,
they took their revenge on the Greeks they were able to overtake. To the
bodies of the Turkish women and children were added the mutilated carcases
of Greek stragglers. But the main Greek army had escaped by sea. Their lust
for infidel blood still unsatisfied, the Turks swept on. On the ninth of
September, they occupied Smyrna. For a fortnight, refugees from the oncoming
Turks had been pouring into the city to swell the already large Greek and
Armenian populations. They had thought that the Greek army would turn and
defend Smyrna. But the Greek army had fled. Now they were caught in a trap.
The holocaust began (The Mask of Dimitrios, 30).
He also states that
the massacre was, later on, diverted onto the Armenian population of the city as
they were believed to have helped the Greeks while the city was under Greek
control in the wake of World War I:
The register of the Armenian Asia Minor Defence League had been seized
by the occupying troops, and, on the night of the tenth, a party of regulars
entered the Armenian quarters to find and kill those whose names appeared on
the register. The Armenians resisted and the Turks ran amok. The massacre
that followed acted like a signal. Encouraged by their officers, the Turkish
troops descended next day upon the non-Turkish quarters of the city and
began systematically to kill. Dragged from their houses and hiding-places,
men, women and children were butchered in the streets which soon became
littered with mutilated bodies. The wooden walls of the churches, packed
with refugees, were drenched with benzine and fired. The occupants who were
not burnt alive were bayoneted as they tried to escape. In many parts looted
houses had also been set on fire and now the flames began to spread (The
Mask of Dimitrios, 31).
He introduces another hair-raising story of
massacre which was continued by the Turks even for some time after the fall of
the city:
The massacre continued with unabated ferocity. A cordon of troops was
drawn round the city to keep the refugees within the burning area. The
stream of panic-stricken fugitives were shot down pitilessly or driven back
into the inferno. The narrow, gutted streets became so choked with corpses
that, even had the would-be rescue parties been able to endure the sickening
stench that arose, they could not have passed along them. Smyrna was changed
from a city into a channel-house. Many refugees had tried to reach ships in
the inner harbour. Shot, drowned, mangled by propellers, their bodies
floated hideously in the blood-tinged water. But the quayside was still
crowded with those trying frantically to escape from the blazing waterfront
buildings toppling above them a few yards behind. It was said that the
screams of these people were heard a mile out at sea. Giaur Izmir - infidel
Smyrna - had atoned for its sins (The Mask of Dimitrios,
31).
Barry Unsworth presents similar accounts of massacres in
association with the brutal image of the Turkish figure in Pascali's Island
(1980):’my mind began to fill slowly with thoughts of the bayoneted children,
disembowelled before they could walk; the clubbed Armenians bleeding their lives
away into gutters’(14). Nancy
Phelan relates similar account in her Welcome to the Wayfarer (1965):
The country was closed to foreign tourists while the Turks tried to put
their house in order. Shocking reports were heard. The Greeks who had
lived in Asia Minor for centuries were massacred; and their remnants driven
from the land; the Kurds were massacred; the Armenians were massacred(15).
Another
massacre image is introduced by Mary Lee Settle when she refers at one point to
the Trabzon massacre:
The massacre at Trabzon was one of the few times in Turkish history that
Turkish soldiers, who still have the reputation as the most disciplined
troops in the world, refused to obey orders. There were so many that they
were not shot, but were jailed(16).
Christina
Dodwell, during her journey to the eastern part of Turkey in A Traveller on
Horseback (1987), also refers to the Turkish atrocities:
Armenian independent mindedness clashed with its Arab overlords, and in
the eighth century the Arab viceroy was reported to have ordered the killing
of Armenian high nobility. But that was nothing to the genocide that came
later(17).
As
far as the image of brutality and massacre is concerned in twentieth century
thrillers and travel accounts with reference to early twentieth century Turkish
history, writers such as Dennis Wheatley and Nancy Phelan remind the reader of
the Turkish national figure, Kemal Ataturk with diverse negative attributes, as
he was one of the key military figures during World War I, the chief military
commander of Turkish army in the Turkish War of Independence, and eventually the
founder of the Turkish Republic.
While travel writer Jan Morris calls Kemal Ataturk one of the Turkish
despots(18),
Nancy Phelan declares that 'Ataturk was a bloodthirsty tyrant, a fiend, a
monster' (Welcome to the Wayfarer, 2). The negative image of Kemal Ataturk
propagated in the west also find its expression in popular fiction. For example,
in several parts of The Eunuch of Stamboul (1935), Dennis Wheatley describes him
with demeaning attributions:
He is said to be a licentious drunken brute, a cynic and a liar,
whom no decent man could respect or trust. He was feared and hated even by
the men who, from patriotic motives, had stood by him in his long struggle(19).
Describing
a Turkish military figure within the context of brutality in The Mask of
Dimitrios Ambler makes an indirect reference to Kemal Ataturk through a
character in the novel that ‘he was one of the Gazi’s own particular man in
Anatolia in nineteen nineteen, a deputy in the Provisional Government. I’ve
heard stories about him then. Bloodthirsty devil by all accounts. There was
something about torturing prisoners’ (The Mask of Dimitrios, 16).
When Mary Lee Settle described the ethnic clashes in Turkey during the First
World War as the Turkish massacre of the Armenians in Turkish Reflections, she
emphasised the late nineteenth century as the starting point with the key brutal
image of the Ottoman sultan of the time:
In the late nineteenth-century, Abdul Hamid II, known along his coast as
Abdul the Damned, sent the Turkish army to put down an Armenian revolt that
existed mostly in his own paranoid mind. He was the last of the absolute
monarchs. He sent his army to ferment murder and looting. It was
cold-bloodedly done, with a bugle call to start the massacres, and one to
end them in the evening. English sailors from a ship in Trebizond harbor
told of Armenians being pursued as they tried to swim to safety and drowned
by fanatical Turkish Muslims and soldiers (Turkish Reflections,
66).
Although the number of Turkish casualties was higher than the
Armenian ones during the First World War, Settle still feels exasperated with
the earlier conflict and accuses the Turkish sultan of being the arch-murderer:
All of this was the product of the half-insane mind of Abdul Hamid, and
it was murder without excuse, unlike the civil wars during the First World
War that came later, and from which a half-million Armenians and two million
Turkish people are said to have died (Turkish Reflections,
66).
In addition, within the context of World War I there are
some other Turkish military figures who are represented not only for their
cruelty but also for their humiliating defeat. In Greenmantle Enver and Talat
Pashas, who participated in World War I on different fronts of the country in
alliance with Germans, are described in a sarcastic and humiliating way:
Those boys aren’t good. Enver’s bright enough and for sure he’s got
sand. He’ll out a fight like a Vermont game-chicken, but he lacks the longer
vision, sir. He doesn’t understand the intricacies of the job no more than a
sucking child, so the Germans play with him, till his temper goes and he
bucks like a mule. Talaat is a sulky dog who wants to batter mankind with a
club. Both these boys would have made good cow-punchers in the old days, and
they might have got a living out west as the punmen of a Labour union(20).
As
a consequence of the popular belief that 'the lust of massacring Christians is
in the blood of every Turk' (The Eunuch of Stamboul, 44), 'America came to share
the popular antipathy in Europe toward the “Unspeakable Turk”'(21) as well.
Because there had been serious emigration from Asian provinces of the Ottoman
Empire to the United States during the closing years of the nineteenth century,
the great majority of whom were Armenians, Greeks and other Christian
minorities, there began to be an emotional identification of the American public
with the non-Turkish, and especially non-Muslim, subjects in Turkey through the
views propagated by Armenian, Greek and Lebanese immigrants in the United States
(Middle East Dilemmas, 167-8).
In a number of travel accounts examined in this thesis Turks are compared to
minority groups such as Greeks or Armenians. In these comparisons, the minority
groups are usually depicted as victims oppressed by the Turkish yoke, whilst the
Turks are seen as the oppressors, mainly through anecdotes presented by
characters from the minority groups such as Krikor of In Xanadu: A Quest. In the
early pages of the book concerning Turkey a similar massacre episode is
reflected through an Armenian character, Krikor, who is described with sympathy
by the narrator on their first meeting in Syria:
Krikor Bekarian looked pleasured to see us. He was a Christian Armenian,
he told us, whose family had fled from Erzurum in 1917 during the massacres,
and had managed to get to Beirut where they had set up a shoe-making firm(22).
Later
on, Krikor takes the narrator to an Armenian nightclub where 'an Armenian band
was backing a wailing chanteuse' (In Xanadu, 54) and '“Lovely, lovely”, said
Krikor. “This is a famous Armenian song about the massacre in Van”' (In Xanadu,
54). Accounts of massacre increase as Dalrymple travels eastwards. Noting the
ruins of the churches in Sivas, a middle Anatolian city, he refers to what he
has already heard from an old man in the city:
I had managed to establish that whatever was the case in Polo's time,
there were no longer any Greeks or Armenians in Sivas. According to the old
man they had all 'left' during the First World War (i.e. they had all been
slaughtered during the 1917 massacres) and since then their churches had
fallen into disrepair, and eventually had been swept away. The one near the
citadel, probably the Armenian church of St. Blaise, had been used as an
army store, and when the roof fell in 1953 it had been destroyed. The other,
presumably the Greek church of St. George, was knocked down in 1978 and its
stones had been used to build a mosque (In Xanadu, 92-3).
Likewise
Newby in On the Shores of the Mediterranean (1984) tells how he hired a taxi in
Adana driven by an Armenian who is depicted sympathetically:
He was an Armenian and gloomy. I had always had a soft spot for
Armenians, a race who have spent more time being massacred than any other
people in the Mediterranean regions in the last eighty years or so, more
than 600.000 in 1915-16 alone (On the Shores, 184).
It is Xenophon, a
Greek student in The Towers of Trebizond, who guides the travellers through the
Black Sea region. When he describes a group of boys playing around the tent he
cannot contain his prejudice by making a comparison that 'they were Turkish
bullfrogs and had no shame, and that Greek boys would never behave so' (Towers,
103). Another example of such ethnic prejudice is revealed in reference to the
historic barbarism of Turks through another old Greek when the group meet him in
Rize, a small Black Sea town. As he converses with Laurie hesitatingly in Greek
he expresses his opinion about the Turks:
Whispered to me, 'Ellenes, Ellenes! I said 'panu', nodding and smiling
to show him how completely I accepted his view. He repeated it, however,
saying, 'Ellenes. Ou Barbaros', and I echoed 'Ou Barbaros', with such
conviction that he would realise how utterly I was with him in rejecting the
barbarian ascription (Towers, 148).
While passing through different
cities of Turkey John Dos Passos narrates different stories about the massacre
of the minority inhabitants of the places, relaying anecdotes like 'there's
another Armenian whose mother, father and three sisters were cut up into little
pieces before his eyes by the Turks in Trebizond' (Orient Express, 9). In
another place, he encounters another massacre-story: ‘The Turks in Samsoun, the
Kemalists, who some weeks ago since deported the men of Orthodox faith, have now
posted an order to deport the women and children. Three days notice. Of course
that means ...”Massacre”, says some one hastily’ (Orient Express, 17).
Besides accounts of massacres which add a new dimension to the historical
connotations of Turkish brutality, another reflection of atrocity comes in the
form of accounts of harassment by the Turkish police and the military
particularly during the coups, and accounts of the appalling conditions of
prisons in the country. As he travelled to Turkey when the country was under
curfew during the 1980 coup, Philip Glazebrook met many soldiers at different
check-points on his way to the eastern part of Turkey, and infers from their
physical appearance as well as from their aggressiveness a close identification
with Germans and Mongols:
Many of the buses I had taken had been stopped at military roadblocks:
in the west of the country, in sunlight, these had seemed not unfriendly
checks on passengers’ papers. By night, in the eastern wilds, they altered
their character. They became frequent, and hostile... Up the steps sprang a
couple of soldiers under steel helmets, one running to the back of the bus,
both covering the passengers with automatic weapons... The shaven skulls and
Germanic helmets of the guards behind their weapons made them into another
race from the passengers, Mongol overlords crushing rustics under armed
heels (Journey to Kars, 116-7).
In addition to the early images of
brutality, another widespread anti-Turkish stereotype, especially popular in the
second half of the century refers to the appalling prison conditions and the
ill-treatment of prisoners by the Turkish security forces. This image, which has
become quite powerful through the cinema, with films such as Midnight Express
(1978), intermingled with the implementation of sadistic sodomization is also
obscenely emphasised in novels such as The Light of the Day (1962), when the
protagonist narrates his first impression of a Turkish jail: 'Then he took a
rubber glove and a jar of petroleum jelly from the wall cabinet and searched my
rectum' (The Light of the Day, 50). Another shocking example of torture and
ill-treatment by the Turkish police is pointed out by William Dalrymple through
a Turkish youth as he tells the bitter story about his cousin to Laura, another
English traveller in In Xanadu: A Quest (1989):
My cousin - my uncle's son - was arrested for his socialism and given
electric shocks by the police...Still he talks about the prisons. The
robbers, they beat the political prisoners and the guards they beat up
everybody (In Xanadu, 78).
Dalrymple implies that torture as a method
of interrogation is employed particularly in the case of political prisoners:
'The robbers, they beat up the political prisoners and the guards, they beat up
everybody. There are gangs, and many killings' (In Xanadu, 78). In Diamonds Bid
(1967), when the hero witnesses a bribery scene in a Turkish police station he
is exposed to brutal harassment by the police (Diamonds Bid).
Frederick Prokosch relates how he was arrested in an eastern city in The
Asiatics (1935):
The first three days we spent in a large room with twenty-eight other
men. They were all political prisoners;..All of them needed a bath. One man
had typhoid and another dysentery and a third one gonorrhoea. We were
allowed to go to the latrine only twice a day. And as for the food, it was
unspeakably wretched. One wouldn't have been surprised to discover that the
meat was the flesh of hyenas and the vegetables came from out of the Pontic
swamps. Many in this room, I learned later, had died, were dying, were going
to die; either from sickness or in the executioner's yard(23).
Referring
to what he has learnt from the guardians of the prison Prokosch proceeds to give
some details about the appalling conditions of the prison and the prisoners:
There were three guards; one of them, a fat little man from
Elizabetopol, grew quite friendly with me later. He would tell me tenderly
obscene jokes and bring me uneatable sweets wrapped in blue lead foil. There
were men with catalepsy, he told me with ery-sipelas, all sorts of worms,
tuberculosis, syphilis, eye diseases of a tragic kind, and many saddening
things that the exposure and the dirt and the malnutrition had slowly
grafted upon them. In a neighbouring room were the narcotic patients. We
would look at them by standing tiptoe on the bench and peering through an
iron lattice-work rose between them and us. They were living behind a
permanent veil. Once or twice some one called to them. But they didn’t
answer. There was no use trying to get near them; they were far, far away...
One of them was whispering incessantly. “He’ll die soon,” said my guard from
Elizabetopol casually. “Next week maybe.” And that’s just what did happen,
but it was an event so trivial and inconclusive that not a single person
could possibly have noticed the difference. But still, that’s what strategy
is, of course. The things no one else knows. And if I’d had the chance I
might have wept a tear or two (The Asiatics, 57-8).
Besides some
general attributions to the Turks such as ‘Turkish habit of striking...servants
violently in the face when they displeased’ (The Mask of Dimitrios, 13), as far
as the image of savagery or cruelty is concerned at individual level,
particularly thriller writers seem to create various fictitious Turkish figures
who are generally characterised by their villainous acts or records. Apart from
bribery, Rathbone tends to make use of brutality in order to make the combined
image of drug-trafficking and antique smuggling more sensational. For example,
Barish Uz invites Diana's boyfriend David, who is an expert on Hellenistic
bronzes, to his villa and he is introduced to 'an Eros and a Zeus. He said the
Zeus was as fine as and similar to the one in Athens Museum'(24), but 'two
days after he had talked of it all to this Turkish archaeologist he was knocked
down and killed. (Trip Trap, 132).
Another Turkish stereotype Timur Urganci, is a psychopathic murderer paid by
Barish Uz: 'They were both shot by Timur Urganci. Both times in the pay of
Barish Uz. Timur Urganci is probably psychopathic' (Trip Trap, 142). In order to
emphasise his wickedness Rathbone remarks:
For Timur Izmir was a dream come true: It was Chicago; and his
employers, mysterious people who kept him like a prince, had given him a
black suit, a machine gun, a black car, a suitable laconic driver, and a
target. Timur was in Heaven (Trip Trap, 82).
To increase the impact of
Turkish brutality upon the reader, many novelists refer to different methods of
execution as commonplace. In The Asiatics (1935) the execution takes the form of
shooting an Armenian prisoner already sentenced to death since he killed a
Turkish soldier:
Finally they took away the old Armenian (Miskranian was his name)...That
was the last we saw of the old Armenian, we strained our ears as we sat
there, waiting to hear the pistol report. Finally we heard it. Click. Then a
pause, then click again. That was all (The Asiatics, 71).
Sometimes
executions are described as taking place in public in well-known parts of
Istanbul like Sultanahmet square (a popular tourist centre), as exemplified in
Joan Fleming's When I Grow Rich (1962):
Do they hang people in Turkey?' Yes! he replied, 'they hang people in
Turkey, for murder!...Yes! they hanged murderers in Turkey and Nur bey
thought it necessity to tell her that they were public hangings (When I Grow
Rich, 27).
On one occasion Madame Miasme takes Jenny to another public
execution in Istanbul as an implicit sign of warning:
The hangman’s
movements were economical and unfussy. In his ordinary well worn European-style
suit he looked like a busy draper or any other kind of shopkeeper performing
familiar movements amongst his stock. He slipped the noose over the prisoner’s
head, pulling the knot round to the back and tightening it against The back of
the neck whilst adjusting it in front well beneath the chin. He then helped him
upon to the stool, pulling the spare rope twist and tying it firmly against one
of the supports. There was absolute silence now in the square but once more the
fog horn sounded. Light was rushing up out of the east, but the deed would be
done before dawn (When I Grow Rich, 78)
NEXT
NOTES
1-Rose Macaulay, The Towers of
Trebizond (London: Fontana, 1990), p.75. Further reference to this work will be
given after quotations in the texts, by mentioning its shortened title,
'Towers'.
2-J.V. Guerinot, “The Pleasures of
Rose Macaulay” in Twentieth Century Literature, 33 (Spring 1989), (110-128),
p.119. Guerinot makes this comment in particular reference to Macaulay’s
Pleasures of Ruins. See: Rose Macaulay, Pleasures of Ruins (London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, 1953), p. 169.
3-Philip Glazebrook, Journey to
Kars (London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 223-4. Further reference to this work will be
given after quotations in the text, by mentioning its title, 'Journey to Kars'.
4-Eric Newby, On the Shores of the
Mediterranean (London: Picador, 1985), p.152. Further reference to this work
will be given after quotations in the text, by mentioning its shortened title,
'On the Shores'.
5-Nick Carter, Istanbul (London:
Universal Publishing and Distribution Corporation), p.20. Further reference to
this work will be given after quotations in the text, by mentioning its title,
'Istanbul'. Also see: Turkish Bloodbath (New York: Ace-Charter, 1980).
6-A. Phyllis Whitney, Black Amber
(London: Robert Hale, 1965), p.114. Further reference to this work will be given
after quotations in the text, by mentioning its title, 'Black Amber'.
7-Charles Forsyte, Diplomatic
Death, first pub. London: Cassell, 1961, (Leicester: F.A. Thorpe, 1988), p.180.
Further reference to this work will be given after quotations in the text, by
mentioning its title, 'Diplomatic Death'
8-Eric Ambler, The Mask of
Dimitrios (First Pub. Hodder and Stoughton, 1939) (London:Fontana\Collins,
1966), p.21. Further reference to this work will be given after quotations in
the text, by mentioning its title, 'The Mask of Dimitrios'.
9-Eric Ambler, The light of the
Day, (London: Heineman, 1962), p.117. Further reference to this work will be
given after quotations in the text, by mentioning its title, ‘The light of the
Day’
10-Joan Fleming, When I Grow Rich,
1st pub. (London: Collins, 1962), p. 186. Further reference to this work will be
given after quotations in the text, by mentioning its title, 'When I Grow Rich'.
11-Although it has been published
recently, the story was composed in the mid 1950s while the author was working
in the British Consulate-General. As the author remarks, 'behind the story of
Diplomatic Death lies another story. It began in the mid 1950s in Istanbul,
where I was working in the British Consulate-General. During this time my
father-in-law in England suffered a severe stroke and my wife had to fly home to
be with him. To while away the winter evenings on my own I read a number of
detective stories, until the thought came to me that it would be more
entertaining to write one myself. I devised a mystery plot set in the local
scene - for although the characters and events were invented, the story is set
in the Istanbul I knew'. See: Charles Forsyte, Diplomatic Death (Leicester: F.A.
Thorpe, 1988), prologue.
12-Julian Rathbone, Diamonds Bid
(London: Joseph, 1967), p.127. Further reference to this work will be given
after quotations in the text, by mentioning its title, 'Diamonds Bid'.
13-John Dos Passos, Orient Express
(New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1922), p. 70. Further reference to
this work will be given after quotations in the texts, by mentioning its title,
'Orient Express'.
14-Barry Unsworth, Pascali's
Island (London: Penguin, 1980), p.42. Further reference to this work will be
given after quotations in the text, by mentioning its title, 'Pascali's Island'.
15-Nancy Phelan, Welcome to the
Wayfarer (London: Macmillan, 1965), p. 2. Further reference to this work will be
given after quotations in the text, by mentioning its title, 'Welcome to the
Wayfarer'.
16-Mary Lee Settle, Turkish
Reflections (New York: Prentice Hall, 1991), p. 68. Further reference to this
work will be given after quotations in the text, by mentioning its title,
'Turkish Reflections'.
17-Christina Dodwell, A Traveller
on Horseback (London: Sceptre, 1988), p. 125-6.
18-Jan Morris, Among the Cities
(London: Penguin, 1986), p.200. Further reference to this work will be given
after quotations in the text, by mentioning its title, 'Among the Cities'.
19-The book was first published in
1935 by Hutchinson. Dennis Wheatley, The Eunuch of Stamboul (London: Arrow
Books, 1960), p. 41. Further reference to this work will be given after
quotations in the text, by mentioning its title, 'The Eunuch of Stamboul'.
20-John Buchan, Greenmantle
(London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1916) Ist pub., p. 226. Further reference to
this work will be given after quotations in the texts, by mentioning its title,
'Greenmantle'.
21-J.C. Hurewitz, Middle East
Dilemmas: The Background of the United States Policy (New York: Russell and
Russell, 1973), p.168. Further reference to this work will be given after
quotations in the text, by mentioning its shortened title, 'Middle East
Dilemmas'.
22-William Dalrymple, In Xanadu: A
Quest (London: Flamingo, 1990), p. 6. Further reference to this work will be
given after quotations in the texts, by mentioning its shortened title, 'In
Xanadu'.
23-Frederic Prokosch, The
Asiatics, 1st pub. 1935, (London: Robin Clark, 1991), p. 56-7. Further reference
to this work will be given after quotations in the text, by mentioning its
title, 'The Asiatics'.
24-Julian Rathbone, Trip Trap
(London: Joseph, 1972). Further reference to this work will be given after
quotations in the text, by mentioning its title, 'Trip Trap'.
