TURKEY AS IT IS TODAY

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29366, 19 November 1960, Page 10

TURKEY AS IT IS TODAY

A Land Of Contrasts

[Specially written lor “The Press” by IMOGEN TALLENTS'] 'JAKE mosques, bazaars, sultans, palaces—add romance. There you have the ingredients that make up Turkey.

Full of these thoughts I set out across Europe one spring afternoon and travelled through Belgium, Germany, Austria, Greece, Yugoslavia and finally Turkey. I went armed with a light suitcase, thirty shillings in each currency of the six countries, a bottle of vin ordinaire and an invaluable book called “Lyalls Languages of Europe.” This contained 800 words of each European language and useful expressions. With its aid and to everyone’s amusement I was able to struggle with Serb, Greek and Turkish.

I had set out to visit my cousins in Ankara and stay with friends in Istanbul on the way up. This is the best way of seeing Turkey, that is, to stay with friends; but if that is not possible there are various tours from England which are very well organised and not too expensive. My whole visit cost £7O, and I was delighted to find that I could return from Ankara to London for only £l7. I went mid-week to avoid the week-end crush and in this way I had my third-class carriage more or less to myself as far as Germany. I changed into a secondclass carriage on the Jugoslav border, where I joined some raucous German students and after a second night sitting up, we watched the dawn as we approached the environs of Belgrade.

You cannot imagine the difference in Europe east of Austria. It is primitive beyond belief and most things are managed by ‘■graft.” After walking round this rather uninteresting town, I decided to rest, so I went to the best hotel and I found, to my horror, that it was like sitting in a lorryman’s halt in London. The Serbs were unsued to seeing women by themselves, because the status of women is so different there and they thought I was a little mad. The ignorance of the man-in-the-street dumbfounded me. Someone said to me when I said that London was my home. “Oh, that is where Roosevelt lived.” Yet, Belgrade possesses some wellplanned museums, and I spent an engrossing two hours looking at their craft museum, which was full of models of houses and clothes down the ages. The embroidery was superb. Finally, my day was up, and with difficulty I found a taxi which took me to the airport and after visa complications I set off with great relief on the final lap of my journey in a Convair. It was a perfect, evening, with a cloudless blue sky as we looked down over the snow-capped mountains of Greece and Albania; beneath us two hours later lay the glittering lights of the Golden Horn. It couldn’t have been a more dramatic entry. The impact of being in a democratic country again knocked me backwards. At last we were free to say and do how we pleased. Turkey is a land of contrasts. America is spending millions there, and so are other countries, because of its strategic position. Part of the lands do not seem to have changed “since biblical times, yet in other places there are the most modern tractors working the soil. Comparison The really interesting part is comparing Turkey today with Turkey 30 years ago. I knew a Turkish family of my age, and when their daughter and I were discussing life while we were sitting in a boat on the Bosphorus. I could not help feeling how odd it was to have come half across Europe to discuss the same ambitions and problems as at home. Not so with her mother, who was brought up before Kemul Ataturk’s impact on the country. She married at 16 and was content with a simple domestic life. So much so that I was aghast when we had a meal in her house to discover that she had been cooking a seven-course dinner for us all the afternoon, and expected to wait hand and foot on her son whilst he amused himself. There was a pile bf seven plates at each place on the table and these she gaily washed up

single-handed, taking it all in her stride.

The Turkish people are a mixture of races—Armenian. Kurdish and others which I do not know. The Greek and Armenian Turks provide the artistic influences, and the actual Turk himself is a solid peasant farmer. The- land-owning system is curious: by Moslem laws the land has to be divided and sub-divided, so that even trees are part shared. There is no continuity of life from father to son: each man fights for himself.

The Turks seldom ask Westerners into their homes because they are sensitive about their primitiveness. For instance, these friends of mine interrupted dinner and said with great pride, “We must show you what we brought back from England.” I had expected to see a piece of china or furniture, but had difficulty in hiding astonishment when a very ordinary grey paraffin stove was brought in with great ceremony. Istanbul is a place where the more you bring to it, the more you get out of it, and I only wish that I had had more time to learn before I went. In a short time one can only hope to scratch the surface of its history. There are so many civilisations that it is hard to get them sorted out. It is confusing because the town is divided into the old and new sections, the old across the Galata Bridge and the new on the opposite bank. All the sight-seeing has to be done on the old side, which takes time to reach by taxi or else a ramshackle bus and using one’s best Turkish! Life is not made - easier by having cobbled streets—they are treacherous when it is wet, and one is liable to land flat on the road. The Mosques The mosques impressed me more than anything. They are vast and every square inch is decorated with exquisite mosaics. But perhaps the strange sounding chant of the people uttering the Koran made the greatest impression. It is so unlike anything European. I returned time and again to sit quietly in the Blue Mosque, sc wonderful was the beauty and atmosphere. After the revolution the Turks’ were cynical about religion, but that is not so now, and the mosques are filled and the country women are often veiled. The Sultan’s Palace is a fabulous place. There were egg cups crusted with rubies, milk jugs with diamonds, priceless porcelain and jewellery, and other treasures. It was tulip time (this is the national emblem) and there were beds the size of lawns filled with tulips swaying gracefully in the breeze and silhouetting themselves against the blue of the Bosphorus. I was told that the Sultans used to have tortoises with lighted candles on their backs to walk amidst the tulips after dinner to entertain their guests—a charming idea. I spent an afternoon in the bazaars. The Byzantine parts are unchanged, and by winding in and out of narrow passages, one can see them working silver, gold and copper and even sewing carpets in their little booths. I became carpet-minded. The designs and colours (so far as I could discover) were part of a local tradition which varied in different parts of the country. Unfortunately they often use crude analine dyes now, and not the vegetable ones; but the Government is trying to restore the Use of vegetable dyes. A week later I left Istanbul on an excellent night train for

Ankara. The next day I arrived there in blazing heat. Ankara has a steppe-like climate and is quite different from Istanbul Contrary to most people’s ideas, Ankara has been in existence since pre-historic days, and in olden times it was an important trading centre for caravan routes to the East. The Turkish War of Independence was planned and directed from Ankara, and the city became the symbol of the new Turkey in 1923. The old town stands on a hill and 'is full of fascinating peasant shops selling camel bells, dried fruit and all manner of Eastern goods. I could have spent hours wandering up and down the narrow lines looking at these booths. The new part diplomatic centre and it was perhaps a little surprising to find Japanese, German, and many different nationalities in the centre of Anatolia. Yet it made life stimulating. I was staying with cousins who are in the Diplomatic Corps, so we were living a fairly English life and even had our food sent from England, because it was so dear in Turkey. One Sunday we left the gay life of Ankara behind to go out into the wilds of Anatolia to see the Hittite capital which the Germans are busy excavating. The roads are so bad that cars are useless, and we set off in two jeeps, often going across bare country in a fog of red dust. Expeditions are a great adventure in Turkey, because vultures fly down at you, wolves come, and sheep dogs with enormous studded collars tear one to pieces if they get a chance. I enjoyed this day more than any other, because it was really seeing Turkey. The countryside has a beauty and solitariness which I shall never forget. By a ruined temple on the top of a hill we had a picnic lunch in. glorious sunshine, sitting on a carpet of wild grape-hyacinths, golden roses and berberis, drinking wine from a Greek monastery. Above us flew white storks and black ones, and hoopoes, and we even came across a nightingale’s nest. There were wild buffalo and tortoises, and we washed up our lunch in a stream where a young Kurdish girl was tending a herd of water buffalo.