“In the Steps of St. Paul”

Kaikoura Star, Volume LVI, Issue 87, 5 November 1936, Page 4

“In the Steps of St. Paul”

A SERIES OF ARTICLES BY

H. V. MORTON

ARTICLE No. 30

Hat and cap makers must have done excellent business in Turkey since , Ataturk abolished the fez. I often wonder, however, what has happened to all the millions of forbidden fezzes I have been told that many of them have been carefully hidden away ,by old Turks, who wear them in secret behind locked doors. This sentimental act, of course, reminds them of the good old days when a harem was a harem, and women knew their places; when there was no nonsense about education or Latin alphabets: when, in fact, Turkey was Turkey. ***** Strangely enough, the fez, which until recently was the sign of a Turk all over the world, was not of Turkish origin. It was Greek, or Byzantine. When the Turks captured Constantinople in 1453, they took the fez cap and wound their turbans round it as a sign of conquest, and less than a century ago the turban was still the national head-dress of the Tunk. Books about travel in Turkey, published during the last two hundred years, picture the extravagent dimensions of the turban, its variation, and the political significance of its shape, size and colour. When the Sultan Mahmud abolished the turban in the course of his European reforms about a century ago, the Turks’ had only to unwind the cloth to expose the Greek or Byzantine fez, which had been hidden since the fall on Constantinople! Now that Kemal has again reformed the country the fez has had to go. 11 Do you really like wearing hats?” I asked Mustafa. “We like wearing what Ataturk tells us to wear,” he replied, drawing himself to attention. I began to wish that he would say something terrible about Ataturk. Such absolute devotion was getting on my nerves. Mustafa and I were walking through the cobbled streets of Konya, towards the mosque of the Dancing Dervishes, v. ’ m I saw about fifty felt hats stacked on the pavement. They had obviously just been made, and were drying in the sun. Every one was - bandless, giving them a curiously unformed and naked look. It was a typical little Turkish shop with a drawdown, slatted shutter over door and windows; and, as I took a photograph of the pile of hats, I smiled to think that I had discovered one source of Ataturk’s hat supply. ♦ * w » • The door of the shop opened and a man. who had evidently been watching me from inside, came out on the pavement smiling all over his face, and politely invited me to enter. I have found that nearly every Turk, unless he is dressed as a policeman, is charming and good-natured and, above everything, loves a joke. He could see that I was amused by his pile of hats, and I believe he thought them rather funny, too, for as he led chc way into his shop he looked back to them and laughed. ***** I was in a Turkish hat factory. Two hatters sat cross-legged on the floor —the only indication that they were Turks. I noticed that in an excess of

loyalty they wore fine new undented £ specimens of the finest European pattern. <■ Watching them at work, 1 wondered 1 whether the Dictator would make the cross-legged position illegal. My mind flow back some weeks to a journey , from Adana to Aleppo, in the Taurus « Express. The train was held up for three hours ,by a landslide, which, foi> tunately, the engine driver had noticed just in time. During those hours' all the passen gers descended and sat on the edge of the precipice on which we had stopped. I was interested in a grand young man who wore a vivid suit of plus fours. At first I thought he was a Frenchman, then I came to the conclusion that he was Austrian. It was not until he sat on the ground and crossed his legs in the most natural way that I realised he was a Tunk. Everything outwardly Turkish about him had been obliterated except his inherited manner of sitting; but I have no doubt that such a brand-new Turk, when at home, sits on a chromiumplated chair. However, the hatters of Konya, sitting like tailors, rubbed and pummelled the felt, while the owner of the shop chatted brightly and exhibited his primitive blocking and steaming devices. “So this in an industry of New Turkey?” I inquired. “Oh, no,” replied Mustafa. “This is the shop which once made the tall felt hats for the Dancing Dervishes. But when the Dancing Dervishes wore expelled and their mosque turnci into a museum, what were these mon to do? They said to themselves: ‘We can make good hats for the dervishes; why should we not alter the shape and make good hats for the farmers’?” I asked what kind of hats the Mevlevi dervishes used to wear, and was told it was a tall, cone-shaped hat about, a foot in height called a kulah. The Movlcvis say that before the world was created a spirit world existed in which the soul of Mohammed was present in the form of light. The Creator took Mohammed’s soul and placed it in a vase, also of light, in the shape of a kulah. The hatter smiled merrily and shook his head when I asked him if he, as a maker of many a kulah, believed the story. “Wo cannot know such things,” he replied, smiling. I asked him if it is easier to make hats for the dervishes or for Kemal’s loyal subjects. He said there was no comparison. A dervish cap was a difficult thing to make, but an ordinary felt hat was easy. He could turn them out by the hundred. And he waved his hand in proof towards the display on the pavement. “Is it more profitable?” I asked. And the hatter turned the palm of his hand upward and patted invisible balls in the air with it, beaming all over his face, as the Turks sometimes do when they wish to indicate that all’s right with the world. (Article No. 31 will appear in our next issue).