SERIAL “In The Steps of St Paul.”

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3795, 14 August 1936, Page 4

SERIAL “In The Steps of St Paul.”

(By

H. V. Morton)

; SUSPECT IN TARSUS. I told you last week how after travelling through North Syria, I crossed the Turkish frontier and, changing trains at Adana, walked into the arms of the police at Tarsus. I was, at first mildly amused. All my contacts with police have, so far, been pleasant. But I soon became aware that my cheerful smile was not going down too well. They looked sternly at me, and their disapproval seemed to extend even to my innocent suit-cases.

The policeman made it clear that I must accompany them somewhere. By this time I was becoming indignant. I followed them to an office on the platform, where my passport was handed to an officer. He sat behind a desk, with a red band round his cap.

was discovered who could speak a and a revolver at his belt. Someone little French and English, and the following dialogue took place. “Why have you come to Turkey?” “I want to see Tarsus.” “Why?” “Because I am writing a book about St Paul.” “Does it contain politics?” “No.” “How long will you be in Tarsus?” “I don’t know.” “Why don’t you know?” After a lot of this, I realized that

it is lunacy for anyone to travel in Turkey without letters of introduction and identification. A passport is not enough. Modern Turkey, swept by an intense Chauvinism, is incredibly suspicious of every stranger. She has never been a tourist country. Travellers have always been few and far between. The sight of a camera is itself sufficient to get a man locked up until someone has telegraphed to Ankara.

It is also difficult, if not impossible, to explain to people who have no sense of history, literature, or archaeology, that you could possibly travel all the way from England only to see a few old stones.

My first impression of Turkey, therefore, was that the police, who are the smartest and best-dressed people in the country, have a perfect right to interfere wfth one’s most trivial actions. They run the country.

It is necessary for the stranger to report to them, explain his movements, to request permission to visit the next town, and to present every station which he visits with three photographs of himself. That is why every Turkish town has a crowd of itinerant photographers, ready to take snapshots and deliver the prints within ten minutes.

However, the result of my examination, conducted in an atmosphere of grave suspicion, was that I could travel to Tarsus by the seven o’clock train on the following morning—but I must leave my passport with the police! . “But can I get it before the train leaves in the morning?” “The station will be open,” said the police officer with a polite bow. Of course, in the morning the station was locked and barfed, as I thought it would be. .Angry and indignant, feeling supremely helpless, and with no document to prove my identity, I took my seat and managed to evade the watchful eyes of police patrols on the way. By this time, the system was beginning to get on my nerves. I even began to feel guilty! Tarsus, the once mighty CraecoRoman capital of Cilicia, the home of philosophers and the birthplace of St Paul, lies on a green plain about ten miles from the sea. My delight and excitement at having arrived there at last were such that for one whole day I forgot the police, and, in some incredible way, eluded them.

I found myself in a small, shabby town of incredibly 1 broken-down shanties and hovels. The roads were unpaved, so that after rain they are ankle-deep in mud. Mild-mannered Turks, dressed in the most remarkable collection of old reach-me-down European clothes I have ever seen, wondered about the streets or gazed, hands in pockets, into the small open shops and workshops. There is not one building worthy of mention in modern Tarsus. Even the mosques are shabby and poor. And this was once the splendid marble city of the Greeks and the Romans.

JWhen Paul was born in Tarsus in A.D. 1, the city had been famous for centuries. Like most ancient cities on the south coast of Asia Minor, its harbour was some little distance inland. This was a protection against pirates. The harbour, with its famous docks and arsenals, was constructed below the city, where the river Cydnus formed itself into a lake thirty miles in diameter. The ancient Tarsians, like the people of Glasgow who have made the Clyde, continually dredged that river and harbour, and it was owing to their engineering energy and initiative that the port became famous all over the world. Their city was glorious to look at. The ice-

cold Cydnus that ran through it was their pride. Wide straight streets, leading into market-places and to temples, lay in every direction, and the most famous building was the University. Cilicia is, I think, the only example in history of a State that was governed by a University. The successive principles of Tarsus University were the rulers of the province; and this notable experiment in government seems to have succeeded. How curious it is to imagine a great commercial port administered by philosophers.

Strabo’s account of Tarsus University reminds me of Aberdeen. Its students were all from the province of Cilicia, they burned with zeal for knowledge and were inspired with a passion to get on in the world and to travel abroad.

Consequently, men of Tarsus were known all over the world, and specially in Rome. The tutor of the great Augustus was a philosopher of Tarsus, Athenodorus, who, after teaching the master of the world, returned in old age to rule his native city. It was in this atmosphere of commerce, learning, and travel, that Paul was brought up. From his earliest childhood he must have met travellers who had just come home from Athens, Rome, Spain, and perhaps, even from Britain, so that the desire to travel and to see foreign cities must have appealed to him when, as a small boy, he wandered the quaysides of Tarsus, listening to the latest hero boasting of his adventures in lands beyond the sunset.

The Jews had been settled in Tarsus for centuries, and it is believed that Paul’s family was one of position and influence. It is curious to think that Paul’s father, as a boy, may have stood on the banks of the Cydnus to watch an event that Tarsus must have talked of ever after--the famous meeting of Cleopatra and Mark Antony. Cleopatra sailed from Egypt to Tarsus, where Antony was resting after the triumphal tour of Asia Minor that followed his victory at Philippi. He had sent for Cleopatra to punish her for the aid she gave to Cassius. She, knowing well how he had punished and fined his enemies, decided to make a sensational appearance.

Shakespeare, putting the wings of poetry on the prose of Plutarch, has told us that “the barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, burned on the water.”

When the Egyptian fleet came in sight, Antony, sitting on his throne in the marble streets of Tarsus, noticed that the crowds melted away, leaving him alone. They had gone to watch the approaching pageant. They saw a vessel with a gilded stern, with sails of purple outspread, and with silver oars moving in time to the sound of flutes, pipes and harps. Cleopatra, dressed like Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, lay beneath an awning bespangled with gold, while boys like painted Cupids stood on each side, fanning her. At the helm and at the rigging stood her most beautiful slave women in the guise of Nereids and Graces. The crowds on the river-bank could smell the perfumes burning on the ship. And thus began the downfall of Antony. Paul must have heard this story told by old men who had seen Cleopatra. He must also have heard many a tale of foreign lands from wandering professors who had returned to their native town.

But we should not imagine Paul as a student of the University. He was probably educated in a school attached to his father’s synagogue; then, at an early age, sent away to Jerusalem to finish his education under Gamaliel.

As I walked the streets of Tarsus, my mind full of thoughts of its ancient splendour, I saw nothing but flimsy wooden sheds, a crowd of shaggy men selling shaggier mountain ponies on an open space, and a boy driving a few mud-bespattered cows through the main street. I looked in vain for the pride of ancient Tarsus, the river Cydnus, that once ran through its marble streets; but this river, its bed choked by centuries of mud and filth, now runs in another channel to the east of the town.

But many feet deep below modern Tarsus, the old city still sleeps. Who knows what lies under the floor of its houses? Perhaps a relic of that great seat of learning whose fame was once world-wide; perhaps a fragment of the marble chair in which Antony was seated when the purple sail of Cleopatra came up the Cydnus.

While I was despairing of finding a single thing that links this Turkish town with ancient Tarsus, I came suddenly, in a little street, to something that has not changed since the time of St Paul.