SERIAL “In The Steps of St. Paul.”

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3842, 4 December 1936, Page 4

SERIAL “In The Steps of St. Paul.”

(By

H. V. Morton

AND CAME UNTO ICONIUM. My Turkish guide, Mustafa, had been in Konya years before, in command of a squadron of Republican cavalry. He was eager, as the train approached the town, to see again the scenes of his exploits. “Look!” he cried excitedly, pointing towards a belt of trees, “a farm I burnt to the ground! Rebels were hiding in it. I burnt it over their heads; and they ran out in the smoke right into the arms of my men.” He looked again, and seemed disappointed to find that the place had been rebuilt. I looked, with curiosity, not at his farm, but at the town, once the Iconium of the New Testament which I had come so far to see. Pounding across the flat, central plain of Asia Minor, the train approached miles of feathery trees and bright green gardens, a welcome contrast to the brown, stone-scattered steppes which we had endured since morning. Wherever I looked, there were blue mountains rising on the horizon like islands from a sea: only to the north did the flat plain vanish in brown distance.

Abode the tops of trees I saw the roofs of one-storey town buildings, with here and there the minaret of a mosque. I saw a file of camels slowly padding along a track on the outskirts of the town. I saw an old Ford car full of Turks trying to race the train on a fairly good road that sprang up from somewhelre and went beside the track for a few miles. And as I looked at Konya and tried to imagine what Roman Iconium once looked like—the city Paul knew so well—'l realised how he- must inevitably have compared it with Damascus. Both thdse places lie in a sudden burst of green due to the presence of water. Just as the Bbana, gushing through the limestone rocks of the Anti-Lebanon, has created Damascus, so water flowing front the mountains of Pisidia irrigates the plain of Konya. Both Konya and Damascus are high above sea-level: Damascus 2300 feet and Konya 3370 feet. In Paul s time both towns were commercial stations on the grdat caravan routes of the world. When the train stopped we jumped down to the track and found ourselves in the motley crowd that in Turkey greets the daily train. Weary-looking men leaned down from the windows of the coaches in their shirt-sleeves and bought skewers of kebab, bottes of water and oranges. Turkish officers gazed out from the windows of first-class carriages; men who look rather British in their khaki tunics, but German when they put on their high-waisted, full-skirted great-coats of field-grey. In the station yard were waiting perhaps thirty incredibly shaky old Victorias, each one! drawn by two lively little well-matched horses. The box-seats were occupied by whipwaving and whip-cracking drivers who, in pre-Republican days, would haVe worn a fez (and anything else they fancied), but now are obliged to wear the Kemalist reach-me-down: caps so old that they collapse on the head like greasy puddings, and suits so ancient and patched that they would create despair in the Louse Market of Paris. “I know they look awful,” said Mustafa, “but that is not the point. The point is that these clothes represent a change of mind and a break with, ‘tradition. That is what our great Leader seeks: a break with tradition and a—new Turkey.” For the hundredth time that day he, metaphorically speaking, took off his hat to Ataturk. We selected a Victoria and set off with much whip-cracking for the town, some distance from the station. On the outskirts I saw a new-ly-erected statue, of the Dictator, standing on a decorative plinth in the middle of a small public garden. Ataturk was shown in military uniform, but the statue was redeemed from the commonplace because his hand rested, not on the hilt of his swond, but on a huge stalk of ripe barley. I admire this statue which is the work, I am told, of a Turkish sculptor. Its dignity and its symbolism are admirable. Statutes no longer horrify the Turk. Forbidden by the Moslem religion in Old Turkey, they are now springing up everywhere, although, of course, they are slightly monotonous. I am told that the most ambitious piece of sculpture is the Monument of the Republic in Istanbul, the first statue ever erected in Turkey. We clattered over a paved road into Konya which, as befits the greatest town between Smyrna and the Taurus, has a spaciousness about its new streets in strange contrast to the narrow, winding labyrinth of the old bazaars. Old Turkey built with wood. New Turkey is building in stone. Fol' centuries the only fine stone buildings in a Turkish town were the mosques round which clustered a confused huddld of wooden houses. Istanbul, which is Old Turkey, contains some of the finest mosques in the world, but its domestic architecture is deplorable. Kemal is chang-

ing all this, and stone houses on each side of wide roads are! growing up in all the towns of Turkey. Side by side with these new houses and shops are ruined Seljuk buildings which date from the eleventh century, crumbling town walls of the same peuiod, and miles of narrow ten-coop shops, open to the street, where the traders of Konya make and sell their goods. Above this strange muddle of old and new rise the slender minarets of many a fine mosque and the stumpy candlet-snuffer cone, covered with sage-green tiles, that marks the ancient headquarters of the now expelled Order of the Mevlevi Dancing Dervishes. iWe caused great interest in Konya, where visitors in real European clothes one of them obviously a foreigner—are not seen every day. Every time I saw a policeman’s eye on me I thought with contentment of Mustafa, ready always to explain that I was not a spy. We had some difficulty about an hotel. The! first one we tried had a loud speaker attached to a gramophone, which blared out Turkish dance music incessantly. The stairs also looked sinister. Eventually we discovered a place called tha Seljuk Plalace, a small, modest-looking house standing some way from the road in a little garden. I was told that it was owned by Russians. The people were charming. They rushed to take our bags up the one uncarpeted staircase. They rushed to take possession of my passport, and, no doubt, they rushed it to the police. I found myself in a small bedroom containing a wardrobe, a chair, and a bed. Two worn rugs covered the scrupulously clean floor boards. The window curtains had shrunk at both top and bottom so that complete privacy was impossible. The most important object in the room, as I was to learn later, was a stove standing almost in the middle of the room, with a big black pipe that spouted up to the ceiling and traversed the room on its way to a chimney outside. Konya, lying over half the height of Ben Nevis above sea-level, can experiencei hot days; but during the night the temperature niay be a little above freezing point. When wood is put in these Russian stoves, the heat runs along the pipe and the room is warm in about ten minutes. The bed looked good, but I was taking no ohances. I sprinkled it freely with that which killeth the moth, the bug, and the beetle; but in the morning I felt ashamed of my suspicions, for the place was clean. I awakened to a morning of dazzling sunlight, and decided to visit the Mosque of the Dancing Dervishes. TURKEY WITH A NEW HAT. 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 day 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 fciz 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 Turk. Books about travel in Turkey, published during the last two hundred years, picture the extravagant dimensions of the turban, its variations, and the political significance of its shape, size and colour. IWhen the Sultan Mahmud abolished the tunban 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 of Constantinople: Now that Kemal has again reformed the country the fez has had to go. “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 demotion was getting on my «erves. Mustafa and I were walking through the cobbled streets of Konya, towards the mosque of the Dancing Dervishes, when 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 drawndown, 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 plyThe 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 the 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. (Wearing them at work, I wondered whether thei Dictator would make the cross-legged position illegal. My mind flew 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, fortunately, the engine driver had noticed just in time. During those hours all the passengers 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 Turk. 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 chromium-plated 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 is an industry of New Turkey?” I queried. “Oh, no,” replied Mustafa. “This is the shop which once made the tall felt hats for the Dancing Dervishes. But when the Dancing Dervishes were expelled and their mosque turned into a museum, what were these men 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 Mevlevis 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 Miohammed’s soul and placed it in a case, also of light, in the shapa 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. “We cannot know such things,” he replied, smiling. I askdd 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 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 thei display on the pavement. “Is it mtore 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. (To Be Continued.)