An email from a ghost: part IV

 

 The story so far:  A few weeks ago I was contacted by Manny Paraschos, a descendant of one the Ottoman Greek families exiled from Asia Minor in 1922, who asked me to help find their lost family home, somewhere in the old town of Ayvalik (pictured above). There was very little information to go on, and my early attempts to trace the address of the family home from census or property records were unsuccessful, but eventually Manny found and sent to me a photo which was thought to be of the family house. The photo was of very poor quality, the old town in Ayvalik is very big, and many of the old houses are in ruins, but there was an unusual architectural feature in the photograph which reminded me of a street in which I recently had been taking photographs.  So, late at night, I went out with my dog Freddie to see if  we could find the Paraschos house.  Now read on…

It was  just after midnight on a warm Aegean evening when Freddie and I set out to find the sokak (street) where there was an unusual window resembling the one in the photograph just emailed to me by Manny Paraschos. It would have been more sensible to do this the following morning, in daylight, but I simply couldn’t wait to see if the street I was thinking of was the right one. I had printed out a copy of Manny’s tiny photograph -

- and was clutching it in my hand as Freddie and I wandered around the maze of streets in the lower part of the town, close to the sea front, looking for the sokak in which I had been taking pictures a few days previously.

Ten minutes later, I found it.

There was the house with the low protruding window, and there was the low one storey house opposite it, with two huge windows framed in the soft, dusky pink local  stone.  The sokak was well lit, and I stood there in the same position relative to the two houses as Manny’s father had done when he took the photograph on his brief return visit to Ayvalik in 1952.

I looked at the photo, and then I looked at the street; I looked at the street, and then I looked at the photo. Were they the same? I thought they might be, but I wasn’t sure. I took some photographs to send to Manny, from an angle as close as possible to the perspective of the original photograph -

 

- and then, while Freddie happily sniffed his way up and down the sokak, and  started chewing on something that I didn’t care to examine too closely, I walked up closer to the two houses to compare, as best I could, their features with those of the houses in the Paraschos photograph.

The window sticking out on the house on the left certainly looked very similar in height, in the distance it protruded from the house, and in the little roof which covered it. There was nothing that seemed different from the photograph.

The house on the right, however, the house that might or might not be the Paraschos house, had both similarities and differences to the photograph. The two huge windows, framed in stone, seemed identical on the house in front of me and on the house in the photograph. But there should be a door between them, and on the house in front of me there was no door.

Where was the door?

Its absence was not too worrying, because where there are two enormous windows like that on the ground floor of houses in Ayvalik, there is always a door between them. Or there was, once. Many of the old Greek houses have been considerably altered over the last 90 years, and those alterations often include filling in and plastering over windows and doors.

And so it was with this house. When I walked up close to the house, and stood midway between the two windows, I could see quite clearly, under the plaster on the wall, the outline of where the doorframe had been. There were a few other minor differences, all of which could be accounted for by alterations and redecorations to the facade of the house over the last 50 years, but the underlying structure looked very similar indeed.

It seemed to me that there was a fairly strong possibility that this could be the Paraschos house, but I would have to come back in daylight to take some more pictures, and get my friend Erkan to compare the photographs, and come and take a look at the house, and the street.  I called to Freddie, and we walked home through the dark, quiet streets. It was past one o’clock in the morning by the time we got in, but I immediately downloaded the photos and sent them to Manny in Boston, with a rather excited email explaining that I thought I might have found the house, but this would need to be confirmed the next day.

And then I went to bed, with the feeling of a job well done.

The following morning I returned to the sokak and took more photographs of the house. In the daylight you could see that the roofline of the street beyond the house mirrored that in the original photograph: a line of  one storey buildings, with a much taller house further on. Standing there, looking down the street, and comparing what I could see in front of me to the annoyingly small and dark photograph, I was 90% sure that this was the right house. Now it was time to see if Erkan agreed with me.

I walked the short distance to Erkan’s office, and we compared the  photographs on his computer: the tiny, dark, photograph from 1952, and the larger, clearer photograph I had taken earlier that morning.

‘What d’you think? Could they be the same house?’

‘I think they definitely could be’, said Erkan. ‘The streets and the houses and the spatial arrangements are very similar. If it’s not the same place, then there are a hell of a lot of structural, geometrical and proportional coincidences. But….’

Oh dear. What was the ‘but’ going to be? I really didn’t want to be hearing any ‘buts’ right now. I wanted this to be the right house, end of story, so we could all pack up and go home.

‘…but it would be a lot easier to tell if they’re the same house if the old photograph was enlarged, so you could see a bit more detail. Have you tried that?’

At this point I must apologise to the more technically savvy of you, who must have been screeching

‘Enlarge the photo, you idiot! ENLARGE THE FRIGGING PHOTO!’

at the computer screen for some time now, in the manner of children at the pantomime shrieking ‘Look behind you! Look behind you!’

My brain is hardwired for words, pretty much to the exclusion of all else; a corollary of this is that both my visual sense, and my ability to manipulate images on the computer are, unfortunately, somewhere on a par with my skills at using scissors and at piloting moving vehicles of any description through space in accordance with predetermined and seemingly arbitrary rules (but hey, I’m left handed, and I still maintain the Cycling Proficiency test was rigged. We won’t dwell on the driving test: the burning shame of being overtaken by that milk float still lingers, all these years later) .

After receiving the photo the previous day, I had saved it in Picasa (the only photographic software on my computer), which remains  almost entirely mysterious to me, other than as a filing system of inordinate complexity. I did try to zoom the picture, but when the image increased in size it just went all fuzzy, and you couldn’t see anything much, so I gave up and forgot about it. It didn’t occur to me that by using different software it might be possible to get a different result.

In fact, since the photo had arrived by courtesy of  Gmail,  all we had to do

-  OK,  all Erkan had to do, if you want to be picky about it -

was click ‘view’ instead of ‘save’, whereupon Google helpfully enlarged the tiny old  photograph, without it going fuzzy - so clever! – thus immediately revealing a great deal of previously unseen detail.

And the very first thing we saw was that at the end of the street, the pine woods on the hills behind Ayvalik were clearly visible, which they are most certainly NOT from the sokak in my own photograph. That street was much too low down, too near the sea for the woods to be visible at the end of it. It was immediately apparent, even to my undiscerning eye, that the lie of the land, the triangulation between the sea, the hills behind, and street location was way off in my photograph. The house I had found was, quite definitely, the wrong house. No question about it.

‘Oh, BUGGER!’ I said, not for the first time that week.

We were back to square one in the search for the Paraschos house.

Again.

Dismayed,  I slumped back  into the chair, defeated once more by this seemingly impossible quest. Meanwhile,  Erkan did what all Turks do at moments of crisis: he called for some tea. In the shops, offices and restaurants in the centre of Ayvalik they don’t make the tea for clients in-house – it comes from the nearest çay ocağı (tea shop  or, more acccurately, ‘tea stop’; an otobus ocağı is a bus stop). Walking through the town you often see men or boys carrying glasses of tea, on metal trays with  domed handles, back and forth between the çay ocağıs and their customers in the surrounding buildings.

(In Turkish, the plural of çay ocağı  is, of course, not çay ocağıs, but çay ocaklar. But somehow that doesn’t work when you’re writing in English, for people who aren’t familiar with Turkish plurals. I will therefore apologise now to Turkish language purists both for this, and for all the other linguistically hybrid and grammatically incorrect sokaks, kedis, lokantas, and bayrams which may be lurking in blogposts still to come.

Mea culpa. Bu Türklish. Çok yanlış, biliyorum. Ben İngilizim.  Türkçe çok zor. Çok özür dilerim).

Erkan’s office has an intercom link to the çay ocağı  next door, and the tea usually appears within a minute or two of being ordered, as it did this day. While Erkan went off to deal with a customer who wanted to buy a big modern villa next to the beach in Ayvalik’s smart suburb of  Şirinkent, I stirred sugar into the little glass of tea and gazed gloomily at the enlarged copy of Manny’s photo we had just printed out.

You could  see much more detail on the enlarged picture:

the way the sokak curved round to the right; decorative stone columns inset on the wall on either side of  the door;  two more one storey buildings, and then a complete two storey house, beyond the house we were looking at; and,  perhaps most importantly, you got a sense of the distance between the house and the pine-covered hills that could now clearly be seen in the background of the photograph.

The old town of Ayvalik is crossed horizontally by three wide roads:  Atatürk Boulevard  is the main road through the town, running round the bay right next to the sea; about 100 metres inland, beyond the area of  old stone industrial buildings which used to be olive oil and soap factories, and now house carpentry, glass and wrought iron workshops, as well as cafes and supermarkets, lies Barbaros Caddesi, a busy shopping street which marks the boundary between the commercial and residential neighbourhoods. The third big horizontal road is 13 Nisan Caddesi, another 400 metres or so closer to the hills, and situated on their lower slopes.

Looking at the enlarged photograph, it was now obvious that the sokak in the picture was located somewhere in the lower part of the town, but not too close to the sea, in the large central residential area bordered by 13 Nisan Caddesi at the top, and Barbaros Caddesi at the bottom. I began to think about how to conduct a systematic search, starting from the northern edge of the old town, and working our way in towards the centre, sokak by sokak, alley by alley, house by house.

If you look again at the photo of the old town at the top of this post, you will get some idea of just how big an area we would have to cover. It would be both labour-intensive and time-consuming, but would  offer the best hope of finding the house. If the house still existed, of course, which was by no means certain.  I had been very foolish to think that I had immediately identified the  house in Manny’s photograph, just from some  superficial similarities; Ayvalik was full of houses like that, in sokaks like that.

I cringed, remembering my blithe certainty, the previous evening, of having found the house, and bitterly regretted firing off the email to Manny announcing that his lost family home had probably been found. Finding the house was a matter of great emotional importance to the whole Paraschos family, in America and in Greece; I should have waited until I was absolutely certain it was the right one, before raising their hopes like this. Now I was going to have to send another email to Manny, saying ‘I’m awfully sorry, but...’

Utterly despondent,  and furious with myself for having jumped the gun, I had by this time been sitting staring blankly at the enlarged photograph for about 20 minutes. And then, quite suddenly, out of absolutely nowhere, a thought popped into my head:

‘I know this house'.

I looked at the big windows, and the great big arched doorway, and the dilapidated plaster on the wall peeling off to show the brickwork underneath; a house not in ruins, but showing considerable signs of neglect.

And then my brain somehow superimposed on that house in the photo another image: of an identical house, with the big windows and the great big door, but replastered, painted, beautifully restored, and with containers planted with flowers standing on either side of the steps.

It was a house in the next street to my own, maybe 300 metres from where I live; close to the corner of Barbaros Caddesi, in a sokak curving round to the right, and with a view of the hills behind. It was a house I had always loved, because in a town so full of ruins, it had been properly restored and was immaculately kept; and although it had clearly lost its upper storeys in the earthquake in 1944, it was still an impressive house, one that you would take a second look at as you walked past, especially when the great big double front doors were open and you could catch a glimpse of the inside, where there seemed to be some kind of  courtyard or atrium.

As the two images fused into one in my brain I became  convinced that this, truly, was the right house.  It had taken me this long to identify it simply because the house today looks very different from the way it did when it was photographed in the 1950s.

And, of course, because of my almost complete lack of visuo-spatial skills.

Despite the growing inner certainty that I was finally on the right track,  it still seemed too good to be true. Could it really be the case that of all the houses in Ayvalik, the house in the Paraschos photograph should turn out to be one that I knew well, that was literally just down the road from my own? One seemingly strong candidate for the house had already been proved to be completely wrong; how likely was it that immediately afterwards I would manage to identify the right house, simply by looking at the enlarged photograph?

With the sheer improbability of this in mind, I refrained from leaping up and screaming about this new development to Erkan, who was just saying goodbye to his client; I had, after all, been wrong before. This time I was going to make absolutely sure I was right before getting too excited. 

Erkan, on looking again at the enlarged photo and being informed of the location of the house of which I was now thinking, looked thoughtful:

‘Yeah, I know that house. It could be it. Only one way to tell – let’s go and have a look'.

This post is getting much too long, and the hour is very late, but, dear Reader,  I have tried your patience long enough already in the slow, circuitous and episodic narration of  this story. To make you wait for yet another instalment before I reveal the outcome would be very unkind.  And I don’t like getting hate mail.

Are you still sitting comfortably? Right, then we’ll continue.

It’s only a five minute walk from Erkan’s office along Barbaros Caddesi to the sokak we were looking for, but that day it was a very long five minutes indeed. I held the A4 sized enlargement of the photo in my hand and, as we turned into the sokak and saw the house, held it up to compare the two: the dilapidated house of fifty years ago, and the smart restored house of 2010.

It was, without a shadow of a doubt, the same house.

The great big arched door between the windows, with the decorative columns of stone on either side, the curve of the sokak, the neighbouring houses, the window opposite, the view to the hills: all were identical. The only differences from the photograph were those caused by the restoration of the building.

We had found the house in the photograph.

And this is it:

 

    (to be continued)

Coming up next from the Camel Barn Library:  ‘An email from a ghost- Part V : Inside the Paraschos House’.

An email from a ghost: Part III

The Paraschos family in 1922

To new readers: this is the third post in a series about the search for a lost house in Ayvalik. In order to follow  the narrative, it would be best to start by reading Part I and Part II.

September is a beautiful month in Ayvalik. Every year, at some time during the first two weeks of the month, the temperature drops suddenly: overnight,  the searing summer heat of the Aegean disappears and is replaced by soft sunny days, cooled by breezes off the sea, as the town relaxes into a quiet golden autumn, with the tourists mostly gone and the children back at school. Should you ever wish to visit Ayvalik, September is a very good time to come.

When I imagine September, 1922 in Ayvalik, I see the town bathed in that same soft sunlight, the breeze rustling through the pines, and the fear etched on the faces of  its remaining Greek population, as they are finally forced to accept that the tsunami of the Asia Minor Catastrophe is not, as they had hoped and prayed, going to pass them by.

On the evening of the 24th September, 1922, Dr. Emmanouil Paraschos (pictured above with his family in a photograph taken earlier in 1922) who, like so many others, had been convinced that if the Greeks of Ayvalik stayed put, and stayed quiet, the war would wash harmlessly by them, came home from work in one of Ayvalik’s two hospitals and, deeply distressed and in tears, told his wife Vrysiis that there was no longer any choice in the matter: the time had come for them to leave.

The marauding bands of Turkish irregular soldiers - ‘Tsetes’, in Greek - who had been in the area since August, were now burning Greek villages just along the coast, and killing the inhabitants, he said; soon they would do the same in Ayvalik itself, if any of the Greek inhabitants remained. All able-bodied males over the age of 18 were to be rounded up and sent to labour camps in the Anatolian interior; only the old men, the sick, and women and children would be allowed to leave. There were Allied ships in the harbour waiting to take them  into exile; they would sail the following morning.

Having told his wife, Dr Paraschos dried his tears and, with difficulty,  pulled himself together in order to appear strong and calm whilst delivering this dreadful news to their five children: Athanasios, aged 18, Evmenis, 14, Polyxeni, 12, Kosta, 10, and Yannis, 2.

What was particularly painful for him was that whilst, as  a prominent Ayvalik doctor with many influential Turkish friends, Emmanouil Paraschos had managed to gain an exemption from being sent to a labour camp, and was to be one of the few adult Greek men allowed to leave Ayvalik, he had been unable to obtain any such exemption for his 18 year old son, Athanasios. It was therefore decided that Athanasios would take the risk of going into hiding with Turkish friends, and try to escape to Mytilene later, rather than take the much greater risk of enduring a forced march into the Anatolian interior towards the grim privations of a labour camp.

The family spent the night making preparations to leave their home, possibly for ever. The first thing they did was to cover the windows with blankets, to ensure they could not be seen by any Tsetes who might be roaming the streets already. Then, they set about gathering together what little they could take with them. Vrysiis went to a cupboard and took out 5 blankets, giving one to each of the children. They would be able to take only what they could  manage to carry on their backs, wrapped in a blanket.

When the children had sorted out a couple of changes of clothes each,  a few toys and books, and their stamp collections, they were sent to bed. Then Vrysiis got down to work: she took out  all her jewellery from the box in which it was stored and, through the hours of the night, carefully unpicked the seams of the coats of the family members, inserted  all the pieces of jewellery, and then just as carefully sewed up the seams again so that the jewellery was invisible.

Once the jewellery was sewn up into the coats , and ready to be transported into exile safely hidden,Vrysiis got on with her next task: cleaning the house. It was a matter of honour to her that, whatever the circumstances of their departure, she could not leave behind a dirty house for others to find; so, as the children slept and the darkness of the night began to edge towards a grey dawn, Vrysiis swept, scrubbed and mopped.

Perhaps this mindless, physically demanding activity also helped her to endure the intense fear and anxiety of this terrible night, knowing that in the morning she, her husband  and children would be forced not only to abandon their home and their lives in Ayvalik and sail away to a highly uncertain future, but also to leave behind the family’s eldest son, in a position of great danger. By the time the sun came up over the hills behind Ayvalik, and cast its rays over the Aegean towards Mytilene, the kitchen of the Paraschos house was immaculate, the tiled floor gleaming, all the utensils, ranged on their shelves, sparkling clean.

The next morning the Paraschos family, along with hundreds of others, all carrying similar small bundles of possessions, walked down to the harbour. There the boats were waiting to take them as refugees to the island which lies just offshore, and is clearly visible from Ayvalik:  Mytilene, also known as Lesbos,  once part of the Ottoman Empire, but by 1922 belonging to the Republic of Greece, and a safe haven for the Ayvalik Greeks.

Although the family were able to take some portable valuables – a small amount of money,  jewellery, and  a couple of stamp collections  -  with them into exile,  they left behind virtually everything they owned: a fine, three storey house, one of the beautiful neo-classical stone mansions of Ayvalik, full of  elegant furniture, rugs, china, art, and books; all the possessions of a well to do Asia Minor Greek professional family at the beginning of the 20th century. The Paraschos family  would never be able to reclaim that house, or those possessions, but were fortunate in that they, unlike many others,  escaped with their lives (Athanasios, with the help of Turkish friends, managed to escape to Mytilene and join the rest of the family a few days later).

Those lives would be eventually be remade and lived out successfully in other countries – Greece and  the United States – but the entire Paraschos family would always carry with them, and pass on to their children, and their grandchildren, the sadness of exile, of refugeedom, and the enduring memories of the beautiful house in Ayvalik that was once their family home, on the western shores of Asia Minor, the homeland of their ancestors.

And that lost house was the one I was now trying to find, so far unsuccessfully, on behalf of one of Dr Paraschos’ grandchildren, another Emmanouil (Manny). It happens very often in families that the younger generations fail to appreciate that their older relatives, keepers of the family memories and history, much of it never written down, will not be around for ever to answer questions, and thus it was with the Paraschos family: by the time Manny got round to wondering if it might be possible to find the lost family home, most of the family members who had ever been there were dead, and there were few  clues left as to its exact whereabouts in Ayvalik.

What Manny did find, however, on searching through the papers of his father, Evmenis, the second son, who died in 1975, was several copies of a very small and very dark photograph of a house -

- and this is the photograph he emailed to me a few weeks ago, as a possible candidate for the Paraschos family house.

His father Evmenis had, in the early 1950s, been permitted to come back to Ayvalik from Greece for a short visit of a couple of days,  and had walked the streets (all by then renamed, in Turkish) of the much changed town, looking for the house he had left as a child three decades earlier. This was not, it should be noted, in an attempt to reclaim the house from its new owners: under the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne, 1923, all those exiled from Turkey to Greece, and vice versa, in the Population Exchange forfeited not only the citizenship of the country they left, but all the property they were forced to leave behind there.

Manny thought that although the photograph of the house was unlabelled, his father must have taken it on this brief visit to Ayvalik. Further, as there were several copies, the photograph must be of some significance: it could well be the family home. This photo, this house, were all, for the moment, that  we had to go on.

Could I find the house in the photograph for him?

You would have to be intimately familiar with the topography of  Ayvalik, the old town spread across several hills sloping down to the Aegean, the warren of  steep, narrow cobbled streets and tiny alleyways, the whole vast mélange of thousands of old buildings, in all possible states of repair and disrepair, from ‘a pile of stones’ and ‘ in ruins’, through ‘partially derelict’ and ‘in need of some urgent attention’, up to and including ‘modernised out of all recognition’, to understand quite how much my heart sank when I saw that photograph.

The photograph was so small and so dark that you couldn’t make out much detail, and since the house in the picture was of only one storey, it was clear that it must be one of the many larger houses in Ayvalik that had lost its upper storey, or storeys, in the major earthquake which hit the town in the 1940s. Along with the upper part of the house would have gone a lot of distinguishing detail: there are many once sizeable houses in Ayvalik with missing upper storeys and, to the casual glance at least, they all look rather alike.

I sat and stared at the photograph, rather dispiritedly. I imagined spending the next few weeks wandering the streets of Ayvalik, a print-out of the photo in hand, trying to find anything that resembled it. The old town of Ayvalik is BIG. It has a number of separate neigbourhoods, with some of which I am only passingly familiar. Although I’ve lived here for over two years, and walk around with my dog Freddie every day,  I’m still constantly discovering streets and alleys which I have never ventured down – or, more likely, as the town is built on hills, up – before. I live in the lower part of the town, equidistant between the pine woods and the sea, but this house could be anywhere, if it still existed at all.

I continued to stare miserably at the photograph, beginning to regret that I had so blithely undertaken the task of finding the Paraschos house. Then I noticed something. On the left hand side of the photograph, on the opposite side of the narrow street from the house which might or might not be the Paraschos house, there was a house with a protruding window on the first (or for Americans, the second) floor, a common feature of Ottoman, and Ayvalik, architecture. What was unusual about it, though, was that the window looked very low, not more than 8 or 9 feet above the ground; generally, in this town of tall, thin 3 storey houses, they are much higher, as in the photograph below:

I vaguely remembered  walking down a street with just such an unusually low protruding window, one low enough so that you could reach up and touch it, only a few days before  - but where the hell had it been?

Then I remembered that I’d been in the street to photograph a horse and cart I spotted tied up there, and that the low protruding window had been somewhere beyond the horse and cart. Going into the photo files on the computer, I started to search and eventually found this embarrassingly incompetent photograph, with the light all haywire, which would never be seeing the light of day on this blog were it not an important step in the search for the Paraschos house:

However, my photographic deficiencies notwithstanding, if you look closely at the photograph you can see that behind the heap of tomatoes in the cart is a protruding window, not very high up, opposite which is a line of low one storey buildings. 

Now go back and look at the photograph Manny sent me, of the house with a similar low protruding window opposite the one storey house, bearing in mind that the two photographs are taken from the opposite ends of their respective streets, one showing the window on the right, one on the left.

That night I looked at one photo, then the other, back and forth, over and over again. Could these two photographs, taken from different angles, be of one and the same street? Could I have already found the Paraschos house, without knowing it, on the day I had recently spent photographing horses and carts (still a common form of  transport  in Ayvalik)?

It certainly seemed possible, as there was clearly a striking similarity between the two streets pictured in the photographs, but the only way to tell would be to go and look at that street again, with a copy of the photograph Manny had sent me. I glanced at my watch. It was nearly midnight. I looked over at Freddie, who  was stretched out on his blanket on his designated sofa, looking about as comfortable as it was possible for a dog to be:

Freddie  did not look like a dog who wanted to go anywhere anytime soon.

Well, tough.

We were on a mission.

Perhaps not a Mission from God, but a mission, just the same.

‘C’mon Fred,’ I said briskly. ‘We’re going for a walk.’

(to be continued)

 

The image below shows the diary entry of Manny’s father, Evmenis Paraschos, then 14 years old,  for 25th September, 1922, the day the family left Ayvalik (also known in Greek as Kidonies) to go into exile.

 

Many thanks to the Paraschos family for providing me   with the images used above, and also for sharing their collective memories both of the family’s life in Ayvalik and their experience of becoming refugees, on which much of this post was based.

And it’s a BIG çok teşekkürler* to the Google Blogger Team…

 

So, on Wednesday night, around midnight, I was thinking it was about time to shut down the computer and go to bed, but before so doing I clicked on to Statcounter, which measures blog traffic,  to look at my blog statistics.

And there was something really weird going on.

According to Statcounter, instead of a couple of dozen people looking at the blog  - which, as I hadn’t put up a new post for a couple of weeks, was what I was expecting – something like 900 people had looked at the blog on Wednesday, mostly in the preceding hour, something which seemed inherently unlikely.

‘Oh, pfft', ' I thought, assuming that  Statcounter had somehow gone haywire,  and was fabricating hundreds of fictitious hits on the blog in some kind of Crazed Out- of-Control Software Fictitious Blog Hit Binge. But then I looked more closely at all these ‘fictitious’ visitors, and saw that they were coming from Google Blogger, and in particular the Blogger ‘Blogs of Note’ page.

So I followed the link back and found,  to my complete astonishment, that the very lovely people in the  Google Blogger team, at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California

- which I have always imagined to be some kind of mountain top redoubt with a turreted log cabin fortress, circling eagles and panoramic views over range after range of snow-covered mountains, receding into the far distant blue horizons -

had,  for reasons best known to themselves, chosen the Camel Barn Library as their Blog of Note  of the day for Wednesday, 13th October, 2010, a date which shall now be forever engraved on my heart. As a result of the link to the blog being posted on the Blogs of Note page, over the next 24 hours there were more than 6,000 hits on the Camel Barn Library, something which left me quite stupefied with amazement, and  has also led to a big increase in email and feed subscriptions, and comments and emails about the blog.

And this has made me exceedingly happy.

The criteria for choosing the Blogs of Note seem to be amusingly random, and The Camel Barn Library was probably selected less for its sterling literary qualities and informative content than for its very odd name, but I can live with that.

The main purpose of writing this blog is to share with people elsewhere in the world something of Turkey, the extraordinarily beautiful  and endlessly interesting country in which I am living, and its fascinating history and culture.  I knew very little about either the modern country of Turkey or the history of Asia Minor before I came to live here, a lack of knowledge which is very common in the West, even amongst people who regard themselves as well informed about the world . Such ignorance is something that should be remedied, given both the huge cultural importance of the many civilisations which have previously existed here in Asia Minor, and the growing economic and political importance of Turkey in the world today. The Camel Barn Library is intended to contribute, in however small a way, to achieving that aim.

When you start writing a blog – something I have never done before – it takes a while for the readership to build up, and since I haven’t been writing it for very long, and am doing so very slowly, I was more than happy that anyone was reading it at all. It had been becoming clear to me, however, from earlier responses to the blog, that there are plenty of people out there who are interested in the topics covered by the Camel Barn Library, and are eager to learn more about Turkey and its culture and history, just as I am. The problem was how to reach more of them, but I wasn’t at all sure how one went about doing that, other than relying on word of mouth.

However, being chosen as a ‘Blog of Note’ has suddenly enabled me to reach a much, much wider audience with the Camel Barn Library, which is wonderful. Of course, this is a fairly specialised area of interest, and for lots of the new visitors, it simply won’t be their thing; however,  it looks as if there will be quite a few new readers who are here to stay, and for that I would like to thank you, Google Blogger Team, very much indeed.

As would my dog Freddie (pictured below playing it cool  while a small but determined admirer tries to lick his nether regions) -

 

- who has gained a number of new fans in the last couple of days, much to his delight. He is woofing  ‘çok teşekkürler’, and wagging his tail. Be thankful that you are barricaded in your mountain-top eyrie, Google Blogger Team; were you not, he would be jumping up and licking your faces enthusiastically to show his gratitude. Not to mention chewing your shoes. Whilst you are still wearing them. We’re going to have to do some work on the whole training thing very, very soon.

So,  thanks again to the Google Blogger Team, and a very warm welcome to new readers: I hope you will stay around, as there is a lot more to come, not least the dénouement of the search for the Paraschos house, which will, all being well, be posted very shortly.

Hoş geldiniz!  Welcome!

 

 

*not nearly as rude as it looks: it means ‘Thank you very much’ in Turkish.

An email from a ghost: Part II

So, there I was, 3 weeks ago, with my shiny new notebook and a blue Pilot 0.5mm fine point pen, but not exactly  sure what, if anything,  I was going to do with them. I had no real idea whether Project Paraschos  would actually turn into something justifying the  acquisition of new stationery items, or if my newly-commenced quest to find the location of the ancestral home of the Paraschos family ( formerly of Ayvalik, now of Boston and Athens) was going to end in a ruin full of feral cats, a newly concreted  car park (of which there are many in Ayvalik, on the sites of old houses) or a complete dead end.

I walked down town to meet my friend Erkan -

(We are getting ahead of ourselves here, because Erkan is an important person in the story of the Camel Barn Library, which I am writing here chronologically, and needs to be introduced to you properly. But this is a real time addition to the story, so he is popping up out of sequence. Never mind. He will make his scheduled entrance in the narrative very soon. He is an interesting bloke, who has had a quite extraordinary life.)

- in a cafe by the sea, located in one of the most famous  buildings in Ayvalik, at the end of a line of neoclassical facades on the water’s edge which constitute one of Ayvalik’s iconic images, frequently displayed on postcards, tourist memorabilia, or illustrating writing about the town, as above.

I was quite excited, as I walked into the cafe and saw Erkan waiting for me, because I thought my idea about finding the Paraschos house through census data was going to be a winner. I am familiar with population censuses, as they are  part of my field of academic interest, and that morning had done a little research on  censuses carried out during the time of the Ottoman Empire.

Censuses were first conducted in the Ottoman Empire, as they were in England, during the first half of the 19th century. The first modern census took place  in 1828/29 in both the European and Anatolian parts of the Ottoman Empire. Its main purpose was to provide quantitative data to facilitate the levying of personal taxes on non-Muslims, and the conscription of Muslim male adults into the army.

In the 1830s the Ottoman government  established the Office of Population Registers  (Ceride-i Nüfus Nezareti) as part of the Ministry of Interior, and censuses in various different forms were conducted at irregular intervals until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The last one took place in 1905, and this was where I hoped to find the information we were looking for, not in the published data giving the macro view of the census, but in the detailed unpublished census data in which, as in the British censuses,  individuals are located  to street addresses; each person’s name is recorded against the exact address at which they live.

Unpublished census data in the UK from 100 years ago and before is now available on the internet via the National Archive,  and is searchable by name and location. I have done some genealogical research on my own family using these databases, and it was remarkably easy.  I didn’t really expect to find that the entire final Ottoman Empire census of 1905 would be available at the click of a mouse – this is Turkey, after all – but was hopeful that if we could get access to the unpublished census data for Ayvalik, a relatively small town, somewhere in those data we should be able to find, if we looked hard enough, the street and house number of the Paraschos family house.

I bounced into the cafe, ordered a glass of çay (tea), and related to Erkan both The Story So Far, and my idea for finding the Paraschos house using census data. What did he think?

Even before he opened his mouth, the expression was on Erkan’s face was not encouraging. Why?

‘You’re forgetting the language’ he said.

‘What do you mean, the language?’

‘Everything written during the time of the Ottoman Empire was  in Ottoman Turkish.  I couldn’t read it. Nor could you.’

My heart sank. In my excitement about the census idea, I had completely forgotten one very important fact: that one of the many sharp disjunctions between the Ottoman Empire of before, and the Turkish Republic of now, is in language. The modernisation of the Turkish language was one of the many fundamental reforms instituted by Mustafa Kemal, later Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, as he separated the squalling infant of the new Turkish Republic from its dying progenitor, the Ottoman Empire.

You may be wondering how a language can suddenly be modernised out of all recognition without the entire population becoming extremely confused, and why anyone should wish to do such a thing, so let us digress for a moment into the history of the Turkish language.

During the  six centuries of the Ottoman Empire’s existence  the Turkish language used within its borders developed into two distinct variants, with different uses: first, there was the simpler, purer, vernacular form of Turkish, ‘kaba Türkçe’ or ‘rough Turkish’ spoken by the lower echelons of society, which remained close to the original form of Turkish brought into Anatolia from Central Asia by nomadic Turkic tribes in the late Middle Ages, namely Oğuz ( Oghuz) Turkish.

Second,  following the adoption of Islam in 950 AD,  and in tandem with the growth of the initially small Ottoman principality  into an empire,  there developed Ottoman Turkish, which eventually became the literary and administrative language of the Ottoman Empire, in particular between the 16th and 19th centuries.

Via the Persians, who introduced them to Islam, the Turks  were influenced by Arabic, the language of the Koran. This, plus the fact that the Arabs and Persians were then advanced in science and literature, led the Turks to adopt the Arabic alphabet, although not its grammar. Ottoman Turkish thus came to  contain a vast amount of loan words imported from Arabic and Persian, was written in a variant of the Perso-Arabic script, and was  an elaborate, ornamented, rhetorical language, in large part unintelligible to the mostly  illiterate majority of the population, who spoke vernacular Turkish: Ottoman Turkish was used by only about 9 percent of the population.

And this is what it looked like…

In an earlier post  we discussed the triune nature of the human brain, with its newer, reasoning part, the neo-cortex, welded awkwardly on to its older, much more primitive parts, the limbic and reptile brains, and concluded that if you were if you were setting out to design a brain for a thinking being, it certainly wouldn’t be constructed  like this.

Ottoman Turkish was the linguistic equivalent of the human brain: a language welded together from quite disparate parts which did not function well together, and challenging to use, even for those who were well acquainted with it. Trying to combine Turkish , Persian and Arabic together in one language was really never a good plan: the grammar and morphology of the three languages were quite at odds with one another.

As the multi-cultural Ottoman Empire declined,  and there developed  in Anatolia a strong movement towards an ur-Turkishness, and a Turkish  nationalism which would culminate in a modern Turkish republic which expelled ‘foreign’ minorities, the strange hybrid language of Ottoman Turkish became a symbol of what needed to be left behind, and the momentum grew for the language to be reformed into something truer to its original old  Turkish roots, and more accessible to the wider population.

There were early attempts to get language reform under way in the late 19thC,  but the major change came a few years after the founding of the new Turkish Republic in 1923, when Atatürk instigated the great language reform. This had two major parts: one was the elimination of Arabic and Persian words from the language, and their replacement with words from old Turkish and, if necessary, neologisms based on old Turkish roots.

The Turkish Language Society was set up to bring back into use authentic Turkish words discovered in linguistic surveys and research, and its work continues to this day.  The outcome of these linguistic reforms, according to the Turkish Ministry of Culture,  is that the use of authentic Turkish words in written texts has risen from  35-40 percent in 1932, to 75-80 percent in recent years.

The other part of the reform was changing the script in which Turkish was written from the Arabic alphabet to the Roman, adapted with a few extra letters to accommodate Turkish vowel sounds.  Atatürk strongly believed that for Turkey to become a modern state, a contemporary civilisation, it was essential to benefit from Western culture. The change to the Roman alphabet in 1928,  which allied Turkish  with European rather than Oriental languages, was thus a deliberate and highly symbolic act, one of the key points  in his  extraordinarily comprehensive  programme of political, social and cultural reforms (of which we will discuss other aspects in due course), which dragged Turkey into the modern world, laying the foundations for the successful modern state which exists today.

Atatürk himself promoted the change by touring the country to introduce the new alphabet to the public, as in the photograph below, taken in Sinop -

 

- and public education centers opened throughout the country, resulting in a  dramatic increase in literacy, which before the language reform was about 9%. By 1950,  literacy rates had risen to 48.4% among males and 20.7% among females.

All exciting and important stuff, but what the language reform also did was to cut modern Turkey off, suddenly and sharply,  from direct access to its written past, from the extensive  written records of the Ottoman Empire,  from its literature, and from its recent history. Atatürk gave a  famous speech in Ottoman Turkish to the youth of the nation in 1920, one that is  still compulsory reading for all Turkish school-children, but in its original version the speech is now unintelligible to the reader of modern Turkish, even if transliterated into Roman script.

Every couple of decades Atatürk’s speech has to be retranslated, so that succeeding generations can understand it. The language has changed, and is continuing to change, that much.  By analogy, imagine if  the English language had changed so much that Winston Churchill’s ‘Blood, sweat and tears’ speech of 1940 had to be periodically updated with new vocabulary so that we could continue to understand it. For a young Turkish person now, trying to read the original text of Ataturk’s speech would be like an English person trying to read Anglo Saxon.

And, returning to our  subject after a considerable detour, the same problem would arise in trying to read Ottoman census records. As soon as Erkan mentioned the language problem, I realised that my plan was doomed: it would be impossible without the assistance of a scholar of  Ottoman Turkish.  And the chances of finding in Ayvalik an Ottoman Turkish scholar who would be prepared to go through the town’s entire census records to find the name ‘Paraschos’, just for fun, seemed vanishingly small.

Erkan then put an end to the whole idea by explaining that anyway, all records in Ottoman Turkish were now held in a national archive in Ankara, so we wouldn’t even be able to access them without making a 400 mile trip.

‘Oh, BUGGER’ I said. ‘Well, that’s that, then.’

We ordered some more tea, and I tried to regroup. Time to move on to Plan B, which was to go to the local property records office, and look at records from pre-1922 which would …… yes, which would also be written in Ottoman Turkish.

Plan B was then disposed of even more swiftly than plan A, as Erkan explained that current property records here only go back to the early 1930s, when the houses  of Ayvalik were registered, with their new owners, in modern Turkish; all the older records were also in the national archive in Ankara.

Project Paraschos was turning out to be much more difficult than I had anticipated. There seemed to be no way forward without some more information, some clue, from the Paraschos family itself. Manny had told me he was searching through his late father’s papers to see if he could find any more information, and it was thought that his elderly aunt, who was away from home at the moment, might have a photograph of the house.

I mentioned the possible existence of a photograph to Erkan who is, amongst other things, an estate agent. His face brightened.

‘That would be much, much easier.’ he said.

‘I know every street, every house in this town. If they send a photo, and the house is still standing, I’ll be able to find it. I promise you.’

I agreed to keep him updated on any developments, went home and sat down at my computer to send Manny an email telling him of the disappointing outcome of  my first attempt to find the house. When I opened my inbox, I saw that there was a new email waiting there for me from Manny.  Even without opening it, I could see that there was an attachment to the email. A photograph.

I opened up the email and began to read.

(to be continued)

An email from a ghost

Exactly a month ago I received an email from a man in America. The email opened without salutation: the writer merely said that he loved my blog, and was passing it on to others, a statement guaranteed to make me feel warmly towards him, whoever he might be. He then went on to say ‘I need some information you might know something about’.

What, I wondered, might that be?

The next paragraph made my jaw drop: I was stunned.

‘My father's family was from Aivali. His father was a physician at the hospital there. Is there a way to find out where the Emmanouil Paraschos  (Εμμανουήλ Παράσχος) family lived until 1922?’

 

I live in a town full of ghosts. The Greeks who lived here until 1922 hover constantly at the edge of one’s vision, a shadow population peering from the empty windows of  ruined houses, and only ever glimpsed in the few photographs* that remain of life here a hundred years ago:  middle class couples, like the one above,  in a formal pose for the photographer, confident of their place in the world; families in their Sunday best ready to attend mass at the Greek Orthodox churches that now have minarets attached;

children lining up in solemn-faced rows for school photographs;

and a young girl  in a white dress, gazing calmly into the future, unaware that her childhood was about to come to an end and that her adult life, if she survived the coming catastrophe, would be lived in another country:

The disjunction between those sad spectres of the past and the town in which I live has always seemed complete; when I talk to people who live here now about their family backgrounds, they tell me that their grandparents and great grandparents came here from Salonika, or Mytilene, or Crete. There is literally no one in Ayvalik today whose ancestors were here before 1923. They are gone, lost to history, and can never come back.

Yet when I read the email from the professor in Boston, a man called Manny Paraschos  named, it seemed,  for his grandfather, it was as if someone had suddenly stepped straight out of one of those old photographs, waving, and shouting ‘Hey! We’re still here!’ 

I had received an email from a ghost.

When I started writing this blog, I imagined its possible readers as people like me: interested in, but largely ignorant of,  both modern Turkey and the many previous civilisations and empires which rose and fell, flourished and  faded, during the last 9,000 thousand years in Asia Minor. It simply never occurred to me that the blog would be read by anyone in the diaspora of Asia Minor Greeks.

I wrote back to the professor immediately, expressing my delight at making a connection to someone now living who had his roots in that lost world, and offering to help him in any way I could in the quest to identify his ancestral home. If he had no address for the Paraschos family house, as was implied by his question, then I would try to approach the problem from another angle: I knew that population censuses list the names of all the people living at any given address, so if there were any pre-1922 census records for Ayvalik still extant, I could search them to find any mention of the  name  ‘Paraschos’.

Another possibility might be the Property Records Office of the Ayvalik municipality. My own house was built in 1908, only 14 years before the Greeks left, so I imagined it might only ever have been occupied by one family, and I remembered a friend telling me that if I wanted to find out who used to live in my house, I might be able to do so at the Property Records Office, where the land registration deed should record the name of the house’s first owner. Without an address, it would be more difficult, but it was possible that the details from land deeds had been computerised, and one might be able to search by name, rather than address.

I outlined these possibilities, both of which  seemed to offer at least some slim chance of success, to Manny, and undertook to discuss the problem with a Turkish friend here, who has a strong interest in, and considerable knowledge of, local history. However, not wishing to get his hopes up too high, I added the following caveat: that many records had been destroyed during the cataclysmic events in Anatolia between 1919 and 1923, and that even if we could manage to find  the address where the Paraschos family lived, the house might be a ruin, or have disappeared completely and been replaced by a new building. I would do my best to help him find his family home, but  was, in truth, doubtful of a successful outcome.

Still, it was a fascinating quest, and I was determined to try. I arranged to have lunch the next day with the friend who might be able to advise me on my search, and bought a new notebook, on the basis that all great –or even small – enterprises should begin with a new notebook and a Pilot pen with a very, very fine point.

Project Paraschos was now officially underway.

(to be continued)

* Please note that these photographs of  Greek families in Ayvalik before 1922, from publicly available sources, are not of the Paraschos family.

My City of Ruins

“Those who take pleasure in the accidental beauty of poverty and historical decay, those of us who see the picturesque in ruins — invariably, we’re people who come from the outside”.

Orhan Pamuk '’Istanbul: Memories and the City’

If you come from one of the tidier countries of northern Europe, like the UK, then you will spend the first couple of days of your first visit to Ayvalik in a state of  shock.  The guidebooks will have told you of the charm of the town’s cobbled streets, lined with picturesque old Ottoman Greek houses, and you may well have had your appetite further whetted by the ‘Rough Guide to Turkey’ rhapsodising thus:

‘Ayvalik presents the spectacle –almost unique in the Aegean – of an almost perfectly preserved Ottoman Greek market town, its essential nature little changed despite the inroads of  commercialization. Riotously painted horse-carts clatter through the cobbled bazaar, past the occasional bakery boy roaming the alleys in the early morning selling fresh bread and cakes….

There’s little point in asking directions: use the minarets as landmarks and give yourself over to the pleasure of wandering under numerous wrought-iron window grilles and past ornately carved doorways.’

Well, yes - 

- a whole book could be devoted solely to the eccentric beauty of the doorways and wrought iron work of Ayvalik .

But what they don’t tell you about is the ruins.

In an earlier post I described how in September 1922 the Orthodox Greek inhabitants of Ayvalik were forced to leave the town and migrate to Greece, taking with them only what they could carry, and how they were  replaced a year later by Muslims forced to migrate in the other direction, from Greece to Turkey,  who moved into the abandoned houses of those who had left, and turned their churches into mosques.

The incoming migrants, however, were much fewer in number than those who were forced to leave, which meant that a lot of  houses were left empty. Some of them have remained uninhabited to this day, and have  been standing there, slowly decaying, for the last 88 years. This process was accelerated by an earthquake during the 1940s, during which some of the taller, three- storied houses lost their upper floors. As a result, the charming cobbled streets of Ayvalik feature - amongst the moderate number of houses that have been properly restored and the rather larger number that have been modernised  in what is perhaps best described as an ad hoc fashion – many houses in various stages of decay and ruin, some long beyond the hope of  repair. 

My street  contains  several beautifully restored houses, amongst them the elegant summer residence of  one of  Turkey’s most famous rock stars (the house and its restoration have been featured in newspaper and magazine articles in Turkey, so its location is well known):

It also, in rather marked contrast, contains this

and, right next door to me, this:

The ruins are beautiful in a heartbreaking kind of way: you will see a huge, imposing doorway (Ayvalik is full of doorways with attitude), a magnificent facade, and  behind it nothing…

…but the bare bones of the house it was once was.

Houses fall down regularly in Ayvalik, despite the fact that the old town is a conservation area, and has been for decades; a friend of mine narrowly missed being hit by the falling rubble when the house pictured below collapsed a few months ago:

To someone coming from a country whose architectural heritage is preserved, conserved, restored and polished to the nth degree, such a state of affairs is, at first, literally incomprehensible. The first-time British visitor wanders about the old town of Ayvalik dazed and confused: delighted by the beauty of the town, but simultaneously quite overwhelmed by the stunning visual impact of its decay.

It takes a bit of getting used to.

Once coherent thought returns, the visitor’s next reaction is  ‘But this is terrible! How can  such a thing be allowed to happen?’  to which the short answer is  ‘Burası Türkiye’ – a popular phrase meaning ‘This is Turkey.’  The longer answer, inevitably, comes under the category of  ‘It’s complicated’, and I’m not sure that I can provide an adequate explanation. However, the answer seems to lie in  a complex tangle of  cultural, political and economic factors.

One view, put forward by Bruce Clark in 'Twice A Stranger' his book about the 1923 Population Exchange between Turkey and Greece,  is that for painful historical reasons there is no particular general desire here to preserve the architectural heritage, however picturesque, left behind by what are perceived as the historic enemies of the emergence of the Turkish nation state, the Asia Minor Greeks  (with a mirror image of  this sad situation being found  vis-à-vis the many physical remains – and thus reminders - of centuries of Ottoman rule in what is now Greece).

A Turkish friend of mine here in Ayvalik argues against this view, pointing out that the problem of preserving the physical remains of  Turkey’s multiply layered  multicultural heritage is a much broader one, and I would tend to agree. As described previously, Turkey is chock full, on a scale quite difficult to comprehend, of the archaeological and architectural remains of earlier civilisations (and I will list them  again, as I do so love the litany of their names)  -

 Hattis, Hittites and Hourrites,  Uruartians, Phrygians and Lydians,  Assyrians,  Persians,  Greeks and  Trojans,  Romans, Byzantines, Selcuks and Ottomans

-  amongst others. Many of these sites have never been excavated, and perhaps never will be, because there simply isn’t enough money, in a country which is still developing, so from this point of view a few crumbling Ottoman Greek houses in a small town in the north west Aegean are perhaps fairly minor in the great Anatolian scheme of things.

There is a wider cultural point, however, which seems significant:  Turks, on the whole, are not that interested in old houses, and with a few exceptions have little interest in restoring them, much less living in them. This is a sweeping generalisation, but there is empirical evidence to support it. To explain why this is the case we need to take a brief look at the development of Ottoman architecture (Ottoman referring to the period between 1299, when the Ottomans took over in Anatolia from the Seljuk Sultanate of Rūm, and 1923, when the Ottoman Empire officially ended and the Turkish Republic was established).

Stephane Yerasimos, an architectural historian specialising in the Ottoman era,  describes how Turkish domestic architecture developed using a material – wood - chosen for its transience, with the spiritual symbolism that entailed,  in contrast to the permanence of the stone used for public buildings:

'The need to emphasise the transitory character of human life, in every undertaking related thereto, became a fundamental principle of Ottoman civilization, especially in the synthesis it effected between architectural creation and its materials. By contrast with the mosque and other public buildings (caravanserais, baths, hospices etc) , designed to endure and thus fashioned of stone for all eternity, the structures for sheltering the private lives of individuals are in wood, made to be rebuilt from one generation to the next.’

                       Stefane Yerasimos, ‘Living in Turkey’

The high density and proximity of the wooden houses of Istanbul and other Ottoman cities led to repeated  destruction by fire,  and gave a wood-built house a life expectancy of  only thirty years or so;  as a result, the constant replacement of domestic living spaces, generation upon generation, has been a feature of Turkish life for hundreds of years.

It is instructive in this context to consider what has happened during the last hundred years to the wooden houses of Istanbul, the main component of the city’s domestic architecture since the 16th century.

Their fate has some parallels to the situation in Ayvalik. At the beginning of the 20th  century most of Istanbul's housing stock consisted of wooden houses. Today, there are only about 250 timber houses left in the entire city, and many of them are in a very poor state of repair.

For four hundred  years, wooden houses were built, and regularly replaced, generation after generation. But after particularly devastating fires during World War One, construction in wood was banned by the authorities. The wooden houses could no longer be replaced, and throughout the twentieth century those remaining  have fallen victim to neglect, poor planning, and population changes.

Most of the tradesmen who had the skills to maintain and restore these houses were from the Greek and Armenian ethnic minorities who vanished from Anatolia, through death or deportation,  during the cataclysmic events of the first two decades of the twentieth century.  After the Second World War the Turkish middle classes abandoned the neighbourhoods of decaying wooden houses for more modern suburbs, leaving the old houses to rural  immigrants without the money, or the know-how, to repair and maintain  them. Although the planning laws in theory protected the houses, as in Ayvalik, many have been allowed or even encouraged to fall down by owners with no interest in preserving them, and local authorities are reluctant to spend public funds on houses in private ownership.

In Ayvalik, too, owners of old decaying houses have preferred to move to more modern accommodation in the suburbs, rather than bear the considerable financial costs of modernising and maintaining inconvenient old houses.  Many of the houses in the old town of Ayvalik are now rented, to recent migrants from the east of Turkey, who, like their counterparts in Istanbul, have neither the money nor the skills to maintain the buildings.

It would be possible to obtain funds for the urban regeneration of Ayvalik from the EU, or UNESCO, as has happened in a few other places in Turkey, notably Safranbolu and Eskişehir. However, that would depend on energetic project leadership from the political leaders of the town, something that has to date been notably lacking.

The houses that have been properly restored belong mostly either to incomers from Istanbul or Ankara – Ayvalik attracts writers, artists and musicians, like my neighbour the rock star – or to foreigners, like myself.  Unfortunately, there aren’t enough of them and, even more unfortunately, two years ago the Turkish government passed a law banning foreigners from buying property in Turkey in areas of  ‘cultural and historical importance’;  the old town of Ayvalik is one of those areas. Since there are rather more foreigners than Turks interested in buying these houses, and willing to pay the considerable costs of restoring them to the required standard, this has slowed down the rate of house restoration considerably. A few foreigners continue to buy here by having the ‘tapu’ (property deed) held by a Turkish friend, but it is something not many people are willing to consider.

It is probable that the law will be rescinded at some point, but the houses are fragile, and every winter the torrential rains, which intermittently fill the steep streets of Ayvalik with running water, further damage and destabilise these already weakened structures. At least half a dozen houses have fallen down in the two years I have been living here, and there are many others on the verge of collapse. It is immensely saddening to see the  decay progressing, week on week, month on month, year on year.

The ruined houses of Ayvalik have a peculiar, haunting sadness about them. The restored and modernised houses, the lived in houses, have moved on into a new era, and are continuing to function, the horrors of what went before papered over with another layer of history. For the ruins, however, there is no such effacement of the past: they stand there empty, untouched and unlived in for nearly ninety years now, and decaying more with every winter’s rains. And their doors - if they still have doors - stand always open, waiting patiently for their lost owners to come home.

 

‘The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes’

Derek Walcott

Entertaining angels unawares

‘Her yiğidin bir yoğurt yiyişi vardır: Each man has his own style of eating yoğurt.’

Turkish proverb

A recent visitor from England, walking round the local supermarket with me, stopped in front of the chiller cabinet – actually, the series of chiller cabinets - devoted to yoğurt, and said:

‘That’s interesting. In Turkish they have the almost same word for yoghurt as we do. Is that a word they’ve borrowed from English?’

I stared at him, appalled.

‘It’s a Turkish word. The Turks INVENTED yoğurt. The English stole the word from them. And MANGLED it.’

My visitor looked slightly bemused by the vehemence of my reaction, as  well he might.  He had no idea of the central importance of yoğurt in Turkish life and culture, although the stream of people lugging huge 5 litre BUCKETS of the stuff  into their supermarket trolleys might perhaps  have given him a bit of clue.

So, let’s talk about yoğurt. There are some things you really need to know.

First, spelling and pronunciation: the British, when importing the word yoğurt into the English language, came a cropper over the fact that is spelt with a silent ğ which  was transliterated into English as a ‘gh’. This was fair enough, as in English, as a general rule

Vowel + g + h   --   silent gh    as in  Dough

but it ended up being pronounced as a hard g, when it shouldn’t have been pronounced at all.

What were we thinking?

Yes, I know. I still haven’t properly explained the Turkish silent ğ. But there’s a lot to get through. There will be a post on the strangeness and difficulty of the Turkish language very soon. For now, all you need to remember is that it is an

(WARNING: do not click the following link if you suffer from any kind of Grammatical Anxiety Disorder)

 agglutinative language and features a silent ğ, the use of which simply lengthens the vowel in front of it.

So it’s not yo-    as in  ‘But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?’   -urt   (William Shakespeare)

It’s yo - as in ‘I said Yo, Jay, I can rap’  -urt   (Kanye West)

So there it is: a silent ğ and  a long ‘o’ –  yo’urt.

The word is derived from the root yoğ- , which is the basis of a number of Turkish words relating to density, and the process of thickening or condensing: e.g. yoğun – thick,  yoğunlaşmak – to become dense, thicken, or condense.

But enough with matters linguistic, before you lose interest  entirely and  wander off to  Awfulplasticsurgery.com  (No, of course I didn’t make that a hyperlink; I’m not entirely stupid. But do go there later to marvel at the bizarre juxtaposition of photos of  Hollywood celebrities with surreally bad plastic surgery and … adverts for California plastic surgeons. Only in America).

Let’s get on to the more – and you’re going to have to trust me on this - interesting stuff: the history of yoğurt.

In the beginning, for thousands of years, the original Turks  were nomadic tribes, roaming the steppes of Central Asia (they didn’t turn up in what is now Turkey until considerably later).  They were pastoral nomads: indeed, Central Asian Turks were the first people ever to domesticate sheep and cows, during the Neolithic age. Living in a climate where summer temperatures were around 40 degrees Centigrade, and frequently travelling long distances,  they needed to find ways to preserve food, particularly the milk from their herds.

At some point it was noticed that when milk fermented, it turned into a denser, slightly sour substance which stayed fresh much longer than raw milk: and thus was yoğurt invented. It was first made and stored in animal skins, easily transportable when the nomads were travelling. Exactly how long ago this happened is a matter for conjecture, but it’s likely to have been not long after the first domestication of sheep and goats in the Neolithic age, so at least 5 or 6 thousand years ago.

Perhaps yoğurt’s earliest appearance in the written historical record is in the Bible: in the Book of Genesis, (which in its current form dates back to 500BC or thereabouts) we find the famous story of Abraham putting together an impromptu al fresco meal for some strangers who arrive unexpectedly, and later turn out to be divine messengers. The menu included ‘curds (i.e.yoğurt) and milk’ – perfect for a light lunch should you find yourself  ‘entertaining angels unawares’.

Another very early written reference to yoğurt comes from Pliny the Elder’s  ‘Natural History’ (written around AD 77-79), in which this cheese-loving Roman imperialist, happily unaware that one day there would be yoğurt-fuelled barbarian hordes frolicking in the ruins of the Coliseum, rather snootily observes:

"It is a remarkable circumstance, that the barbarous nations which subsist on milk have been for so many ages either ignorant of the merits of cheese, or else have totally disregarded it; and yet they understand how to thicken milk and form therefrom an acrid kind of milk with a pleasant flavour".

It is entirely irrelevant to the subject under discussion, but nonetheless interesting, that Pliny the Elder died during the eruption of Vesuvius which destroyed Pompeii, after sailing from a position of safety across the Bay of Naples towards the eruption, in order to study what was happening at closer quarters. Pleasingly, this self-immolation  for the sake of furthering human knowledge did not go entirely unrewarded: Pliny is still remembered in volcanology, where the term Plinian refers to ‘a very violent eruption of a volcano marked by columns of smoke and ash extending high into the stratosphere’.

I’m sure Pliny would have been thrilled.

The historical significance of  yoğurt to the Turks is demonstrated by the fact the  word yoğurt is included, with the same meaning, in the oldest known dictionary of  the Turkish language, Kasgarli Mahmut’s ‘Divân-i Lûgat’i Türk’, published in  the 11th century. There is an entire thesis to be written on the role of yoğurt  in Turkish epic poetry and other literature, but to gauge how important yoğurt still is in the average Turkish home, let me just point you to the following short extract from the section devoted to yoğurt on the fascinating Turkish Cultural Foundation website, a fount of information on all aspects of Turkish culture:

A dish that is to be accompanied by yoğurt is a must on any traditional Turkish table - unless of course, there is already another dish whose main ingredient is yoğurt. For thousands of years, yoğurt has been an indispensable element on Turkish tables. It is consumed plain or as a side dish, and it is a crucial part of Turkish Cuisine. Yoğurt is used to make soups, sweets, and the favorite drink ayran, which is made by mixing in water, mineral water and salt. Another reason why Turks hold yoğurt dearly is that all over the world it is consumed and known as “yogurt,” which is a word of Turkish origin.

A few months ago I visited  Diyarbakir, an old city in south-eastern Turkey famous for its dramatic black basalt city walls, and was delighted to find there an entire bazaar, many hundreds of years old, devoted to yoğurt - the Eski Yoğurt Pazar:

Inside, I saw where they got the idea for the plastic buckets in which yoğurt is now sold in Turkish supermarkets:

In the rural south east of Turkey, they still make and sell yoğurt the old-fashioned way, something  I was to witness for myself a few days later when I went to stay with a family in a village on the Mesopotamian plain between Diyarbakir and the ancient city of Urfa (the biblical Ur, and birthplace of the yoğurt-loving Abraham).

This happened purely by chance: ready to move on from Diyarbakir, I was looking on the internet for hotels in Urfa, and came across a local company called Nomad Tours, which conducts short tours around south eastern Turkey, and also arranges home stays in Yuvacali, a remote, very poor, village some distance from Urfa. The home stays (which Nomad Tours organises on a voluntary basis) enable villagers, who make a meagre living from subsistence farming, to earn some money, and provide their guests with an insight into rural life which it would be impossible to obtain in any other way.

I’m going to write in more detail at a later date about the time I spent in Yuvacali, which was the highlight of  a month-long solo trip exploring south-eastern Turkey for the first time. For the time being, let’s focus on the yoğurt-related elements of my stay  there with my hosts Pero,

 

Halil,

and family:

 

in their partly concrete, partly mud house looking across the Mesopotamian plain to Mount Nemrut in the far, far distance, on the other side of the Euphrates:

The concept of  ‘food miles’ is not really applicable in Yuvacali, where virtually  everything the villagers consume (except tea) is produced on their own smallholdings: Pero and Halil grow wheat, vegetables and fruit, and raise sheep, cows and chickens, to provide eggs, meat and milk, which is made into cheese, yoğurt, butter and ayran.

Truly, Yuvacali is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s spiritual home, although even he might find the stand-pipe which provides water, and the outhouse in the middle of the vegetable garden, a little challenging:

My hostess Pero, a woman for whom my admiration knows no bounds, shoulders a work load which would fell most Western women about half way through the first day, including as it does rising at dawn to sweep the farmyard, before feeding the chickens, milking the sheep and cows and cooking the day’s bread over an open fire. All this before breakfast.

But for the moment, let’s focus on the yoğurt.

You’ve probably seen yoğurt recipes before; you may even have got yourself one of those nifty little electric yoğurt-makers and brewed up at least one batch of this life-preserving superfood for yourself and your loved ones before relegating it to the back of the kitchen cupboard which houses all the gadgets that will never be used again.

You are unlikely, however, to have seen a yoğurt recipe which provides you with a step by step guide from sheep to breakfast table.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: 

How to Make Yoğurt in 6 Easy Steps, Yuvacali-style

Step 1: First catch your sheep

Step 2: You and the sheep, up close and personal

Step 3: Milking done, disengage from your sheep and rise gracefully in one swift movement, taking care not to allow the sheep to kick over your bucket of milk as you do so (this may require a little practice).

Step 4: Take the milk to the dairy, built with thick mud walls to withstand the baking heat of the Mesopotamian plain*

Step 5: Boil the milk, add the ‘starter’ from the previous batch of yoğurt and then leave it to ferment, a process which takes only a few hours.

Step 6: Preside over the next day’s breakfast table, with yoğurt that has travelled all of 3 yards, from the dairy into the house, and is still within spitting distance, literally, of its sheep of origin.

* Should you try to recreate this recipe in its entirety in, for example, the English Home Counties, it might be wiser to focus more on the water-proofing aspect when constructing your dairy.

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‘Sütten ağzı yanan, yoğurdu üfleyerek yer: A man who’s burnt his mouth drinking hot milk will drink even yoğurt very carefully’.

Turkish proverb