Churches with minarets

Why do the churches in Ayvalik have minarets?

Or, to rephrase the question, why are all the mosques in the old town of Ayvalik actually old Greek Orthodox churches, rather poorly disguised by the addition of minarets?

The answer is - well, how long have you got?

The very short answer is that in October 1922 the original Greek Orthodox Christian population of Ayvalik left suddenly, and was replaced by in 1923 by Turkish Muslims, who later turned the abandoned churches into mosques.

The slightly longer answer  is that after the First World War, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the Turkish War of Independence, with the victory of the newly emergent Turkish state over the invading army of the newly emergent Greek state, the 30,000 Orthodox Greek Christians of Ayvalik (effectively the entire population of Ayvalik), were forced to leave their ancestral homes (Ayvalik had been an Asia Minor Greek town for 300 years, although part of the Ottoman Empire), and to migrate to Greece.

They were either put onto boats, and forcibly deported to Greece or, if unlucky enough to be male and over the age of 18, sent to forced labour camps in the Anatolian interior, from which few ever returned. They were replaced by a much smaller number of Muslims, many Greek-speaking, from the island of Mytilene (also known as Lesbos) which lies just offshore, from Crete and from other Greek territories now part of Greece, but formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, who were similarly forced to leave their ancestral homes to move to the new, primarily Muslim, nation state of Turkey, created from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.

These forced migrations were part of the much bigger Population Exchange which was taking place between Turkey and Greece at the time, and later ratified by the Treaty of Lausanne, in 1923. This was based purely on religious identity: one and half million Greek Orthodox citizens of Turkey and 500,000 Muslim citizens of Greece were forcibly deported from their homes and sent to live in the other country, where they would form part of the religious majority.

None of the 2 million people involved had any choice in the matter: their lives were torn apart because the international powers had agreed that in order to avoid further conflict Turkey should be primarily Muslim, and Greece primarily Christian. Unfortunately for them, those 2 million people were living in the 'wrong' place for their religion, and because of that were forced to migrate, as penniless refugees, to places where many of them could not even speak the language.

Those are the bare facts about what happened to the Ayvalik Greeks who suddenly disappeared and left all those churches behind, and the people who came in to replace them and turned their churches into mosques. A more comprehensive explanation of why this happened, however, would have to take in both the 3,000 year history of the Asia Minor Greeks, and the rise and fall of the multi-cultural Ottoman Empire and its replacement by the rather more culturally homogenous and less religiously tolerant Turkish Republic. This followed the First World War, the ill-advised Greek invasion of Anatolia in 1919 and the subsequent vicious and bloody Turkish War of Independence, which ended with the Greeks being driven back, quite literally in some cases, into the sea.


That's all rather too much for one blog post, though.

Silent, in a Camel Barn in Ayvalık

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

                                                                                                                 John Keats

The problem I have always had with Keats’ poem ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’ is Stout Cortez. I imagine him, red-faced and dangerously overweight, stuffed into an uncomfortably tight leather tunic, not standing up straight on the peak in Darien for that first magical glimpse of the Pacific Ocean, but bending over, wheezing and gasping for breath after the exertion of getting up there, and quite unable to appreciate the view.

Keats was, of course, using the word ‘stout’ in a different sense to the one above, but there's no helping it: for me, the image of Stout Cortez will always be that of John Prescott in a Conquistador’s uniform. And looking at portraits of Cortez, that image doesn't seem too far from the truth.

Nevertheless, the poem does convey vividly the idea of the life-changing moment: when, quite without warning, you come upon a person or place or idea that alters everything, and the boundaries of your previous world slip and slide in an instant, opening up new, and previously quite unthought of, horizons. For me, that moment came on a sunny day in January 2007, when I walked into a camel barn in Ayvalık, a town on the north Aegean coast of Turkey.

I first came to Ayvalık quite by chance, when I was teaching at a university in the Turkish capital, Ankara, and thinking of buying a house in Turkey. A Turkish friend suggested that I should consider Ayvalık, a town famous for its beautiful location on the Aegean coast, surrounded by islands, for its Ottoman Greek architecture, and for its delicious golden olive oil. We came to Ayvalık for a weekend, and from the moment I first saw the town, I never considered buying a house anywhere else.

Ottoman Greek, in terms of architecture, refers to houses built before 1923, (when the Ottoman Empire came to an end and was replaced by the new Turkish Republic) by the Orthodox Greek Christians who were the principal occupants of this part of Asia Minor under the Ottoman Empire.

Many of the houses in Ayvalık are built in the style of the Greek neo-classical revival - square stone boxes, with pediments - like the one in the photograph on the right, which belongs to my next door neighbour N, one of Turkey's most famous rock stars (and also an architect).



 Others are built in the traditional Ottoman style, with an overhanging upper storey, giving them a slightly mediaeval air, although the town is only about 400 years old: it was founded by people looking for a safe place to live on the mainland, to escape from continual pirate raids on Lesbos (which lies just off-shore) and other Aegean islands.

The old town in Ayvalık contains just under 2,000 Ottoman Greek houses, in varying states of repair from fully restored, like this:

 to falling down - literally- like this:

The house I ended up buying, with its attached camel barn, was somewhere in between, but was distinguished by being one of the most hideously modernised houses in Ayvalık. The picture of the house on the estate agent's web site looked deeply unpromising. It was 100 years old, but you wouldn't have known it: in a town full of beautiful swans, this house was a serious ugly duckling:

I only went to see it  because there was some kind of stone 'studio' in the garden, and I was looking for somewhere containing at least one really big room, to house all my books. The inside of the house turned out to be much, much better than its dispiriting exterior. As it stood on a corner, there were many windows, and the house was filled with light. The rooms were large, with high ceilings. Although most of the original features had been removed, there remained one tall, typically Greek, extravagantly-pedimented cupboard, which alone almost justified buying the house:

The 'studio' turned out to be this, the sad skeleton of a once lovely stone building, the  windows and doors long gone, and the massive stone walls coated with whitewash:

It was, the emlakçı (estate agent) told me, a camel barn, about 150 years old, and thus rather older than the house. It was built in the days when camels were the main form of transport for bringing in the olives and other produce from the surrounding countryside, and was used to stable the camels whilst their owners were busy disposing of their produce in the marketplace close by.

As soon as I walked inside the camel barn, however, I stopped hearing what the emlakçı was saying: I didn't see the empty door and window spaces, the concrete floor piled with junk, or the mess made by whitewash on the pink stone walls.

I saw my library, the one I had been waiting for all my life. The barn was 10 metres long, 6 metres wide and 7 metres high. It was big enough to house all my four thousand or so books, many of which had been in storage for years, because the Oxfordshire cottage I  previously lived in only had room to shelve about half of them. This room would house all my books, and more. For years there had been lurking in my head the image of a great big barn-like room, lined floor to ceiling with books, maybe even with a gallery, as some of my favourite libraries, like the Oxford Union library, have. And here was that room. I could finally make my library, in a camel barn.

That was the moment when the boundaries of my world changed: I decided to buy and restore the house, and then make a library in the camel barn. There was no question about it, not a moment's doubt, even though I had been in the town for less than 24 hours, knew nobody there, and was working in Ankara, 900 miles away. This was going to be my library.

Reader, I bought that camel barn.

The very next day.

If you go down to the woods today...

Truly, for my next post I was intending to write about the Treaty of Lausanne, 1923, and its catastrophic effect on the people inhabiting Ayvalık at the time. And I will, I will. But I have been waylaid by a puppy, and this is he.



At the moment the puppy's Coke bottle chewy toy is somewhat bigger than him, but he is a Kangal, or Anatolian sheep dog, the Turkish national dog (and, perhaps, symbol of national virility) which means that one day he will be the size of a Shetland pony, thus:



And I am to be his godmother.

Down in the valley between the two ranges of pine-covered hills along the coast south of Ayvalık, there is an unmade track running between olive groves, and this constitutes the homeward arc of Freddie's and my circular walks, once we have climbed up the hills, gazed at the views over the sea, and then come downhill again through the pine woods.

I have recently become friendly with a man I often see down there who owns a ramshackle, unfinished farm house apparently being built without benefit of a plumb line.



The house is surrounded by many interesting artefacts, not least among them several boats in varying states of repair, an unexploded Greek mortar shell dating back to the Turkish War of Independence, and many examples of what is probably best described as 'Outsider Art': think Steptoe, amongst the olive groves.



My new friend, M, tells me that he is a man who like animals much better than people. The truth of this statement is evident from the menagerie that lives in the enclosure surrounding the farmhouse. M keeps rabbits, ducks, hens and six dogs of varying sizes.





One day M invited me into the compound to have a cup of tea, and to meet the animals. He let me play with the puppy for as long as I liked, and sent me home with a handful of newly laid eggs. Now, if he's around when Freddie and I walk past, we often sit and chat for a while. Although he owns other properties in Ayvalik and elsewhere, and presumably has some kind of other life to fund this bucolic idyll, M spends as much time as possible down here tending his animals, his vegetable garden and his olive grove, and having his friends over in the evening to drink beer and cook stuffed mussels (an Aegean speciality) over an open fire.

Although M is not fond of people in general, I am acceptable because I come with a dog attached. Freddie loves it down on the farm, as there are five other dogs for him to run around with. The puppy is too small for that yet, and during my visits spends most of his time curled up in my lap.

The puppy is a relatively new arrival, and a few days ago M asked me if I would like to think of a name for him. I felt honoured, and gave the matter much thought, considering numerous alternatives before returning to my first idea: Utku, which means 'triumph' or 'victory' in Turkish, and was the name of a student I taught in Ankara. I love the sound of this name, and have previously bestowed it on one cat (now deceased), and on the fighting camel I fell in love with last year, and whom I long, passionately, to own.



But it also makes a hell of a good name for a puppy that will one day be 4 feet tall. Yesterday, I told M that the puppy's name would be Utku, and he seemed pleased. He picked the puppy up and said 'Utku, Utku, Utku', kissing the puppy in between each repetition. That, he said, made the name official.



Then he invited me to come back to the farm this evening for a christening party - this being Turkey, I am translating freely here - for Utku at which, I understood him to say, there will be cake. Naturally, I accepted, and am now wondering what might be an appropriate christening gift for an Anatolian sheep dog puppy to whom I seem to have been appointed de facto godmother.

I'm thinking in terms of a big, juicy bone.

The truth about cats and dogs...

I awake to the realisation that I left the kitchen door open last night and that not one, but two, feral cats are in the house.

Shortly afterwards Freddie, my dog, realises this too.



There are breakages.

For does not an old Turkish proverb say: 'A terrified cat will always choose to rampage through a tray of wine glasses rather than head for the door standing wide open'?

After several minutes of extreme havoc and a considerable amount of collateral damage, the feral cats are ejected. I sweep up all the broken glass, feed the dog and yowling resident cats, and take a cup of coffee into the courtyard to sit awhile and regain my equilibrium.


I sink gratefully into the Lloyd loom garden chair and raise the mug of coffee to my lips, but even as I finally take the first sip of coffee of the day, a loud clacking noise starts coming from inside the camel barn. I sigh, knowing what the noise is. My cat Ollie is sitting inside the camel barn, batting the door of the cat flap back and forth with his paw. CLACK! CLACK! CLACK! goes the door. He will continue doing this until I get up, walk over to the camel barn doors, and lift up the cat flap door from the outside, thus allowing him unimpeded egress from the camel barn into the courtyard.



Ollie is 15, very old in cat years, and I indulge him in this practice on the grounds that he may be going senile and have forgotten how to use the cat flap. The possibility remains, however, that he simply sees no necessity to bother with pushing his way through the cat flap when an indentured servant is available to do it for him. I strongly suspect that he manages to get through that door perfectly well on his own when I am not in the vicinity.

With Ollie ushered safely through the cat flap I manage, finally, to drink a few sips of coffee and sit back in my chair, enjoying the scent of the jasmine growing up the courtyard wall.

Then two things happen simultaneously: Ollie strolls over to the flower bed in which the jasmine is planted, just next to where I am sitting, and defecates neatly, and copiously, right in the middle of it. The scent of the jasmine is immediately replaced by something infinitely less pleasant. Meanwhile, Freddie begins to exacavate, with enormous, earth-spattering enthusiasm, the large terracotta pot in which I have recently planted some not particularly robust geraniums.

Once I have disposed of Ollie's little gift and swept up the earth and broken flowers, I bow to the inevitable and decide to take Freddie for a long walk to dissipate some of his energy. As I re-enter the house via the camel barn, in which I will be entertaining some friends for dinner this evening, I notice a very strong odour of Eau du Feral Cat, a souvenir of last night's uninvited guests. When a cat sprays the smell is both disgusting and extremely difficult to eradicate. At this point it becomes necessary, for the sake of my mental health, to move into a state of extreme denial, and I decide to think about this problem later.

Freddie and I set off on our walk, and make our way up to the pine woods with only two motorcycle-chasing incidents (not bad going), and no one moved to throw anything at Freddie or me because they don't like dogs (also good). The day is looking up. We continue to climb and, after an hour or so, get to the high point of the walk, where there is an extraordinarily beautiful view over the Aegean and the islands of the Ayvalik archipelago, shown here in a photo taken last week:




At this very moment, however, as Freddie sits on the ground panting happily and I, gazing at the view, am struck anew by the incredible beauty of this place, the electrical storm which has been threatening for several days finally arrives, with thunder, spectacular lightning effects and torrential rain. We are some distance from any form of shelter, and within minutes I am soaked to the skin. I sit down on the wet ground next to my big, wet dog, give him a big, wet hug and, huddled together, we sit and watch the sheet lightning illuminate the sky over the sea.

Between the woods and the sea.

It's been a long time since my first blog post, nearly a year, but I've been writing it in my head all the while: the longer I live here, the more I love Ayvalik, and the more I want to write about it.

Here's a little visual context for the Camel Barn Library: this is a photo I took earlier today from up in the pine woods behind the town, on my morning walk with my dog Freddie. It's a terrible photo, for which I apologise, but the reason I'm posting it is that you can see where my house is, just about.



See the mosque - actually an old Greek Orthodox church with a minaret stuck on to it - in the middle of the photo? Look straight down below the mosque and there's a house with a large, yellow ochre side wall, with a line of trees to the right. The yellow ochre house belongs to my next door neighbour, and her yellow ochre wall lies at the end of my courtyard (happily, the bottom half of the wall is bare stone). You can just see the roof of the camel barn in front of the trees, and then the roof of the house, which adjoins the barn at a right angle to form two sides of the courtyard, beyond that. It's a good location to be in: not too high up (the steeper streets in this town are a killer), and midway between the wooded hills behind and the sea - only five minutes walk in either direction.

By the sea you can see the marina - full of beautiful boats belonging to people from Istanbul and elsewhere, who come here in the summer to sail - and the fish market, where the local fishermen come and sell their catch every morning. Some fishermen still tie up on the waterfront in the town centre and sell directly from their boats, attended by patient, ever-hopeful street cats. This photo shows the southern end of Ayvalik: the town centre lies to the north, five minutes walk from the right hand side of the photograph.

So. there we have it: I'm back, and the scene is set. What I really want to write about now is why the local mosque is an old Greek Orthodox church with an added minaret, and that will be the subject of a post in the very near future.