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.