Black Sea (32 page)

He was dead by the following night. There was no effective treatment, and he and his friends knew it. Colonel Kuczyriski, a friend from Paris, called during the last evening and bent over his bed. Mickiewicz managed a smile, and began to say something: 'Kuczyiiski.. . the Ottoman Cossacks...' Then he lost consciousness. It was six, and growing dark. Just before nine, he died.

The war went on. The Ottoman Cossacks, with Sadyk at their head, went off to Crimea and fought 'for your freedom and ours': the Jews served in their ranks, and nothing more was heard of the
Hussars of Israel. Nothing more was heard about Polish independence either, once the war was over. When the Allies and Russia sat down in Paris to make peace the following year, they agreed to overlook the Polish question. That was the price already agreed for keeping Austria and Prussia, the two other partitioning powers, in the alliance against Russia. The French and the British, who had deliberately raised the hopes of the Poles, now abandoned them. The Russian ambassador at the Peace Conference reported with relief that the word 'Poland' had not been so much as mentioned.

Seven years later, in January
1863,
the last and most terrible of the Polish nineteenth-century insurrections broke out. Men and women chanted the poems of Mickiewicz and Slowacki as they marched through the forests or lay waiting in the trenches, hoping that they would live up to the prophecies of 'the nation as Christ' or 'resurrection through sacrifice'. When the January Rising failed, most Europeans thought that the age of Romantic nationalism had closed for ever. The future must surely belong to great supranational blocks of power, to the empires.

The corpse of Adam Mickiewicz was taken back to France by steamer, and buried in Paris. Many years later, in
1890,
it was dug up again and brought to the Wawel Cathedral in Krakow, where Mickiewicz was laid among the Polish kings. Then the world changed once more, in a quite unexpected direction. The First World War ended with the collapse of four empires: Ottoman, Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Romanov. All along a line drawn between Galway and Georgia, all round the Black Sea and across the triangle between the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Adriatic, the graves opened and the forgotten nations emerged to claim sovereign statehood. One of them was Poland. From Partition to Resurrection had taken
124
years.

Ludwika stayed in her grave by the Black Sea, where the first and last passions of Adam Mickiewicz were enacted. The phrase 'in Polish soil' written on her tomb is not about politics or territory. It is about a sort of transubstantiation, held to take place wherever Polish blood falls or bones are buried - much what Rupert Brooke meant by the 'corner of a foreign field / Which is for ever England'. In the Sikorski Museum in London, there is an urn containing earth mixed with blood, taken by a Polish soldier from the slope at Monte Cassino on which his dead comrade lay. This substance is
polska ziemia —
Polish soil.

Chapter Seven

Home,

A sort of honour, not a building site,

Wherever we are, when, if we chose, we might

Be somewhere else, but trust that we have chosen right.

W. H. Auden, 'In Wartime' (1942)

THE BUS JOURNEY
from Ankara to Trabzon, which used to be Trebizond, takes thirteen hours. The road begins in the steppe of central Anatolia and then winds down through the forests and passes of the coastal mountains to the Black Sea. This is the route that Xenophon and his Ten Thousand took in
400
BC, on their march home from Persia. But where exactly they were when the soldiers saw the blue band on the horizon ahead of them, and cried out
'Thalassal
The sea!', cannot be known.

Some think that it was near the port of Ordu, about a hundred miles west of Trebizond, others that they filed down from the mountains a little further east. The point is that when the soldiers shouted
'ThalassaV,
the local people understood them. They were Greeks too. Trebizond, which was their 'Trapezos', was only one of the chain of colony-cities which lined that shore, in touch with all the other Greek settlements ringing the Black Sea. They had been there for three hundred years already when Xenophon and the survivors of his army came out of the wilderness. The Pontic Greeks, as these settlers came to be called, remained on that coast and in its green, foggy valleys running up to the snowline for almost two and a half thousand more years. They were ruled by the Romans, then by the Byzantine emperors, then — briefly - by the Grand Comnenoi, emperors of Trebizond. After that, the Turks came. That too the Pontic Greeks survived, negotiating and

conceding a little, converting to Islam a little. The end came only in 19x3, with the event known in diplomatic language as 'The Exchange' and in undiplomatic Greek as the
Katastrofe.

Greece, in a wild imperial venture supported by Britain, had invaded western Anatolia, hoping to make itself an Aegean 'great power' and to construct a 'greater Greece' out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. But the invasion ended not simply in Greece's defeat at the battle of Dumlupinar in 1922, but in a calamitous rout and slaughter which drove not only the Greek armies but much of the Greek civilian population of Anatolia into the sea. The Treaty of Lausanne, in 1923, settled the frontiers of the new Turkey under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The universal caliphate — a sprawling, multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire - now imploded like a dead star, metamorphosing itself into a compact, homogenous modern state of Moslem religion and Turkish speech. At the same time, Greece and Turkey agreed to exchange minorities. Nearly half a million Moslems (many of whom were Greeks in all but religion) were forced to leave Greece, while more than a million Christians (some of whom were culturally Turks) were expelled from Turkey. Most of the Christians were Pontic Greeks, who abandoned their monasteries and farms, their town houses and banks and schools, and fled with what they could carry down to the docks.

People on Turkish buses are either going home or leaving home. I never met anyone who admitted to travelling on business or on state duty. Before each passenger climbing into the Trabzon coach floated the picture of a house. For some, it was an urban apartment doorway, crowded with women and children weeping or waving farewell. For others, it was a red-roofed house above the Black Sea, an expectant house in which the family have finished preparations for the welcome and are telling each other to go to bed and not wait up. Everyone on the coach was a little tremulous, anxious to be consoled or distracted.

A beautiful woman, tall and narrow-eyed as a Kazakh, had flown back from her job with an oil company in Japan to see her family in Giresun - the town which the Greeks named Kerasos and which gave its name to a fruit which the Romans found there and planted all over their world: the cherry. A well-wrapped family, with a married daughter in a heavy Islamic cowl, talked to each other in
scathing Brooklyn English; they were heading home from New York to the port of Samsun. A peasant woman was helped by the other passengers to settle her handicapped daughter, paralysed and lolling, into a front seat; she arranged a white scarf about the girl's head and then, twisting her hands, made a speech about the family's misfortune. Beside me, a young woman studying media sciences in Holland talked to me about her mother waiting for her at Unye, about her experiences as a trainee in Dutch television. As night fell and a misshapen, waxing moon blazed over the bare hills, she told me that snow had fallen that day in the high Pontic Alps.

This was a swift, strong Ulusoy bus, from the long-distance road fleet which binds the Turkish continent together. Every hour or so, the conductor came down the aisle with a glass carboy of cologne. Cupped hands were held out and filled; faces and necks were laved and massaged. The conversations fell away, and the passengers slept. On my other side, by the window, a bearded man remained silent. Once he turned to me, opening his black eyes wide, and said, 'I am a Turk!' He regarded me for a long moment, then turned back to the window.

I half-woke at Samsun, and then again at Unye where the girl from Holland got off. Now the Black Sea was present, no more than an oppressive darkness on one side of the highway. When I woke again, at first light, a shrill voice was shouting and wailing. At first I thought it belonged to an eighteen-month-old boy, being tossed up and down and comforted by his parents a few rows ahead of me. Then I realised it was coming from further forward, where the handicapped girl had been placed with her mother. The sound strengthened into a sort of chant, a loud, protesting crying. Some of the men had gathered round the seat from which the noise was coming. The crying was not from the girl, it seemed, but from her mother. Low voices muttered in Turkish around me, and I saw that two women sitting across the aisle from me were silently wiping away tears with their scarfs.

Two men came down the aisle, carrying with great difficulty the handicapped child wrapped in a blanket from head to foot, and laid the bundle across one of the rear seat rows, near the door. I understood then that the girl was dead, that she must have died some time back in the darkness as the coach made its way down through the hills towards the sea. The mother came past and sat down by her daughter's body. Her cries became a rhythm, and then a song, a Pontic dirge of mourning in which the same musical phrase rose and fell in verse after verse.

Ahead of us, to the east, a huge red glare was rising from behind the next cape as if the city of Trabzon were burning. The sea was visible now, still black, with viscous dark-blue gleams. As the sun rose, the bearded man next to me began to pray, sitting upright and moving his lips. When he was done, he made the Moslem gesture of reverence, passing his hands gently down his face as if awakening from a dream.

The coach stopped by a mosque already lit for dawn prayers. A taxi was waiting. Several of the male passengers carried the girl's body down the steps of the bus and laid it in the back of the taxi. Somebody opened the taxi boot and gestured to the mother; her face twisted, and she flung her handbag into the boot and turned away. Presently she was persuaded to get in. Two men from the bus squeezed into the rear seat, beside the bundle, and the cab set off ahead of us towards Trabzon. The driver and the bearded man walked across to the mosque. I could see their outlines against the lit windows as they prostrated themselves, then rose again.

They returned, and the Ulusoy coach moved off for the last twenty miles to Trabzon. The conductor came round for the last time with the cologne bottle. The two women across the aisle continued to weep small tears in silence. The red sun rose into heavy clouds, which grew thin and then burned away. As the coach swung into the Taksim Meydane, the main square, it was six in the morning and already a hot, clear day.

Trabzon is built upon ridges, between deep ravines which run down to the sea. On one of these ridges stands the ruined citadel of Trebizond, the palace and fortress of the Great Comnenoi. The town itself is full of Byzantine churches which are now mosques: St Eugenius, St Anne, St Andrew, St Michael, St Philip, the cave church of St Savas, the church of Panaghia Chrysocephalos. On a headland in the western part of the city, cool in the wind from the sea, is the cathedral of Aghia Sofia, now a museum, its Byzantine frescoes restored by David Talbot-Rice and Edinburgh University.

There is something of Edinburgh in the commercial centre of Trabzon, tall classical buildings of grey volcanic stone built in the nineteenth century by Greek bankers, Greek shipping lines, Greek benefactors who endowed schools and hospitals. But to walk those streets today is to be constantly impeded by Turkish kindness and curiosity. Men call to you from the terrace of tea-houses, and tell you the story of their lives over glasses of smoky tea grown on the slopes above Rize, on the Black Sea. In the restaurants, the cook comes to lead you by the hand into the kitchen and make you choose from the hissing pans. The waiter gently pulls the book from your hand to see what you are reading. The cobbler who mended the leather strap of my bag fetched me a glass of cold, fresh lemon juice from the cafe while I was waiting, and then tried hard to refuse payment for both lemon juice and strap. The man in the camera shop (who turned out to have replaced my exposed film, so that two entire rolls were wrecked) gave me a long lecture about how an English professor had gone to Erzerum to investigate the mass grave of a 'so-called Armenian massacre' and found that all the skulls were perfect examples of Turkish heads, not an Armenian among them.