Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria

“Fi Ingilterra,” he repeated, knowingly. “Helou.” Helou means “sweet”, but has the connotation “pretty”. Then he said London was “helou”.

I admitted that London and England were “helou,” and after a few minutes we both agreed that Alexandretta too was “helou.”

Mehrez pointed out the sights along the Arsuz road, the onion fields, olive groves and grazing pastures where in summer people from Alexandretta and the villages went for picnics. He offered to stop at several villages where we could drink home-made arak. He seemed disappointed that I had neither the time nor, at eleven in the morning, the desire for a glass of the strong distilled grape with aniseed and asked, “Would you rather have beer?”

We reached the northern outskirts of Arsuz, hideous with new buildings in creative forms of ugliness, as though the houses had been modelled on the Lego designs of a particularly troublesome child. Most of the two-storey structures had just been built or were nearing completion. Trees had yet to be planted, so there was no shade. Concrete dust was everywhere, a side-effect of the Westernising of housebuilding in a land rich with stone and forests which had for centuries until our own provided the materials for beautiful villas, temples and theatres. It was a relief to cross the little bridge at the mouth of the River Arsuz into old Arsuz, with its small cluster of eucalyptus-shaded stone houses. Wooden fishing boats bobbed up and down beneath the bridge, beyond which, almost hidden by pines and eucalyptus, was the Hotel Arsuz.

“Rosuz is the Hellenistik name of this charming little town,” I read in Mehmet Udimir’s tourist brochure. “Coming to Antakya, Selevkos Nicador set foot to shore here. There are some mozaics and the remnants of stone pillars are to be seen in Arsuz, from the middle ages.”

Mehrez drove into the hotel courtyard, where young men were playing soccer. One of them stopped playing and took me inside one of the hotel’s two buildings. He was enormously fat, with a gentle, friendly face, and spoke English well. He told me his father owned the hotel, which had opened in 1965, and that his name was Sedat Mistikoglu. He gave me a room in the newer building, a simple bedroom with windows on two sides, one facing the sea and a sandy beach and the other with a balcony over the courtyard. In the bathroom, there was a shower. I left my bags and went downstairs, where Sedat and his younger brother Suat asked me if everything was all right. They were proud of the hotel’s modern conveniences, the telephones in each room and the new plumbing. “We have just installed solar heating,” Sedat said, beaming.

“What happens when the sun doesn’t shine?” I asked, dreading cold morning showers.

“The sun always shines here,” Sedat assured me.

Back in Alexandretta, I asked Mehrez to take me to the Catholic church. He interpreted this to mean a general tour of Christian churches. He drove to several small churches with tin roofs, first a Greek Orthodox, then an Armenian Orthodox, then a church whose denomination was not indicated. I said I was late for an appointment, that the church I wanted, the “Franciscan” church, was “old and large”. He took me to another Orthodox church, which was tiny with a miniature basilica on top. Finally, despite my limited knowledge of Alexandretta’s roads, I managed to direct him to the Church of the Annunciation. As we approached it, he made a gesture of recognition, as if to ask, “Why didn’t you say this church?”

In search of Padre Giovanni, I went into the rectory, along a corridor hung with old French morality prints. One contrasted the death of the sinner, being subsumed into hell, with that of a faithful man ascending to heaven, all in faded pastel shades. Another showed Adam and Eve in the garden, accepting the apple from the serpent. These were the visions of my own pre-Vatican II childhood, the simple messages of an older church. I heard voices coming from a room which turned out to be a large kitchen. Padre Giovanni was sitting with several other people at a long table eating lunch, but got up and walked with me to the courtyard in front of the church. The church was entirely surrounded by a high wall, leaving large gardens front and back. Both were overgrown and the façades of the church and rectory needed paint, at least, and probably repair. With only about 350 Catholics in all of Alexandretta, the cost of repairs would have been difficult to bear.

We sat on a bench, which the young priest wiped clean with his handkerchief, in the shade of a small pine tree. He stretched out his long legs, and his beard with its few flecks of grey lay over his chest down to his stomach. The beard made him look more Greek Orthodox than Catholic. He was tall and thin, with an austere face. He wore the traditional Franciscan footwear, sandals, but otherwise dressed in civilian clothes – a plaid shirt without Roman collar, a cardigan and a beige jacket. The hair on his head was the same colour as his beard, brown with a little grey, cut short.

I asked Father Giovanni why I had met Franciscans in every Muslim country, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, I had visited. For years in west Beirut, the Muslim half of Lebanon’s divided capital, Franciscans said mass in their chapel whatever the battlefield conditions outside. They turned up in such unlikely places as Libya, serving Polish, Filipino and other Gastarbeiter. They offered the sacraments to visitors like myself in the wilds of Somalia and on the banks of the Nile in Cairo.

“In St Francis’s time,” he said, in English with a strong Italian accent, “he thought there should be cooperation between Christians and Muslims. For all Muslim people, he became the possibility of living in peace between these two peoples.”

“It’s too bad he’s dead,” I said, thinking of Christian – Muslim bloodshed in Lebanon and Egypt.

He told me that there were 4,000 Christians in Alexandretta, the largest community being the Greek Orthodox with 3,000. As well as the 350 Roman Catholics, there were a few Armenians, Assyrians and Protestants.

“In the Orthodox Church,” he said, “according to tradition, they say the Mass in Arabic. The Orthodox youth who want to pray in Turkish, they come to our church.” Other communicants from outside his congregation were the many foreign seamen, mainly Filipino and Italian, whose ships berthed at Alexandretta harbour.

How were relations between the Christians and the overwhelming Muslim majority?

“Relations are normal,” he said. “Unfortunately, I see that between Christian and Muslim people there is no theological understanding. Generally, there is indifference. I heard it said, they are Muslims, we are Christians. Unfortunately, I say, because I am interested in how Muslims live their own faith. I was lucky myself to become friends, because God gave me the occasion, with an Imam. He is young. He came to our church, so we started to become friends. I pay a visit to him. He pays visits to me, and so on. I’m proud of this friendship, because I take it as a gift from God.”

“What kind of Muslim is he?”

“I know he is a special confession of Muslim, but I don’t know which. Not an Alawi.”

“Is there any intermarriage between Christians and Muslims?”

“There are ten or fifteen couples I am aware of, but I know they have some difficulties. Generally, Christians and Muslims don’t marry each other. That is a problem, of course. The Orthodox Church believes differently from the Catholic on marriage between faiths.”

“How?”

“The Orthodox requires that the partner who is not a Christian must be baptised. As Catholics, we do not ask this. The Catholic Church blesses the marriage, even when the other person is not baptised. If someone, man or woman, accepts to be baptised in order to be with his beloved, what kind of conscience has he about the sacrament of baptism? It is a problem I face with my Orthodox colleagues.”

The Orthodox may have been closer to the Muslim outlook. An old friend, who had converted to Islam for what he felt might have been base motives at the time, later became devout. “We believe,” my friend explained, “that motive in accepting God as God and Mohammed as his Prophet does not matter. It is important to become a Muslim, to submit to God, whether to get married or to avoid tax on non-believers or whatever. In time, God will act on you, and you become a true Muslim.”

I asked Padre Giovanni whether the Christians tended to be richer, as in Lebanon, or poorer than the Muslims.

“The Catholics,” he said, “generally come from families who were originally European. They are mostly Latin Catholic. They work in trade and are rich. If we speak of Christians here though, we have to discuss the Orthodox Church, which is much larger. As a minority, Christians face difficulties. For instance, it is not easy to find important jobs in this society. The better jobs go to Muslims. Here in this country, the Christians are second-class people.”

“Do the younger Christians want to leave the country?”

“It’s not a problem of young people, but of families. That is, there are a lot of families who leave to go to Germany, France, Italy, New York. Of course, it’s a problem especially for young people who don’t easily find work. This is worse in eastern Turkey, where the Christians are much poorer ...”

“Do the Muslims you know face the same problems?”

“Among the Muslims, there is the problem of secularisation. Many people do not go to the mosque, don’t have a religious feeling. Materialism and secularism are problems for both Islam and Christianity.”

The garden was quiet, but for the chirping of small birds, and cool despite the sunshine. Padre Giovanni stood to lead me on a tour of his church, where he said I could come to Mass the next day. We were on the steps of his church when an old woman walked up to him and told him in Italian with a strong southern accent to come inside and finish his lunch.

“This is my mother,” he said. “She and my father are visiting from Italy.” He promised to return to lunch in a few minutes. She walked back to the rectory, clearly disappointed.

“They built this church in 1888,” he said as we walked in, “when Alexandretta had large Italian, French, English and local Catholic communities.”

I imagined what it must have been like on a bright Sunday in those last years before nationalism and modernisation crept into the Ottoman Empire. The priest would have said Mass in Latin at the high altar, while several hundred Catholics who spoke different languages in their daily lives worshipped together. Despite changes in the world outside, the interior of the Church of the Annunciation looked unchanged, except that a new altar now faced the twelve rows of pews and the priest would say Mass in Turkish. The marble floor, in large slabs of alternating black and white, was freshly washed, looking as it must have a century earlier. The Mediterranean sun still shone through the rounded windows above the columns that lined the church, near which old women made the Stations of the Cross. Above the old altar, which symbolically faced God rather than the people, were six large baroque golden candelabra. The tabernacle was gold. There were two side altars, neither recessed, the one on the right with a large plaster statue of St Theresa, the one on the left with a similar coloured effigy of St Francis of Assisi holding the child Jesus in one hand. On the right-hand wall of the church at the back was a large frieze of St George, patron not only of England but of most eastern Christians. Above the caption, “Sancte George Ora Pro Nobis,” the saint astride his white charger held a real spear, red tipped with blood, poised to strike the already wounded green dragon, whose teeth were exposed menacingly, like a monster’s in an old horror film, sneering at the horse’s hooves and the spear at his head. This was the religion of my youth, the religion that was born in the Levant, in which St George vanquished the dragon with his spear and the Archangel Michael conquered Lucifer by the sword. Yet it was the followers of the pacific St Francis of Assisi who kept Christendom alive here. The heroes of the Crusades, the marauding Knights Templar and Hospitaller, had fled long ago.

Padre Giovanni excused himself to discuss something with the women who were cleaning the church for Palm Sunday mass the next day. I thanked him for his time and left.

Walking out of the church courtyard into the road facing Mehmet Udimir’s library, I saw a small cinema, the profane neatly adjoining the sacred. A torn poster stapled onto a board in front advertised an Italian soft-porn film starring the Eritrean actress Zeudi Araya. I went in to take a look, but found the cashier fast asleep in a chair. I decided not to wake him. A doorway covered with a blanket led into a bare room with iron and plastic folding chairs set haphazardly on the cement floor. A flat wooden ceiling above and an arched window along one wall gave the room the feel of an abandoned Spanish mission. A white sheet stretched across one wall served as the screen.

Twenty-five men and boys sat in a room that could comfortably seat 200. There seemed to be no minimum age to watch this film of a bad Italian actor fondling the breasts of, first, a bad Italian actress, and then of Zeudi Araya, a lithe African, who herself soon fondled the breasts of the Italian actress, who reciprocated by fondling Zeudi’s breasts. I feared for the young boys, some aged eight or nine, not because they were exposed to the sight of bare breasts, which I took to be harmless, but that they might grow up to believe the sole object of sex was breast-fondling. The sounds of the lovers’ heavy breathing could hardly compete with the creaking of the old projector. What little dialogue there was, mainly expletives of one and two words, had been dubbed into Turkish. The film itself was grainy, obviously the last print of an extremely cheap production.

Every so often, some of the men got up to leave, no doubt bored. A few more pre-adolescent boys drifted in, without disturbing the somnolent cashier, and sat down to watch the Italian couple find the meaning of life on a tropical island inhabited by a naked black girl. On the wrinkled sheet, an appropriate medium for projecting this particular film, Zeudi Araya sadly waved good-bye to her Italian lovers. They were sailing back to Italy and out of her life forever, which I took as my cue to depart. I did not disturb the cashier. I was certain he preferred his dreams to the twenty pence I would have paid him for my ten-minute excursion into Turkey’s world of soft porn next to the “very old” church.

I returned to the church on Palm Sunday. The old altar and pulpit stood as empty reminders of the old Latin Mass, while microphones on the new altar and lectern carried the voice of Padre Giovanni in Turkish to the eighty people, mostly well-dressed women and children, of the congregation. When the priest reached the Pater Noster, he sang it in Latin. Perhaps he did that so that his mother and father, seated at the front, would understand at least part of the ceremony. They sat like two humble Italian peasants, the mother with a black mantilla on her white hair, and the father dressed in a shirt without tie buttoned at the collar. They were indistinguishable from their fellow Mediterraneans in the church and could easily have been Turkish, Greek, Syrian, or any other race of the civilisation at the “middle of the earth”. Behind them, children dressed in white held leafy twigs, though I wondered why they did not have palm leaves from the trees outside. The Mass ended, and outside other young boys were drifting into the cinema next door for a glimpse of Zeudi Araya’s breasts.

That evening, I strolled about the town. Alexandretta was pleasant, but run-down, with unrepaired roads and crumbling buildings. There was the smell of sea-air, mixed with that of diesel fuel, and the smoke of meat grilling on coals in the popular restaurants. Most of the streets were dark, only half lit by old street lights.

My exploration of Alexandretta’s limited night life was brief. On one street near Mehmet Udimir’s library, two night clubs stood side by side. One was the Kazablanca, and the other was the Tanca Bar. Their exteriors were lit with coloured lights, blinking in the darkness like Christmas trees, lights that were identical in border towns and ports from Tijuana, Mexico, to Trabzon. They beckoned the stranger into a forbidden world which, at its best, would be merely disappointing. There were men standing outside in cheap light suits, bright ties and pencil moustaches – the uniform of cabaret doormen throughout the world. Two of them were beckoning unwary pedestrians into the Kazablanca, so I walked into the Tanca, which at that moment had no one at the door.

As soon as I was inside, I knew I had made a mistake. It was so dark I could not see. I felt my way along a short, low corridor to a doorway which opened onto a long, only slightly less dark room. When my eyes adjusted, I saw that the ceilings were vaulted, strangely covered in a knitted pattern of wood slats. The twining wood all round gave the cavern a sylvan feel, in the worst and most forbidding sense, recalling fairy stories in which the child is warned not to go into the woods alone at night. I waited for the wolf.

The head waiter, dressed like the doormen of the Kazablanca, motioned me to an empty table. Men, alone or in groups, sat at other tables in rows along either long wall between the door and the bar. In the central file between the men’s tables were those of “the girls,” who sat together impassively, more than a dozen of them. None was sitting with any of the men. In ill-fitting dresses, with costume jewellery and dyed hair, they appeared to be either plain bar girls, there to encourage men to buy more drinks, or prostitutes. They were unusually ugly and unforthcoming for either. On the wooden dance floor, in front of which a three-man band was laconically playing “Oriental” music, there were no dancers, strippers, or even magicians.

I sat quietly for a minute trying to discern the sights in the room. Suddenly out of the darkness a waiter was standing in front of me. He had dark, greasy hair, and a moustache out of a 1930s film. He spoke to me in Turkish, which I could neither hear because of the music nor understand. I asked for “bira,” beer in Turkish and Arabic. He returned a moment later with a bottle of Tuborg, an empty glass on a metal tray and a tin dish with a few pistachios in it. He put the tray down on my small round table, and, with a flourish worthy of the uncorking of a bottle of vintage champagne, pulled the cap off the beer bottle. As delicately as any sommelier at Simpson’s with a choice claret, he poured the beer into the glass. Then he smiled and asked me to pay.

I did not understand. He repeated the price. I thought he said “bes” something. I recalled from the Farsi name for backgammon, “Shesh-Besh,” that “besh” was five. Perhaps he was saying “five something,” maybe 500. The band was still playing its loud, discordant music, so it was impossible to be sure. Was it 500 Turkish lira? I handed him a 500 lira note, a little less than one American dollar, but he shook his head. He wrote down a figure: 8,000.

“Eight thousand?” I asked, incredulous.

He nodded.

I did some quick figuring in my head. “That’s over ten dollars!”

He raised his eyebrows, then waved his hand to indicate the beer and the nuts. So, that explained it. With pistachios, a fifty cent bottle of beer cost ten dollars. Perhaps I had to take into consideration the cost of the entertainment and the presence of the girls at their private tables.

“That’s too much,” I said and stood to leave.

The waiter was clearly displeased, but he did not follow me or argue. The band continued playing its awful tune, and the girls sat as placidly as before. I walked into the blackness of the corridor and outside to the cool night. I knew that if I had been somewhere else, say Beirut, the waiter would have tried to force me to pay. He would have chased me and summoned assistance in the form of a security guard with ham fists and a .38 revolver. (In fact, that is exactly what had happened to me on my first night in Beirut in 1972.) The people here were mercifully more relaxed. I decided not to sample the delights of the Kazablanca, although a more serious investigator of the joys of Alexandretta’s night clubs would have persisted.

I walked along the same street to a normal, non-cabaret bar. It was open to the road with large windows and the inside was as lively as the Tanca Bar had been dead. Scores of mostly young men were talking and drinking beer, seated at stools along the curved, marble top bar or at the wooden casks which served as tables. There were no women – no bar girls, no wives or girlfriends, no young Alexandrettan ladies out on their own.

I ordered a pint of draught lager, which was served with a bowl of nuts by a smiling barman and cost 300 lira. The bar was not exactly clean or well lighted, but it was friendly and relaxed, and cleaner and better lit than the Tanca. There were two television sets, one in each of the two rooms separated from each other by the bar. They were playing the video of a Turkish thriller. In every scene, men were either punching or shooting at each other. In one segment, a group of men chased another group of men in cars. When nearly everyone was dead, the video ended and the barman turned it off and put on a cassette of Turkish pop music. But for the language spoken and the absence of women, it could have been a college beer bar anywhere in the Western world – young men in jeans, glasses of lager, music, a kitchen serving hot sandwiches. One man kindly offered me a beer and tried to welcome me into his conversation, but we discovered we had no common language. I tried English, French, Arabic and a few words of Spanish and Italian. He tried Turkish and what might have been Kurdish. He settled for a clink of glasses and a hearty pat on my back. What more could anyone ask?

At breakfast in the Arsuz Hotel, the old waiter in a uniform of black trousers, white shirt and tie, walked slowly across the terrace carrying breakfast on a tray. He tilted his thin body towards the table as he laid out the small breakfast dishes of olives, bread and white cheese. He poured tea from a tin pot into a cup and asked in Arabic if I wanted anything else.

“No,” I said. “Thank you.”

The waiter, whose name was Iskandar, Arabic and Turkish for Alexander, had somehow adopted me in my few days at the Arsuz Hotel. From the time we struck up a conversation in Arabic when I arrived, he would not let the Turkish waiters serve me. He was moody and would run his hand through his thinning grey hair and shake his head disapprovingly if I asked one of them for anything. He would always try to give me something extra, sometimes new green olives alongside the black, sometimes fried eggs, which I could see were not being served to the other guests. Despite his moodiness, he was a gentleman who moved and spoke with great dignity. He was proud that he came, not from this village, but from the ancient city of Antioch. He sympathised when I told him my shower that morning had been cold. Apparently, I was up too early for the sun to have had time to heat the water. I suspected he was solicitous because he enjoyed having a guest in the hotel who spoke his language, however badly and with however strong a Lebanese accent.

When I asked Iskandar where I could find a taxi to take me into Alexandretta, he advised me to save money by using the “dolmüs,” a taxi which picked people up and dropped them off anywhere on a fixed route.

“Why do you want a taxi?” he asked reproachfully. “Taxis cost 5,000 lira. The dolmüs is only 250.” In Turkey, the dolmüs was usually a micro-bus. Like the service in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel, the dolmüs was the normal transport for the poor. They called it “dolmüs”, here because it was “stuffed” with passengers, the way they called courgettes or vine leaves “stuffed” with rice and meat “dolma”.

When I reached the Ford micro-bus parked in the main square, it was already filled with fifteen people in twelve seats. We waited a few more minutes to stuff in another passenger before the bus began its journey north. The driver, his dashboard decorated with a turquoise stone to ward off the evil eye, stopped every so often on the way to let someone off or on, often leaving the road altogether to seek out passengers in the villages.