Stanley Stewart - In the Empire of Genghis Khan - A Journey Among Nomads

William set sail from Istanbul on one of the trading vessels that carried cotton, silk and spices from Constantinople to the ports on the north shore of the Black Sea. In Karaköy, round a watery corner from the Golden Horn, I found the modern equivalents of William’s ship, the Russian and Ukrainian freighters which ply the same route. The fall of Communism has given a new impetus to Black Sea trade, and Turkey has become a conduit for Western goods, from tinned tomatoes to Johnnie Walker whisky. Russians and Ukrainians, now as free to travel as Levi’s and Coca-Cola, come to Istanbul to savour the bright lights and to buy in bulk. They travel by freighter, the only kind of vessel able to cope with their excess baggage.

My telephone enquiries had been inconclusive and I had come to the docks to see if I could rustle up a passage. In pole position was a huge cruise liner called the Marco Polo . Had William had a more aggressive publisher this floating palace might have been named after him. Beyond Marco’s luxurious namesake the shipping degenerated spectacularly. There were a few European freighters, shouldering the docks like naval toughs, then a couple of Turkish ships, painted gunmetal grey. At the far end of the dock I came to the Russian and Ukrainian freighters, the shipping equivalent of MOT failures, held together by rust stains and a grimy coating of oil.

The last ship was the Mikhail Lomonosov , an ageing rust-bucket that seemed to be kept afloat by its mooring ropes. It had a limp deflated appearance that one did not like to see in a ship, as if someone had let the air out of its tyres. It listed. It sagged. It exuded black smoke from unpromising quarters, like the portholes.

I called up to a man in a naval smock leaning on the rail at the top of the gangway. He replied that they were sailing for Sevastopol on Monday, in two days’ time. He waved me aboard and I stepped gingerly onto the gangway, unsure if the ship could take my weight.

Dimitri introduced himself as the second mate. He had one of those narrow Slavic faces, very pale and very bony, that are permanently knotted in expressions of anxiety. I asked about cabins, and he summoned the accommodation officer by barking into a pipe in the bulwark behind him. The accommodation officer took me below, showed me a cramped cabin full of sacks of onions, which he assured me would be cleared out, and then took a hundred dollars off me in exchange for a grubby receipt written on the back of a beer mat.

The speed and the casualness of the transaction startled me. Back on deck I lingered by the gangway with the second mate, hoping to learn more about this ship which now contained such a large proportion of my publisher’s advance. In spite of his dour appearance, he seemed eager to talk. He spoke the casual staccato English of ships.

‘Did you get receipt?’ he asked.

I showed him my beer mat. He nodded. Beer mats were obviously accepted currency on the Mikhail Lomonosov.

‘You can’t trust anyone on this ship,’ he said. He leaned forward to spit over the rail. ‘This is my last voyage. I can’t take it any more. Do you know how many times I make this trip? Sevastopol, Istanbul. Istanbul, Sevastopol.’

I told him I had no idea.

‘Four hundred forty-seven,’ he said. ‘It is no life. This is my last voyage. Four hundred forty-seven. It’s enough, I think. It’s making me crazy. If I don’t get off this ship, I will kill someone.’

I took what comfort I could from the fact that he had ruled out murder as a career option.

A bell rang twice from somewhere within the ship, and he turned to go. ‘We sail at six o’clock, Monday evening. Don’t be late.’

The following day, a Sunday, I went to morning mass at Our Lady of the Mongols. I felt a few prayers for the voyage wouldn’t go amiss. When I arrived the service had already begun but Father Alexandros broke off in mid-chant to usher me personally into a seat. As I looked uneasily about the church I realized why I had got the special treatment. I was the congregation. It is a measure of the decline of this ancient church here in its Patriarchal city that the only worshipper it could muster on a warm spring Sunday was a lone Irish Presbyterian.

There is not a lot to do in Presbyterian services except doze off in your pew while a flushed preacher warns of the fire and brimstone that awaits you just the other side of retirement. A couple of hymns, the collection plate, and we all went home. For Presbyterians even a common Anglican mass was a complicated affair involving a disturbing degree of participation – responses, collective prayer, not to mention the endless standing and kneeling at unpredictable moments. Now suddenly I was the crucial component of the most arcane ritual that the Christian church has to offer, here in the last remnant of Byzantium.

The only other people present were a neanderthal-looking altar boy who kept peering out at me through a door in the iconostasis as if he had never seen a congregation before and an elderly cantor, a cadaverous figure in a black robe. With a scythe and a grin the cantor could have doubled as the Grim Reaper. He stood to one side at a lectern chanting interminable passages in ancient Greek in a thin beautiful voice. In the pauses where the congregation were obviously meant to respond, he looked across at me from beneath lowered lids. I looked at the floor or examined the dome with a critical intensity. Amen was the only word I understood and whenever I heard it I joined in heartily to make up for all the important stuff I must have been leaving out. Otherwise I signalled my involvement by throwing in as many signs of the cross as I could manage – not exactly a Presbyterian thing, but I had seen people do this in films.

Later in the courtyard the Grim Reaper took his leave with a slow funereal nod while Father Alexandros and I lingered to have coffee with Nadia, the Syrian caretaker, as if it was already an established ritual between us.

I didn’t allude to the fact that there had been no congregation. It was like some dysfunction that one politely ignored. With the same courtesy Alexandros didn’t mention my own lamentable performance as an Orthodox worshipper.

‘How long will you stay in Istanbul?’ Alexandros asked.

‘I leave tomorrow.’

‘Do you fly back to London?’

‘No, I am going on to Outer Mongolia,’ I said, as if it formed part of some natural tour of the region. As I listed the stages of my route – across the Black Sea, then overland across the Crimea, southern Russia and Kazakhstan – he tried to disguise his shock behind a polite clerical façade.

He put his empty cup down on the ledge between us. ‘And what do you hope to find in Mongolia?’ he asked. Despite his best efforts, I felt a note of sarcasm had crept into his voice.

I expanded on the fascination of nomads, speaking rather too fast, overdoing the enthusiasm as I tried to convince him. I might have been speaking about the dark side of the moon. Alexandros was the epitome of the polished metropolitan figure: a Greek, a man of the city from the race that had created the city state, a man whose ancestors may have inhabited this city, one of the world’s oldest and greatest, since before the birth of Christ. He seemed to shudder involuntarily at the notion of nomads, people who lived in tents, people who built nothing. Confronted by his civilized sophistication, I was struggling to convince even myself that the Mongolians were not barbarians who had taken a historical wrong turn when they decided to stick to sheep rather than join the ranks of the committed settlers determined to create something that would outlast their own lifetime.

‘I have little opportunity to travel,’ he said at last.

He looked up at the old church. ‘I must look after Mouchliotissa. If we don’t keep the church alive, the Turks will take it from us. When the church disappears there will be nothing left of Constantinople, or of us.’