Charles Glass - Tribes with Flags - Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria

CHAPTER TWO 2The Army of the Levant 3The Last Ottoman 4Minarets and Belfries 5No-Man’s-Land PART TWO 6Six-Star Brandy 7Where Armies Failed 8A Consular City 9The Survivors and the Dead 10The Village of a Pasha 11The Road PART THREE 12The Old City 13Meleager’s World 14This Bad Century 15Queen of the Desert 16Provincial Loyalty 17Enemies of the Goddesses PART FOUR 18Excursions 19A Blood Feud in the Mountains 20Foul is Fair 21The Ghetto 22Monks and Martyrs 23The Family and the Plain 24The Slumber of the Dead 25Disrespectful Dancing 26The Last Day PART FIVE 27The Black Hole 28Recalled to Life About the Author Also by Charles Glass Copyright About the Publisher

THE ARMY OF THE LEVANT 2The Army of the Levant 3The Last Ottoman 4Minarets and Belfries 5No-Man’s-Land PART TWO 6Six-Star Brandy 7Where Armies Failed 8A Consular City 9The Survivors and the Dead 10The Village of a Pasha 11The Road PART THREE 12The Old City 13Meleager’s World 14This Bad Century 15Queen of the Desert 16Provincial Loyalty 17Enemies of the Goddesses PART FOUR 18Excursions 19A Blood Feud in the Mountains 20Foul is Fair 21The Ghetto 22Monks and Martyrs 23The Family and the Plain 24The Slumber of the Dead 25Disrespectful Dancing 26The Last Day PART FIVE 27The Black Hole 28Recalled to Life About the Author Also by Charles Glass Copyright About the Publisher

For most of its life, Alexandretta managed to avoid playing a role in history. In the Levant, this meant it rarely became a battleground. Yet armies often passed through, whether Asians on their way to conquer Europe or Europeans seeking victories in the East. In 333 BC Alexander the Great defeated one of the largest armies ever assembled in antiquity, that of King Darius and his 400,000 Persians, at Issus, about twenty miles north of Alexandretta. After the battle, on an empty piece of shore, Alexander established a port town to control the northern route to Syria and named it for himself.

After Alexander’s death, the heir to his Asian empire, Seleucus, established his capital inland at the other end of a pass through the mountains and named it in honour of his father, Antiochus. Antioch, not Alexandretta, became the centre of Hellenism in Syria and, later, the third greatest city in the Roman Empire. The city declined to a backwater in the Arab and Byzantine Empires, the Crusader Kingdoms and, finally, the Ottoman Empire. Although the Romans had abandoned it even as a port, preferring Seleucia Pieria to the south, it became popular with Venetian and Genoese merchants who established trading houses there for the caravan trade with China, India and Baghdad. The French and British later won concessions from the Ottoman Sultan to do the same. It became a pleasant Mediterranean outpost, only a short sail from Venice, from which to purchase the spices of Asia. The route went from Alexandretta, through the Beilan Pass, to Antioch and Aleppo, where the great caravans across the desert from India had their terminus.

In 1834, Alexandretta missed its chance at greatness. That year, the Duke of Wellington commissioned Colonel F. R. Chesney to establish a route “between the Mediterranean Sea and H.M. possessions in the East Indies by means of steamer communication on the River Euphrates”. The route, for which Parliament voted an initial £20,000, might have become another Suez Canal, which was not constructed until fifty years later. The plan called for an expedition to take two paddle steamers in pieces to the mouth of the River Orontes near Alexandretta. There the steamers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, would be assembled and sail upriver to a point nearest the River Euphrates. They would then be taken apart, carried to the Euphrates and reassembled to sail downstream to Baghdad. Chesney discovered at the beginning that his 20-horsepower engines were not strong enough to sail against the Orontes’ four-knot currents. So, he took the boats apart at the Orontes and carried them the 140 miles to the Euphrates. Although a storm sank the Tigris, the Euphrates steamed into Baghdad just after New Year 1837.

The expedition explored the possibility of cutting a canal between the Euphrates and the sea, but lacked the resources to undertake the digging. It had been difficult enough to hire local labour to carry the ships. Twenty years later, Chesney, by now a Major-General, and a group of businessmen in the City of London obtained permission from the Sultan to construct a railway along the banks of the Euphrates from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. When the British government refused to guarantee Chesney’s “Euphrates Valley Railway Company”, it was disbanded. Had either the canal or the railway been constructed, Alexandretta would have become the first Mediterranean outlet of the swiftest route to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, Britain’s lifeline to India. This might have led to a British invasion in the mid-19th century, to protect the route to India, as the British invaded Egypt in 1882 to seize the Suez Canal. Who knows what would have happened in 1956? One thing is certain: France would never have ceded the area to Turkey in 1939, because Britain would not have allowed France to enter in 1920.

When Kaiser Wilhelm II won the concession in 1898 from Sultan Abdul Hamid to build the Berlin–Baghdad Railway, the German engineers planned a branch line to Alexandretta to provide the first rail link between the Mediterranean and the Gulf. Luckily or not for Alexandretta, the branch line was not constructed, and the little town was left to sleep its way into the twentieth century.

Its last flirtation with history came during the First World War, when it almost became the scene of the decisive battle between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire. In 1914, Sherif Hussein of Mecca, whose son Faisal led the Arab Revolt with Lawrence of Arabia, proposed an Allied landing at Alexandretta to cut Turkey from its forces in Iraq and Syria and coincide with an uprising in Syria’s larger cities. Hussein’s plan had the support of the British strategists on the ground, Lord Kitchener, Sir Charles Monro, Sir John Maxwell and Sir Henry McMahon, but it was nonetheless rejected by the General Staff. The British had a commitment to their French allies, who, with no troops available, would not permit an invasion of Syria without them. The Allies decided instead to invade Turkey itself at a place called Gallipoli, a historic disaster which resulted in more Commonwealth dead than any other battle in the East.

The Alexandretta in which I had begun my tour of the Levant was the site of neither a decisive battle nor of a great trade route between West and East. It was merely the northern limit of what geographers, ever scornful of the changing maps of soldiers and politicians, called Syria. To the British, it was valuable, like the rest of the Levant, only as a passage to India. To the French, the Levant had special resonances, as Edward Said wrote in his book Orientalism: “In contrast, the French pilgrim was imbued with a sense of acute loss in the Orient. He came there to a place in which France, unlike Britain, had no sovereign presence. The Mediterranean echoed with the sounds of French defeats, from the Crusades to Napoleon.” For an American traveller like myself, the Levant was filled with reminders of broken promises, beginning with President Woodrow Wilson’s to the people of the Ottoman Empire that they would enjoy the right of self-determination in the post-war settlement. To the people themselves, from Alexandretta to Aqaba, avoiding all our attentions and staying well out of the movement of history was the most they could hope for.

When I awakened on my second morning in Alexandretta, I decided to move. I would continue my wanderings through the town, but stay on a quiet beach forty minutes to the south, near the end of the coast road in the village of Arsuz. The morning was pleasantly cool. There was no wind and not a cloud in the sky. Ships lay at anchor outside the port like ornaments on a cake, apparently frozen into the blue icing. Shopkeepers pulling up steel awnings and opening their doors were bringing the quiet of Saturday morning to an end. Small cafés were serving Turkish coffee and bread to workers, and old women were inspecting vegetables in the street markets.