Joseph O'Neill - Blood-Dark Track

For a while, the red, white and blue of France flew serenely over Cilicia. On 14 July 1919, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, the populace decked out the streets of Mersin and Adana in French tricolours, Union Jacks, and Armenian and Greek flags; the showing of Turkish colours remained unlawful. For the rest of the year, Mersin was treated to a steady and glorious inflow of French military dignitaries who would parade before the massed and craning townsfolk in superb cavalcades of carriages, motorcars and chevaliers. The young Joseph Dakak certainly witnessed these scenes and could only have been deeply excited. It was not hard to imagine how scintillating these near-magical creatures, sprung from the myths he’d consumed at school, must have appeared to an alienated Syrian with no experience of a government that took an active and apparently benevolent interest in his welfare. After the British finally pulled out in October 1919, the French in Mersin (using Algerian and Senegalese labourers) paved streets, opened a hospital and public library, founded a literary society, and built a new port consisting of a customs house with a magazine, a concrete landing platform, and a wharf.

Militarily, however, things were not going well. Even as Oncle Georges welcomed General Gouraud in December 1919, French outposts in the Taurus mountains were under attack. Oncle Georges’ comparison of General Gouraud with Bayard struck me, on further reflection, as more desperate than triumphant, because the salient point about Bayard was that he’d held at bay a besieging army of 35,000 with only a thousand men. And sure enough, by June 1920 Mersin and Tarsus and Adana were under siege and intermittent attack. Mersin was trapped — or, looking at it from the Turkish perspective, on the point of liberation.

While the fighting went on in Cilicia, the remnants of the Ottoman government were submitting to the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres, by which Turkey was dismembered and portioned out to the Allies with extraordinarily transparent rapacity: Istanbul was put under the jurisdiction of an international commission, Greece was given Thrace and the Izmir region, Italy the Antalya region, and France was authorized to occupy Cilicia and large tracts of south-east Anatolia; the cost of maintaining these foreign troops was, naturally, to be borne by Turkey, which in addition had to pay very high war reparations. The capitulations were restored and Turkish taxes, customs, loans and currency were put under the supervision of the Allied Financial Commission. The Treaty also provided — fantastically, it quickly became clear — for the establishment of an independent Armenia and an autonomous Kurdistan, whose projected territories respectively extended into vast parts of the north-east and south-east of modern Turkey.

In the year that followed, Atatürk’s armies defeated the Greeks, the Italians, and, in north-east Anatolia, the Armenians. The French government lost interest in its Turkish adventure. Even though French troops had managed to regain control of the Cilician plain, in October 1921 the French agreed to evacuate the occupied lands in return for an assurance that there would be no reprisals against Christians. The Christians, especially the Armenians, were not reassured. A panicked mass exodus began. By the end of November 1921, only 60,00 °Christians were reportedly left in Cilicia, 20,000 of whom were sleeping in the port of Mersin, waiting for a ship out. On 4 January 1922, when the Cassard sailed from Mersin, the Cilician occupation, which had lasted for three years, was finally over; indeed, according to one French observer, ‘The siren of the Cassard sounded the end of the glorious era that began with Charlemagne, in which the French flag swaddled in its folds whosoever raised his prayers to Jesus.’

Among the departed were my great-aunt Radié, who married a Frenchman stationed in Mersin, Lieutenant René Salendre. The couple left Mersin in 1920, going to Iskenderun and then to Aleppo, where Oncle René served until around 1930 as France’s consul. Georges Dakak left for France when he was around sixteen or seventeen, in 1921 or 1922.

While thousands of Christians were fleeing from Mersin in terror at prospect of what the victorious Turks would do, Joseph Dakak stayed behind. It was an enormous gamble. The Dakak family had strong collaborationist links to the occupiers — Joseph had worked for the (ostensibly neutral) Red Cross, his brother had given a welcoming speech to General Gouraud, his mother had taken English and French officers into her home as paying guests, and his sister had married a French officer — and Joseph had no property or family ties to Mersin. No doubt he stayed in the knowledge that his professional and social standing in Mersin was relatively certain; but there was also the complex matter of identity. My grandmother once told my mother that Joseph was ‘too Oriental’ to leave. He felt comfortable in Mersin. Thanks, perhaps, to counter-perspectives gained from his work alongside the Ottoman and German armies, he was not seduced by French promises of a homeland; and he reckoned he knew the Turks well enough to feel sure that they would not regard him, at least not to any hazardous degree, as a political threat. A Levantine of the Christian Syrian-displaced-to-Turkey variety, he did not belong to an ethnic group with nationalistic ambitions. He was not to be confused with an Armenian.

Although certain retaliatory measures were taken — Christian schools were closed, Christian shops were boycotted, and imports at Mersin were taxed very heavily — the fears of massacre turned out to be unfounded. Nevertheless, the exodus of Christians continued, and their numbers in Cilicia soon dwindled to next to nothing. The Greeks, for their part, were deported in accordance with the Turkish — Greek population exchange provided for by the Treaty of Lausanne 1923, by which, furthermore, the sovereignty of the Turkish Republic was recognized and all prospects of an independent Armenia or Kurdistan were extinguished.

I rang up my mother and discussed with her what I’d learned: that Cilicia used to be heavily Armenian and that the French occupation had ended with a massive regional depopulation of Christians. Joseph, in Mersin, and the young Georgette for that matter, must have witnessed unforgettable scenes as thousands of refugees poured in and out of the port. How come these events had not been perpetuated in the local folklore? Had she never been told about them?

‘No,’ my mother said.

‘Did your father ever talk about the French occupation at all?’ I asked.

‘No, he didn’t.’

‘What about the Armenians?’

‘Never. He never spoke about them. No one did.’

She paused as she reflected on her community’s insulation from the fate of local Armenians. ‘We didn’t really mix with Armenians,’ she finally observed. ‘They were completely separate from us. They spoke Turkish, whereas we spoke French and Arabic. I think that in those days they were regarded as a lower class; I remember that when a Nader married an Armenian man it was regarded as something of a mismatch. Also,’ she continued, ‘they mainly lived in Adana. Even at the time I was growing up, the 1940s, Adana seemed very far away, almost another world. In my father’s time it must have seemed even further away, because there were no real roads.’ Then my mother mentioned something else. Now that she thought about it, she recalled that her father’s family had migrated to Mersin from Iskenderun because of attacks on Armenians. The Dakaks fled to Cyprus first, and then sailed on to Mersin. Tante Radié, my mother said, used to relate that it was in Cyprus she first ate an ortolan — a finch so small and soft-boned that it could be popped into the mouth and eaten whole.