This is the eightheenth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia—to spend time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of Donald Trump. (This week, Trump and his cohort of Musketeers raked in billions in their own personal cryptocurrencies by auctioning off the White House and the executive branch.)
The strategic fortress city of Kars, now on the border between Georgia and Turkey, but once the distant limits of the Russian empire as it collided with the Ottomans. Photo by Matthew Stevenson.
By the time my bus approached Kars (in eastern Turkey) across an expansive valley with mountains at its northern periphery, I was restless with my travels. Instead of reading my books, I had spent the trip peering out the bus window, trying to match the route with some of the battle maps from 1877 and 1916 that I had with me in my bag. For most of my life, I had never heard of Kars; now I was coming to the view that its fate determined that of Eastern Europe.
When the bus stopped outside of Kars for yet another cigarette break, I decided that I had had enough bussing (and smoking) for the day. I retrieved my bicycle from the luggage hold and began riding toward the city and, in particular, Kafkas Cephesi Harp Tarihi Museum.
I had read in one of my books that it was a military museum located in one of the many forts that once encircled this city lying at the end of so many conquering dreams between the Russians and Ottomans.
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According to my notes, the museum covered more than the 1855 siege and battle of Kars, which concluded the Crimean War. It also had displays about the city fighting in 1877 and during World War I.
The fort turned out to be less than three miles from where the bus left me in a gas station parking lot. I locked my bicycle to a railing near the Kanli bastion, and inside bought a ticket to tour the exhibitions, which are located in the gun bays where before there would have been ammunition and long barrels.
In all there were 46 bastions, forts, and entrenchments around the center of Kars and its imposing castle on the hill overlooking the city. Whether the city was in the hands of the Ottomans or the Russians, the fortifications were a tough nut to crack, especially as behind these lines was the castle artillery, which could reach almost anywhere on the perimeter.
Except to the north of Kars, the surrounding landscape is open prairie, which made it hard for investing armies to hide from the artillery.
Prior to rolling up to Kanli bastion, I had thought that Kars would be a more imposing fortress than Erzurum. But if I had been an Ottoman or Russian general, I would have much preferred to defend Erzurum, given the snow-capped mountains on its perimeter.
Erzurum has the look of a fortified Innsbruck or Verdun, while Kars feels more like a cavalry outpost—admittedly, the castle is imposing and deadly—on the American frontier.
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The Russian attack and siege against Kars in 1855 was a last throw of the dice in the Crimean War, to break the Allied support of the Ottoman Empire and its own siege of Sebastopol on the west coast of Crimea.
The Russian tsar, Nicholas I, thought that an attack against Kars and Erzurum might well panic the Ottomans and force them to sue for peace independently. But British General William Fenwick Williams used the terrain around Kars to organize the Ottoman defenses, and to prolong an inevitable defeat until late 1855, by which time Sebastopol had fallen to the Allies and, effectively, the Crimean War was over.
Actually, the Russian 1855 victory at Kars became the impetus for peace negotiations. Now the Russians could trade Kars for parts of Bessarabia (more a core interest), and the Allies could claim victory in Sebastopol and sail home, ending the war that the French politician Adolf Thiers called: “A war to give a few wretched monks the key to a Grotto.” (He was referring to the Russian insistence before the war that Russian monks in Jerusalem have access to Christian relics in the holy city.)
Professor J.A.R. Marriott’s comments about the war read like this:
The Crimean War was fought ostensibly to maintain the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire. That principle received its consecration in the Treaty of Paris [1856 at the war’s end]. The supreme purpose which inspired the Western Powers in their joint enterprise was to repudiate the claims of Russia to an exclusive protectorate over the Christian subjects of the Porte [Turkey], and to arrest her progress in the Black Sea and the narrow straits. That purpose was apparently achieved in 1856.
But contemporaries were as usual slow to apprehend the things which really belonged unto their peace. Beneath the surface of Balkan politics there were fires smouldering, forces silently at work, which, in the middle of the nineteenth century, few people could have perceived. Meanwhile the soldiers and diplomatists were working better than they knew. They set out to repel Russia and to save Turkey. What they really saved was not the effete rule of the Ottoman Sultan, but the future of nations which were not yet reborn.
And proof of his “future nations which were not yet reborn” can been seen in the extensive museum exhibits about all the Hungarian officers who abandoned the Austrian dual monarchy and fought on the side of the Ottomans in the Caucasus, still angry that Tsar Nicholas I had put down the Hungarian national rising in 1849.
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It was not lost on me that I was visiting Kars and inspecting its siege lines around Kanli bastion at a time when yet another Crimean War was being fought between Russia and the West.
In the current instance, the battle lines are virtually the same as they were in 1853-56, although instead of fighting for Kars and Erzurum, Russia was attacking Donetsk and Mariupol.
In 1853, the French and English (think of NATO today) feared Russia might well dominate the Black Sea, Constantinople (Istanbul), and the Principalities (today Romania and Moldova), and it invaded Crimea to strike a blow against Russian imperialism, which was then on the march to the Danube.
Twenty years later—after Gladstone denounced the Bulgarian Horrors (the Ottoman massacres of Christian subjects)—the West was relieved when in 1877 the Russians besieged Plevna and stormed the heights of Shipka Pass (Turkish outposts of influence in Bulgaria).
And come the outbreak of World War I, the “Crimean coalition” (i.e., the powers that besieged Sebastopol in 1854) united on the side of dismantling the Ottoman Empire at Gallipoli and elsewhere. In The Eastern Question, Marriott asks:
Can the Crimean War be justified before the tribunal of impartial history? Retrospective criticism has tended to the view that the war, if not a crime, was at least a blunder, and that it ought to have been and might have been avoided. Sir Robert Morier, writing in 1870, perhaps expressed the current opinion when he described it as ‘the only perfectly useless modern war that has been waged’. Lord Salisbury, some twenty years later, enshrined in classical phrase the opinion that ‘England put her money on the wrong horse’.
In 1854, however, that was less evident, and one of the exhibits in the museum shows a ceremonial coin minted at the war’s outbreak, which reads:
In the year 1854
During the reign of the Queen
VICTORIA
and that of
NAPOLEON III
GREAT BRITAIN
and
FRANCE
joined together in order to insure
the peace of the world
On the flip side of the coin are words: “God defends the right,” and the image shows Queen Victoria and Napoleon III holding hands with the Ottoman sultan.
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From the Kanli bastion, I decided to check into my hotel and reclaim my lost bicycle helmet (left behind on the Dogu Express) before setting out for the Kars castle, which dominates the high ground behind the town.
I found the Hotel Konak on the main street, but it had no trace of my reservation nor word of my helmet. Puzzled, I dragged out my printed confirmation and showed it to the desk clerk, who corrected both errors in explaining that there was another Hotel Konak in Kars and that I was expected across the street, where to my relief I found my helmet and my reserved room.
From my hotel, I biked around the center of Kars before locking my bicycle to a railing (where I could keep an eye on it) and climbing to the ramparts of the castle, which dominates the skyline of the city.
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The castle stretches out along the ridge line of the hillside, but the keep of the castle was locked up, so all I could do is stroll around the walls and imagine how the Russians had taken the fortress city in one night in November 1877, effectively ending that particular Russo-Turkish war (in which, on this occasion, the French were advising the Russians).
In all, in something of a stealth attack, the Russians attacked the fortress with seven columns, and came at Kars from all directions. For once, the Russian army eschewed a plodding direct assault, and came at the fortress with guile—bypassing some strong points, feinting at others, and using speed and courage to get to the top, after which the city below collapsed.
Both the treaties of San Stefano (1877) and Berlin (1878) awarded Kars to the conquering Russians who held the fortified frontier city until the end of World War I. Marriott writes: “In the Caucasus their success was not less complete; the great fortress of Kars had fallen on November 18; the Turkish Empire seemed to lie at their mercy, and in March Russia dictated to the Porte the Treaty of San Stefano.”
