The Towers of Trebizond

This is the twentieth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe, Turkey, and the Near East to Georgia and Armenia—to spend time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of Donald Trump. (This week, the Commander-in-Chief and veteran of the Bone Spur Wars shared his combat-is-hell stories about trophy wives with the graduating class at West Point, telling the emergent warrior class: “Could you say a trophy wife? I guess we can say a trophy wife. It didn’t work out too well. But it doesn’t — And that doesn’t work out too well, I must tell you. A lot of trophy wives doesn’t work out, but it made him happy for a little while at least…”)

Instead of boarding a train in Kars for the Georgian capital, Tbilisi (two hundred miles to the northeast as the crow flies), I had to go the long way round through Batumi, beginning with a four-hour bus ride to the Black Sea and then a six-hour train ride across Georgia.

I had no trouble booking a ticket online, but it took me more than an hour to find where the bus left Kars for the coastal town of Hopa.

The desk clerk at the Hotel Konak sent me to the city bus station, but there everyone shook their head when I waved around my ticket to Hopa. I biked to another area congested with departing buses, but there too I was shooed away. Back at my hotel I asked again, but this time the clerk just shrugged.

Finally, I figured out that I needed to wait at the in-town offices of my bus company, Golden. By circling through a crowded neighborhood and asking about every third person I passed, I found a dingy store-front office with a Golden sign and “Hopa” listed among the cities its buses were serving.

An agent at the desk told me to come back in thirty minutes. When I did, he loaded me and the bicycle in a van and drove us out of the city to the Kars Otogar [station], located on a main road outside the downtown. Had I known from the beginning that I needed to be there, I could have biked there in ten minutes. Instead I had spent more than an hour hunting-and-pecking.

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As it turned out, the bus ride to Hopa traversed spectacular scenery in eastern Turkey, as many of the roads we took ran along river banks and through mountain gorges.

The bus wasn’t crowded, so the seat next to mine was free. For once on a Turkish train or bus, I could spread out my books and maps, and keep track of our route. (I have the soul of a train conductor.)

I hoped we might go through Ardahan, yet another “lost” city that in the last hundred years or so has had vibrant communities of Armenians, Russians, Pontic Greeks, and Georgians, but which is now Turkish.

Ardahan also figured prominently in the 1877 Russo-Turkish War and World War I, enduring the same fates as Erzurum and Kars. But the bus took another route through the ravines and mountains to Artvin, Borcka, and finally Hopa, on the shores of Black Sea.

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For my bus reading I chose Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond, which as it turned out was my favorite book not just of this trip but in recent years.

Even now, just thinking about it, I get a warm feeling that in Rose Macaulay, I found a soulmate for these travels.

Macaulay was an English writer who was born in 1881 and died in 1958, two years after her last book, The Towers of Trebizond, was published to wide acclaim.

Trebizond is now the Black Sea city of Trabzon. Until the war of Turkish independence in the early 1920s, it was a Greek Black Sea settlement that had its roots as a Greek colony in the classical era and thrived under the Byzantine Empire.

After the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, when Greece and Turkey swapped a a number of population centers, some 100,000 Greeks left Trebizond and were resettled across Greece, mostly in the north.

I once took a replacement bus (when my Greek train went out of service) from Drama to Alexandroupoli, in Evros in northern Greece, and my driver was the great-grandson of refugees from Trebizond.

For most of the two-hour ride he spit venom over what happened to his ancestors in the deportations. But despite this bitter history, Macaulay’s novel is a comic delight. It deals with endless serious subjects—the decline of Byzantium, the fate of the Armenians, the origins of Christianity, the end of love affairs—but always in language that is puckish, wry, and engaging. If you ever need a seat mate on a long Turkish bus ride, go with Macaulay.

The heroine of Macaulay’s novel is her aunt Dot, who has come to Turkey with her camel to write a book about the Armenians. (Now you can see why I love the book.)

Macaulay writes: “My aunt…had inherited a firm and missionary Anglicanism, with strong prejudices against Roman Cath­olicism, continental Protestantism, Scotch Presbyterian­ism, British Dissent, and all American religious bodies except Protestant Episcopalianism; she had also inherited a tendency to hunt fish.”

Dot had always traveled to exotic places, either as a missionary or a writer, and this allowed Macaulay to say of her earlier adventures in darkest Africa, when her aunt was taken captive: “So they conducted her to the hut of their chief, and, as he was away on a hunting expedition, put her in the haarem to await his return. She was small and plump, which was the shape he [the chief] preferred; though, as they regretfully said, she would also have done very nicely for the pot.”

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Here’s the premise of this novel: “She [Dot] meant also to write a book about the position of women in the Black Sea regions, which she would call Women of the Euxine today, for the position of women, that sad and well-nigh universal blot on civilizations, was never far from her mind.”

Aunt Dot’s fellow traveller, besides the camel she brings with her from England, is an English cleric, as if from central casting, of whom Macaulay writes: “Father Chantry-Pigg thought it would be wrong to go to Russia, because of condoning the government, which was persecuting Christians. But aunt Dot said if one started not condoning governments, one would have to give up travel altogether, and even remaining in Britain would be pretty difficult.” (I often feel the same way about America.)

From Istanbul this merry band sets out for the eastern Black Sea but not before this exchange, written in the voice of Dot’s niece, Laurie, another fellow traveler:

“Constantinople,” said Father Chantry-Pigg, who did not accept the Turkish conquest.

“Byzantium,” said I, not accepting the Roman one.

Aunt Dot, who accepted facts, said, “How many of our friends are in Turkey just now?”

“A lot,” I said. “They are all writing their Turkey books. David and Charles are somewhere by the Black Sea, following Xenophon and Jason about. I had a card from Charles from Trebizond. He sounded cross, and he and David have probably parted by now. David wanted to get into Russia. Freya and Derek are somewhere camping in Anatolia. Margaret Beckford was in the Meander valley when last heard of, digging away for Hittites. I don’t know where Patrick is, probably somewhere near Smyrna. And I think Steven is in Istanbul, lecturing to the University.

If you want to glimpse Macaulay’s droll humor, there’s this passage:

I spent the nine days’ voyage partly sketching my Turkish fellow-passengers, and partly trying to learn Turkish, and after a time I was able to say, “I would like a shoehorn,” and “See how badly you have ironed my coat, you must do it again.”

From Trebizond (“Expecting the majestic, brooding ghost of a fallen empire, we saw, in a magnificent stagey setting, an untidy Turkish port. The ghost would be brooding on the woody cliffs and ravines, haunting the citadel and palace, scornfully taking no notice of the town that Trebizond now was, with the last of the Greeks expelled by the Father of the Turks years back…”), the pilgrims head into Armenia (of which Dot says: “Armenia—perhaps the whole of Anatolia—is obviously over-missionised, and I shall say so in my report…”).

There aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg drift across the border into Russia and disappear, presumably detained or arrested.

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You might think that losing the two main characters of a novel to a Russian prison might slow down the narrative, but on her own Macaulay (aka Laurie) is fine.

In her desultory way she searches for her missing relative but still carries on with her own travels, and even falls in love. Not everyone in Dot’s circle, however, believes that there is an innocent explanation for her disappearance. Her doctor, Halide, says:

“I guessed it…Dorothea has gone through the curtain to Spy. It was a project that I thought she was playing with. But who can be paying her? Not your government; not mine. She is being paid by Soviet Russia, and she is reporting to it on Turkey. Father Pigg too. Oh they have sunk to the lowest vileness, they are betraying Turkey to the enemy for gain, in order that they may see the Caucasus and the Russian part of that miserable Armenia with its churches and troglodyte dwellings and those dirty Cossacks and Tartars, and fish for female sturgeon in the Caspian and go on that little lake beyond the frontier gap, and eat caviare and drink koumiss from wild mares. Oh yes, I know well what Dorothea hankered after and would sell her soul to get. But she cannot have got it, they will be captured and taken to Moscow to tell what they know about Britain and Turkey.”

Without her companions, Laurie heads back to Trebizond, writing sadly:

It was melancholy to turn our backs on the mountain lake, and on the mountains and lakes beyond it, and on all the Armenian places we had hoped to see, such as Kars and Ani and Ararat (on whose lower slopes even now Seventh-Day Adventists awaited the Second Coming, their transports and their hymn-singing recorded by the B.B.C. for a Home Service programme), and the splendours and islands and fishing and Armenian churches of Lake Van.

With no word from Dot (except one cryptic letter) or Father Chantry-Pigg, Laurie sells her various possessions (but not the camel) and sets off to visit her lover, who is on a yacht along the southern Turkish coast.

Of the vast Turkish interior, she writes (as I saw for hours on my trains and buses): “There were mountains and rocky heights and steep roads up and down, and great flat stretches, and woods and open spaces, and villages with wooden houses and women working on patches of dry land and among scrawny vines…”

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From the Turkish-Syrian coastline, Laurie drifts down to Jerusalem, which she describes:

Jerusalem is a cruel, haunted city, like all ancient cities; it stands out because it crucified Christ; and because it was Christ we remember it with horror, but it also crucified thousands of other people, and wherever Rome (or indeed any one else) ruled, these ghastly deaths and torturings were enjoyed by all, that is, by all except the victims and those who loved them, and it is these, the crucifixions and the flayings and the burnings and the tearing to pieces and the floggings and the blindings and the throwing to the wild beasts, all the horrors of great pain that people thought out and enjoyed, which make history a dark pit full of serpents and terror, and out of this pit we were all dug, our roots are deep in it, and still it goes on, though all the time gradually less.

Eventually Laurie takes a steamer from the Levant to Istanbul and then back to England, where sometime later she gets a call from the British embassy announcing that aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg have had enough of Russia and want to come home, for which passage is arranged.

The Soviets themselves had not known what to make of the eccentric Dot or her fellow traveller, and eventually let them wander about in Russia, hoping they might say good things about the country when they finally got home, although Aunt Dot tells her niece:

“My dear, the things we told them!…. Such nonsensical things, and we made them sound so important. It all goes to show what I have always said, that anything does as information to a foreign government, and that none of it really matters a bit, and that espionage is the most over-paid profession in world. I must say I did enjoy it.

It sounds a lot like writing essays.