Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria

There were more women than men on the bus, and all of them, even the babies, wore gold earrings. The peasant women wore scarves with polka-dots or other designs in lurid colours over their hair. Women were not expected to have to sit next to men. We were about halfway to Alexandretta when a fat old peasant woman with a gold tooth pulled herself with both hands up the step into the bus. She examined us carefully and saw that the only empty seat was next to an inoffensive-looking young man. She hesitated, but finally sat next to him. When another old woman with hennaed hair noticed this unfortunate state of affairs, she picked up the small child next to her and sat him on her lap. She then invited the other old woman to sit where the child had been, an offer immediately accepted. Several people looked with disapproval at the young man, who had done nothing throughout this little drama.

In Alexandretta, Hind Koba took me to meet her elusive brother-in-law, Abdallah Tanzi, who lived in a flat a floor below her apartment near the sea. The building was a representative 1950s study in concrete with small balconies studded along its sides, and in her sister’s flat the reception rooms were typically Oriental, with heavy wooden dressers and tables, dark stuffed chairs and dark walls. Abdallah Tanzi was a friendly man in his late 60s, short, stout and bald. A friend of a similar age, taller and thinner, but just as bald, was visiting from Beirut.

Hind’s sister asked the maid to bring us cups of tea, and Tanzi showed me his letters of recommendation from American companies he had represented, as well as photographs of his son’s graduation from Illinois State University. This son lived in Chicago; his daughter lived in Istanbul, where she worked as an economist; only one child, a son who worked as an engineer, lived in Alexandretta. His English, like Hind’s and her sister’s, was fluent. The maid carried in the tea, which, unusually, was served in china cups. Tanzi talked about Alexandretta, where he had been born under the French Mandate. “For a married couple,” he said, “life is pleasant. For a single person, it depends on whether he has friends. There’s nothing special here.”

I asked him about 1939, the year Alexandretta ceased to be a part of Syria. “Maybe twenty-five per cent of the people living in Iskenderun at that time left,” he said. “They were the minorities, if you’d like to say, the Christians.”

“You’re Christian. Why did you stay?”

“Because we didn’t feel anything. It was everything regular. Nothing special.”

“Did you speak Turkish then?”

“Yes, but not as good as now. The mother tongue is Arabic.”

“How does life here compare with life in Syria?”

“We hear that life is more pleasant here. There is a big shortage of consumer goods there. The administration is much more democratic here.”

“Can you travel to Syria easily?”

“I think it’s difficult to get a Syrian visa. Previously, we used to get it at the border. Now, we have to go to Ankara.”

“Do any Arabs want this to be part of Syria?”

“Even if there are feelings,” he said, “no one here would express them.”

“Syria claims Alexandretta. Does that mean anything?”

Tanzi began to answer, but was interrupted by his guest, Georges Sayyegh, who had until then been playing chess with Hind and now insisted on playing chess with me. I explained I had come not to play chess, but to talk. Another man arrived to play bridge. Hind asked me whether I would like to see a videotape of her MBE investiture at the British Embassy in Ankara. She put on the video, which showed her in a crowded reception in the grand surroundings of the Embassy. She looked happy and shy, like a little bird escaped from her cage in Alexandretta excited to find her way to the flocks in Istanbul. The ambassador delivered a speech in which he complimented “Hannoud Alexander” on her years of service to British subjects in trouble. When the tape ended, she showed me the MBE. “Why did he call you Hannoud Alexander?” I asked.

“That was my name,” she explained, “before we had to change.”

“You had to change your name? Why?”

“When this area was ceded to Turkey, everyone had to take a Turkish name.”

The maid came back into the room, carrying a sweet cake which she put in front of me. I thanked her in Arabic, and she went back to the kitchen embarrassed. Sayyegh then insisted we have a game of chess. We played in silence for nearly an hour until I conceded. Sayyegh, having destroyed any chance I had of conversation with this older generation of Alexandrettans, stood up without a word and walked into the next room. There, the three old men were preparing the cards for a game of bridge and called me to play with them. I admitted I did not know how.

Another afternoon, I went to Hind’s apartment to visit her and her two sisters. They had just eaten lunch, but she told me to sit down at her dining table while she prepared something. She brought me salad, cheese, bread and kibbé, a traditional Syrian mixture of minced lamb and cracked wheat. It was perfect lunch, exactly the food my grandmother would give me when I was young and would drop in on her unexpectedly. Hind and her sisters had lived in the apartment with their mother, who had died a year earlier, when they were girls. All three still dressed in black. Hind was the only spinster, one sister was married to Tanzi and the other to a Lebanese. She was staying with Hind while she recovered from a broken hip. She and her husband lived in a flat on the fifth floor of an apartment building in Sin el Fil, part of Christian east Beirut. With all the electricity cuts, which put the lift out of action, she had become a prisoner.

The sister recalled that the Sin el Fil area had suffered until 1976 from attacks by the Palestinians in the nearby refugee camp at Tel el Zaatar.

“I remember Tel el Zaatar.” I said. “I covered the massacre there.”

“You remember the massacre, but you don’t know that the Palestinians killed every young Christian man they found. When the camp was taken, they found Christians crucified in the cellars.”

“I went into the camp the morning it fell,” I told her. “All I saw were the bodies of Palestinians trampled underfoot by Christians looting the houses. If there had been crucified Christians, I’m sure the Christian militiamen would have shown them to us.”

“We lived with them,” she said sadly. “Until 1973, when the first fighting began between the Palestinians and the army, we lived on the Corniche.” The Corniche runs along the seafront in Muslim west Beirut between the American University of Beirut and Raouche, a Marseilles-like quarter of flashy apartment buildings, restaurants and night clubs.

“Are relations between Christians and Muslims better here?” I asked.

Hind said nothing, but her other sister answered, “To them, we are all giaour.” Giaour, pronounced g’war, was a word I had not heard before outside literature. Byron used it as the title of a poem in 1814. It was the pejorative Turkish name for “unbeliever.” “To them,” she repeated, “we are all giaour, Christians, Jews, everybody. We were having dinner at some Muslim friends’ the other night. Our host was talking about people who had done something awful, and he said they were ‘just like the giaour’. When he realised what he’d said, he excused himself, saying, ‘I didn’t mean you.’ “

She said that Turks in Alexandretta had accused the local Christians of treason during the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus. “They said we were secretly supporting the Greeks,” she complained. She opened her purse and handed me a photograph of a handsome young man in uniform. “I had to listen to this, and all the while my son was an officer fighting for them in Cyprus. For twenty-one days, we did not know whether he was dead or alive.”

We talked about the referendum of 1938, when, according to the Arabs, trainloads of Turks had come from eastern Anatolia with false papers giving their residence as Alexandretta. When France handed the area to Turkey a year later, most of the Christians had left, some to French-ruled Syria, others to Lebanon. In Alexandretta, many Christian Arabs still wanted to be part of Syria. In Lebanon, Christians fought and died to stay out of Syria. In a few cases, they were the same people – wanting Syria to come when they were in Alexandretta, wanting it to leave when they were in Beirut. (I had seen the same kind of thing in Ireland with a Protestant friend, who had fled the violence of Belfast for a peaceful life in the Republic. When I asked whether he would like to see Ireland united under the same government which treated him well in Dublin, his answer was, “Never!”)

All three sisters felt things had changed, not least in subtle ways that had nothing to do with politics. In the past, local people had taken their summer holidays in the mountains, away from the heat of the coastal plain, particularly in the village of Sogukoluk. Recently, they had been taking European-style beach holidays at Arsuz and Samandag, burning their skins on the beach and sweating as much as if they had stayed home. “We have a house in Sogukoluk,” Hind said. “but we don’t use it any more.” The mountain resort had lost some of its charm when a convent there closed and later became a house of prostitution. “This forced all the family hotels to become brothels,” they lamented. “There were stories of young girls kidnapped in Istanbul and forced to work in Sogukoluk. Finally, the government stepped in, arrested some people and closed all the hotels. Now there are no hotels there at all.” Back in Arsuz, I went for a walk on the beach. Next door to the hotel was a single-storey stone house with red tile roof. It was the family home of Georges Sayyegh, the old man from Beirut I had met at Abdallah Tanzi’s. I saw him exercising on the sand. He walked up to the fence which separated the hotel beach from his, and we talked through the wire. At the Tanzis’ I had found him to be distracted, playing chess or bridge to avoid conversation. He tended to look away when other people talked to him. I had thought his manner strange and unsettling until Hind Koba told me his only son had been killed in Beirut, not by the war, but in a car accident. She said he had not been the same since. Standing there on the beach in his swimming trunks, he told me that he swam every day in Beirut at the beach of the Hotel St Georges. He was looking forward to his return there. I wondered how many people whose behaviour seemed awkward or offensive had lurking within them some tragedy, the death of a son, a daughter, a wife. Sayyegh invited me to visit him when I reached Beirut. “We can play chess.” he said.

At twilight, I took a walk through the leafy streets of old Arsuz. The first place I went was the post office, from which I hoped to make a call to my children in London. It was a tiny stucco shed at a bend in the road. A man sat at a vintage telephone switchboard behind a low counter. He spoke only Turkish, but understood a few words of English. He told me to use a call-box outside and sold me several 250 TL tokens. I tried both telephones outside. Neither worked. I walked back in. The operator, unsurprised, gave me a refund for the tokens. He wrote down my number and called the central operator in Istanbul to book the call. He hung up and said it would come in forty minutes. I went to the hotel to bring a book to read.

When I returned to the post office, there were two other men with the operator. One was a middle-aged worker and the other an old man wearing black sharwal, the billowing Turkish trousers still worn by old peasants, Turkish, Greek and Arab, throughout what had been the Ottoman Empire. The old man, who was born when the province was part of Syria under the Sultan Abdul Hamid, and spoke a few words of Arabic, invited me to his house for coffee, but I explained that I had to wait there for my call home.

So much and so little had changed since the old man was born. He dressed as his forebears did in the last century, and he had the hands of a man who worked the land just as they had. It mattered little that there was now a telephone link to London via Istanbul, because he had no need to call either city. There was no longer a Sultan, and the French army had interrupted Turkish rule for twenty years, the blink of an eye, before he went back to living with the polis who had kept a kind of order since 1845. Yet there were now a modern hotel, European tourists and a Turkish nation-state, all of which might pass away, leaving old men in sharwals whose sons would work the land as they and their fathers had. Or would the land and the sea which had always provided the peasants’ and fishermen’s bounty be turned over forever to package holidays for the fair-skinned Goths and Gauls who, in centuries past, had been unable to hold them by force of arms?

The sun was nearly setting when I reached the fields outside Arsuz. I had walked along the coast road and then up footpaths through the meadows, some of wheat, others of grass where sheep and goats were grazing. The foothills seemed to hold back a few clouds, leaving the sky near the sea an undisturbed mingling of red and blue, slowly giving way to blackness. Cut into the hillsides were level plots of earth upon which stood small houses, which from a distance looked adobe, the colour of the exposed earth around them. As the sun receded on the horizon, peasants slowly made their way from the fields, carrying their tools. The men wore black sharwals or khaki trousers, and the women’s long dresses trailed in the dust. Covered in sweat and dirt from a day’s labour, they seemed almost the colour of the earth, the colour of the houses they were entering, the colour of the hard ground neither they nor their ancestors had ever escaped. And they were as silent as the crops under their feet.

It was dark when I returned to the hotel. Wedding guests were arriving. The men wore new suits, many with lapels too wide or trimmed in black or brown, and the women wore dresses of chiffon or imitation lace. Shoes were shined, hair combed back and hands scrubbed. Alawis had come from Arsuz and nearby villages for what would be three days of celebrations. Some were the farmers I had watched make their way home at sunset. In the dining-room, transformed for the night like the guests, more than a hundred people danced, clapped in time to the music or sat exhausted after twirling around the floor. They were doing village dances, like the dabke in Lebanon or bouzouki in Greece, with each dancer holding high the hand of another to form a large circle as everyone’s feet kicked in unison to the music. Although the band was Western, with a drummer and synthesiser, its music was modern Oriental pop.

Outside, small children were playing on the beach and in the courtyard, chasing one another through the darkness. Some older children, boys and girls, stood by the windows and stared inside. As the evening wore on, more people retired to the chairs at the edge of the room, some of the oldest dozing contentedly. In the middle of the circle of dancers were the bride and groom, each with dark, curly hair and a little overweight, swaying to the rhythm. She was still in her white bridal dress, and he wore an ill-fitting white suit. Men took turns in approaching the bride and showering her with money while she danced seductively alone. Little boys would dart up to her feet to pick up the 100 TL notes, which they would present to the newlyweds at the evening’s end.

This was traditional village revelry, but the modern world was encroaching. A man was recording the evening on a video camera; the band had amplifiers and speakers, superfluous in a room so small; the men wore Western suits, the women shop dresses, costume jewellery and fur coats. A grocer’s son had married the daughter of the village sheikh. Arsuz’s richest Alawi family was now one with its most respected. These were signs of a new age, of growing wealth. Perhaps there were no more villagers, none of the peasants I had imagined at sunset, only the aspirant petit bourgeoisie.

The celebrations ended at midnight, when the band packed its drums and guitars, the video cameraman took down his lights, the waiters dismantled the tables and folded the chairs, and the families made their way home. Before dawn, most of them would be back in the fields.

In Alexandretta I had a lunch of grilled shrimps and a bottle of Efes near the port and then went to a photocopying shop. I had decided to photocopy all my notes and send them home in case something happened while I was travelling. The photocopying shop was on a corner, with picture windows on two sides and old calendars hanging on the walls. Inside, a man was photocopying documents and pages from books for the people queuing up. One of the five or six young men ahead of me in the queue turned and asked me in French whether I spoke French. He then asked where I was from, why I had come to Iskenderun and where I was going. It was not unusual, I had discovered, for strangers to ask the most personal questions. He said he was a French teacher from Istanbul. He asked me if I had read the Bible. He had read both the Bible and the Koran and had translated the Bible into Turkish. “From French?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “It is a beautiful book.”

I said nothing, assuming that he as a Muslim was complimenting a Christian on his faith’s holy book.

He turned his back to the other young men in the queue and whispered, “Je crois en Jésus.” (I believe in Jesus.)

I was startled and looked into his eyes. He was completely sincere. I had once met a so-called “Jew for Jesus” in Jerusalem and found him completely mad. The Jew for Jesus had followed me to my hotel, proselytising on the way, insisting the Temple in Jerusalem be rebuilt. When I asked why, he said matter-of-factly, “Because that will cause the end of the world.” Had I now encountered a Muslim for Jesus? “Vous êtes musulman, n’est-ce pas?”

“Oui, je suis né musulman.”

“Et vous croyez en Jésus comme prophète?”

“Non,” he insisted. “Je crois en Jésus.”

“Et Mohammed était un bon prophète,” I said, helpfully.

“Non, Mohammed n’était pas prophète.”

We talked a while longer, until each of us had completed his photocopying. He was on his way to Istanbul and I to Antioch, so we could not continue the conversation. He was the second Muslim convert to Christianity I had met in five days. In Antioch, I would learn of others, but I had no idea whether I had by chance met every Muslim turned Christian in Turkey or by an equal chance uncovered a trend. I decided to leave it to the anthropologists and missionaries, but I remembered Sir Steven Runciman’s words to me before I left on my journey: “I think the Seljuk Turks might easily have become Christian. They had converted to Islam, but they were very easygoing. It seems surprising, but quite a lot of Seljuk Turks did become Christian from being Muslim. There was a certain amount of inter-marriage. If they had become Christian, you’d have had a new Byzantium.” That was at the time of the Crusades. In the unlikely event of enough Turks becoming Christian now, the capital of the new united Europe might be Constantinople.

I found Mehmet Udimir in his library office, where the same ancient Mongol brought us tea. I tried to tell him that I’d had an interesting time in his tourism district and that I’d found people who spoke English and Arabic. “Arabi?” he said, his face lighting. “Takellem Arabi?” Do you speak Arabic?

Suddenly, we began a conversation. It was then he told me his name had been Mohammed Haj, that he had three sons and that he was an Alawi. He sounded pleased I was going on to Syria, where the president, a fellow Alawi, was “a very strong man.” Next time I came to Alexandretta, he said, we would go to his house and drink arak.

It was Hind Koba’s cousin, an interesting man who had studied at the American University of Beirut in the 1950s, who suggested that I see the French military cemetery before I left Alexandretta. Mr Philippi, or Philipioglu in Turkish, asked me, “If you are writing a book about the Levant, don’t you want to see what is left of the only Army of the Levant?”

The taxi driver who was taking me to Antioch that evening did not know how to find the cemetery, but Mr Philippi had written directions in Turkish, which said it was near the Belediye Ekmek Fabricase, the Municipal Bread Factory. We drove to a large bakery on the outskirts of town, east of the main highway, and then a hundred yards along the side of a high wall to a monumental gate. A lintel above the gate, supported by three arches, was inscribed, Cimetière Militaire Français.

“I never knew this was here,” the driver said as he stopped his old Ford.

The arch in the gate’s centre was higher than those on the sides, which had their own, smaller inscriptions. On the left were the words, Aux Morts de Syrie Cilicie, and on the right, lère et 4ème Divisions de I’Armée du Levant. We had reached the final resting place of the Army of the Levant, a small piece of a foreign field that would be forever France. It was as dismal and tragic as France’s Levant adventure itself, an enterprise begun in the Crusades, rekindled when Leibniz urged his plan for an invasion of the Ottoman Empire on Louis XIV, dashed for a century after Napoleon’s defeats in Palestine and Egypt, revived in the post-First World War occupation and flickering even then with a token force of paratroopers in Lebanon.

Within the high walls row upon row of stone crosses stood guard over marble slabs. As I walked slowly past each grave, reading the names of the officers and men, or the inscription to each soldat inconnu, a young man walked up behind me. Without disturbing the peace of the dead, he quietly told me in French he was the caretaker. His name was Salim, and he was twenty-one. His father had been caretaker for forty years before him. “C’est territoire français,” he said of the ground on which we stood. He told me there were 561 graves in all. He left me to pace the ranks, and, as I read the names and dates, I noticed something strange. All of them had died between 1919 and 1922, yet the First World War had ended between Turkey and the Allies in 1918. Enri Bonari, a corporal, had died on 17 February 1921. Auguste Boyer, also a corporal, had been killed on 21 July 1922. There was something even stranger, a spectre that kept cropping up: graves of members of the Légion Arménienne and the Bataillon Assyro-Chaldeen. Joseph Romechaud of the Armenian Legion died on 1 August 1919, and Gabriel Josim of the Assyro-Chaldean Battalion was killed on 29 March 1921. The Levant Army was a collection of local minorities, hired by the French to fight the Turks, when, after the war, the Allies, having taken Turkey’s Arab provinces, launched a campaign to conquer Turkey itself. It was little wonder that, when the Army of the Levant left in 1939, most of the Armenians and Assyrian Christians fled with it.

Salim motioned to me to follow him to the south-east corner of the graveyard, where crescents rather than crosses stood above four tombstones. “Musulmans,” he said. Two of them were simply soldats français inconnus, the third plaque had been painted over and was illegible, and the fourth, grave number 238, was marked, “Domani.” He may have been a cook or camp-follower, a Gunga Din in the service of the invaders remembered only by the nickname his French masters had given him. He had died with the army he served, but there was no indication of when.

In the centre of the far wall, nearest the sea, was a large cupola supported on four sides by Islamic arches, a structure blending the Western neoclassical with the Oriental. Carved into the stonework was the memorial: A LA MEMOIRE DES MORTS POUR LA FRANCE EN SYRIE-CILICIE. On either side were monuments to the Tirailleurs Algériéns, Tirailleurs Sénégalais, Zouaves de 3ème RM et 83 soldats inconnus, who had come from all over the French Empire to give their lives for nothing. The dome was like a temple, hovering protectively above a long slab of stone on the ground. Decorated with nothing more than a simple cross, the slab had no inscription, nothing to reveal who lay beneath it. Salim whispered, “Le Général.”

The general and 561 of the men under his command stayed behind while the survivors, Christian and Muslim, French and native, retreated to other corners of the dying empire. The last detachment in Turkey of the Armée du Levant remained, buried, numbered and for the most part named and dated, on the only remnant of French territory in the eastern Mediterranean. They had fought and died near here, but there was nothing about their battles worth remembering. Their army had passed through, like so many before it, and left its dead beside a port town which took little notice of history’s struggles. As we left them to begin our ascent of the Amanus Mountains, the sun was setting into the sea, extending a finger of dying red light through the darkness into the open tomb of the last commander of the Army of the Levant.