In the Empire of Genghis Khan: A Journey Among Nomads

On a bright morning I hailed an old hadji in a woolly cap and a silk waistcoat and took a river taxi up the Golden Horn. The Patriarchate stands in Fener, once a Greek district, now a poor Turkish quarter with a strong fundamentalist character. Ringed by high walls, and guarded by sentries, it is a place beseiged. Muslim fundamentalists, who have a knack for creating artificial enemies, regularly target the Patriarchate as if its elderly clerics posed some threat to the religious fidelity of a nation of 60 million Muslims. Graffiti are scrawled on its walls, and last year a bomb was thrown into the courtyard from a neighbouring minaret, narrowly missing the fifty-year-old doorman and the 1500-year-old library.

I was welcomed by George, a secretary, who apologized that the Metropolitan was late. Despite the fact that his diocese had been Muslim for over five hundred years, the Metropolitan apparently was run off his feet. I settled down in George’s office to wait. A tall heavy-set man, dressed like everyone else inside these ancient walls in long black robes and a thick beard, George looked like an august ecclesiastical dignitary. It was a surprise to learn he was a high-school senior from Minneapolis.

The dramatic decline of the Greek community in Istanbul has made it very difficult for the Patriarchate to fill job vacancies, even within its own walls. Their appeals to the wider Greek world had brought George, a Greek-American boy from Minnesota, to work here in his year off between high school and college. They had got lucky with George’s appearance. He had the tall face, the deep-set black eyes and the dark brow of an archbishop. They gave George his robes, he grew a big beard – he looked like the kind of guy who could do this over a weekend – and suddenly he looked more like a patriarch than the Patriarch did. George might have stepped out of an eleventh-century mosaic. But despite the impressive air of religious gravitas the high-school senior kept breaking through.

Istanbul was not George’s kind of city. Diplomatically he tried to express enthusiasm for the antiquities, for the Bosphorus, for the food, but his American horror at the chaos and the general decrepitude of the place was impossible to keep in check. He was homesick for the Midwest. I asked what he missed most. He chewed his pencil. I was expecting him to opt for the communion of his family or the fellowship of his home church.

‘Cheetos,’ he said after a time.

‘Cheetos?’

‘Yeah, you know. Those cheese-flavoured things.’

The Cheetos were not just a blip. In George two distinct personalities co-existed uneasily. He told me he was planning to be an Orthodox priest then almost in the same breath complained about how difficult it was to meet girls in Istanbul. Candidates for the Orthodox priesthood who are already married are generously allowed to keep their wives, he explained, but those who are unmarried at the time of induction are obliged to remain celibate. In September he would begin three years in an American seminary, not the best place to pick up girls. George was desperate for a love interest. There may have been sound ecclesiastical reasons for this but it tended to come across as the kind of hormone rush common to most nineteen-year-old males.

As delicately as his patriarchal persona would allow he enquired about my time in Istanbul, steering the conversation gently towards social activities. I knew what he was after – where was a good place to pull in Istanbul – but the clerical office, the robes, the icon above his desk, made it difficult to broach the subject openly.

The telephone rang. It was a school friend from America. In an instant the bearded cleric fell into the patois of an American high school.

‘Hey, Bobby. How’s it going?’ said George. ‘Hey man, I got to get outta here. It’s been nine months. This place is driving me crazy.’

He listened for a time, then he asked, ‘How’s that girl from St Paul’s?’

There was a pause. George was chewing the corners of his beard.

‘You know, the one with the halter top. Debbie. We met her at the Dairy Queen.’

There was a much longer pause. George’s face darkened as he listened. There had obviously been a few developments in the life of Debbie of the Dairy Queen.

After a time George shrugged. ‘Hey, who’s worried?’ he said. ‘There are other girls.’

They chatted for a while about basketball and the Chicago Bulls then George hung up. He seemed to have shrunk a little inside his robes.

‘Hayal Kahvesi,’ I said. ‘It’s just off Istiklal Caddesi, near Taksim.’

‘What’s that?’ George’s thoughts were still with Debbie’s halter top.

‘It’s a café,’ I said. ‘You can get a beer, listen to live music. It’s a good place to meet people.’ The thought of George turning up among the hip modern crowd of this trendy café in his robes flashed through my mind.

‘Dress is casual,’ I said.

The Metropolitan of Laodicea never arrived. He called from his mobile to apologize that he had been held up and to say that he had arranged for the priest of Mouchliotissa to take me to the church. Father Alexandros turned up presently, out of breath, and dressed like an undertaker. He was a handsome fellow in his mid-forties with dark luxuriant hair, long eyelashes, and the mandatory beard. He had been a pharmacist but when the Patriarch began to run short of priests he prevailed upon Alexandros, a family friend, to give up aspirins and Night Nurse for incense and holy water.

Alexandros used to live in Fener before the Greeks fled the district to safer parts of Istanbul during the anti-Greek riots in 1955. We climbed through the narrow streets of his childhood, packed with nineteenth-century Greek villas squeezed in among old bits of Constantinople: ancient city walls, the ruined vaults of a monastery, the charred shell of the Palace of the Wallachians, the rubble of a Greek school. At the top of a lane so steep it had become stairs, he pointed out his old house, a peeling ochre mansion, divided into tenements and bedecked with laundry. A swarm of children came out through the gate to hold our hands, tugging us through the garden where Alexandros had played as a child, now full of junk and oily puddles, to a view, over a broken wall, of the Golden Horn.

‘Clematis,’ Alexandros said. ‘There used to be clematis on this wall.’ He poked his hand into a hole between the old bricks. ‘I hid marbles here.’ But he brought out only a handful of dust.

Our Lady of the Mongols stood in the next street behind high red walls. The round drum of the dome presided over a courtyard of sun and old roses where a caretaker was sweeping leaves. Alexandros opened the tall west doors and the ancient ecclesiastical odours of incense and candle wax and polished wood came out to envelop us. In the narthex the glass of the framed icon of the Virgin was covered with lipstick kisses.

The church has lost various of its parts over the centuries, and what remains makes for a rather charming confusion of arches and vaults meeting at odd angles. Dusty chandeliers were suspended on long chains from the high ceilings like cast-offs from a medieval banqueting hall. Byzantine icons were deployed about the walls, the faces of saints and prophets peering out from the antique gloom of the paintings. By the icon of St Barbara was a metal crutch, left behind by a lame man who had been miraculously cured. Elsewhere votive miniatures were suspended from threads in front of the more powerful icons, in the hope of a similar miracle. Legs were popular, as were ears and feet. But the faithful did not restrict themselves to requests for new body parts: Toy cars, models of new houses, and little aeroplanes represented prayers for material success and foreign holidays. One hopeful and rather brazen petitioner had hung a photograph, clipped from a glossy magazine, in front of an icon of St George. The photograph showed a shapely young woman in a bikini. I wasn’t sure if this represented the aspirations of a man seeking help with his love life or of a woman on a diet.

The church was founded by Princess Maria, an illegitimate daughter of Michael VIII, a Byzantine emperor who tended to dole out daughters to potential allies like subsidies. It was the middle of the thirteenth century, and the Mongols were pressing on his borders. He had already dispatched one daughter to the Mongol khan of the Golden Horde, ruler of the districts to the north of the Black Sea. Maria had been engaged at a tender age to Hulegu, a grandson of Genghis Khan and the governor of another of the four provinces of the Mongol Empire, the Il-Khanate of Persia.

The engagement was a long one and by the time Maria turned up for her wedding in Tabriz, the groom was dead. But Hulegu had graciously left his fiancée in his will to his son, Abaqa, and Maria was duly married to the man she expected to be her stepson. She spent fifteen years as Queen of the Mongols until, in 1281, Abaqa was assassinated by one of his brothers. Carefully sidestepping the advances of the assassin, who saw her as a part of his inheritance, she returned to Constantinople where her father, by now running out of daughters, promptly tried to marry her off again to yet another Mongol khan. For Maria this was one husband too many. Mongol romance had persuaded her of the merits of chastity. She became a nun and founded, or possibly rebuilt, this church sometime in the 1280s.

At the time of the Turkish conquest, some two centuries later, when icons of the Virgin all over the city were said to weep tears, Constantinople’s churches were converted to mosques. Even Haghia Sophia, for nine centuries the fairest church in Christendom, had minarets erected round the ancient dome like minders. Only Our Lady of the Mongols escaped this wholesale conversion. No one is quite sure why. It may have been that the parishioners were able to argue that a church built by the wife of a Mongol prince, inspirational figures to their distant cousins the Ottoman Turks, should be left in peace. Whatever the reason the firman or decree of Fatih, the Turkish conqueror, granting it unique leave to continue as a church, still hangs inside the west door. Our Lady of the Mongols is the only Byzantine church in the city that has continued its Christian career undisturbed.

While I browsed among the icons, Father Alexandros fussed about the old church like a conscientious housekeeper, straightening candlesticks, emptying the collection boxes, dusting the ledges of the iconostasis. He was very proud of his old church, and delighted that a foreigner was taking an interest in it. He kept breaking off from his chores to show me some detail of the place he was anxious I should not miss. He took my arm and led me across to the beautiful eleventh-century mosaic of the Virgin. ‘Theotokos Pammakaristos,’ he said, inclining his head as if he was introducing us. Through the grime of centuries the eyes of ‘The All-Joyous Mother of God’ were sad pools of light. He showed me Fatih’s firman written in loping Arabic script. Later he led me down a short flight of stairs into the crypt to sprinkle me with holy water from the well. On the fresco on the end wall the Madonna and Child hovered, as faint as ghosts. The church’s connection to the Mongols meant nothing to him; the point of Mouchliotissa for the Greek community was its connection to Byzantium.

The Syrian caretaker brought us tea in the courtyard where we sat in a long slab of sun on a ledge along the southern wall. I asked Father Alexandros about the future of the Greek community in Istanbul. ‘There is no future,’ he said blankly. ‘Greeks have been here for almost three millennia but in my lifetime I am seeing the end of it. Most of my friends have emigrated. My children will emigrate, to Athens, possibly to America.’ He was stroking the stone of the ledge as he spoke. The ancient mortar crumbled beneath his fingers. ‘This city is my home, home to our people, but it has abandoned us. Unless you are a Turk, it is impossible here. Greeks have no future in Constantinople.’

When the first tempest of Mongol conquest appeared to have abated in the middle of the thirteenth century, the princes of Christendom longed to know more about these Eastern apparitions who had come so close to overrunning Europe. A series of missions was dispatched, most led by Franciscan friars, to report on the Mongols and to enquire about the possibility of their conversion to Christianity. From the Pope down, European leaders nurtured the rather bizarre hope that the Mongol horsemen could be harnessed as allies to drive the Muslims from the Holy Land.

Two of these friars wrote accounts of their journeys, John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck. The latter produced the more interesting book, full of wry and colourful observations about the Mongol hersdmen who had so suddenly found themselves ruling most of the known world. His mission predates Marco Polo’s more famous journey to Cathay by almost twenty years; even Polo’s great English commentator, Sir Henry Yule, was obliged to admit that Friar William had written ‘a Book of Travels of much higher claims than any one series of Polo’s chapters’. But William suffered the fate of many worthy authors: a bad publisher. His book never achieved the circulation of Polo’s accounts.

We tend to think of Friar William now as an early explorer, and like the best explorers he had no idea where he was going, how he was going to get there, or what he should do once he arrived. When William left from Istanbul in the spring of 1253, he was setting off, like Jason and the Argonauts, into barbarian darkness. His journey took him from Istanbul across southern Russia and what is now Kazakhstan to the distant Mongol capital of Qaraqorum. It was the route I wanted to follow and I saw him, across seven centuries, as a travelling companion.

William set sail from Istanbul on one of the trading vessels that carried cotton, silk and spices from Constantinople to the ports on the north shore of the Black Sea. In Karaköy, round a watery corner from the Golden Horn, I found the modern equivalents of William’s ship, the Russian and Ukrainian freighters which ply the same route. The fall of Communism has given a new impetus to Black Sea trade, and Turkey has become a conduit for Western goods, from tinned tomatoes to Johnnie Walker whisky. Russians and Ukrainians, now as free to travel as Levi’s and Coca-Cola, come to Istanbul to savour the bright lights and to buy in bulk. They travel by freighter, the only kind of vessel able to cope with their excess baggage.

My telephone enquiries had been inconclusive and I had come to the docks to see if I could rustle up a passage. In pole position was a huge cruise liner called the Marco Polo. Had William had a more aggressive publisher this floating palace might have been named after him. Beyond Marco’s luxurious namesake the shipping degenerated spectacularly. There were a few European freighters, shouldering the docks like naval toughs, then a couple of Turkish ships, painted gunmetal grey. At the far end of the dock I came to the Russian and Ukrainian freighters, the shipping equivalent of MOT failures, held together by rust stains and a grimy coating of oil.

The last ship was the Mikhail Lomonosov, an ageing rust-bucket that seemed to be kept afloat by its mooring ropes. It had a limp deflated appearance that one did not like to see in a ship, as if someone had let the air out of its tyres. It listed. It sagged. It exuded black smoke from unpromising quarters, like the portholes.

I called up to a man in a naval smock leaning on the rail at the top of the gangway. He replied that they were sailing for Sevastopol on Monday, in two days’ time. He waved me aboard and I stepped gingerly onto the gangway, unsure if the ship could take my weight.

Dimitri introduced himself as the second mate. He had one of those narrow Slavic faces, very pale and very bony, that are permanently knotted in expressions of anxiety. I asked about cabins, and he summoned the accommodation officer by barking into a pipe in the bulwark behind him. The accommodation officer took me below, showed me a cramped cabin full of sacks of onions, which he assured me would be cleared out, and then took a hundred dollars off me in exchange for a grubby receipt written on the back of a beer mat.

The speed and the casualness of the transaction startled me. Back on deck I lingered by the gangway with the second mate, hoping to learn more about this ship which now contained such a large proportion of my publisher’s advance. In spite of his dour appearance, he seemed eager to talk. He spoke the casual staccato English of ships.

‘Did you get receipt?’ he asked.

I showed him my beer mat. He nodded. Beer mats were obviously accepted currency on the Mikhail Lomonosov.

‘You can’t trust anyone on this ship,’ he said. He leaned forward to spit over the rail. ‘This is my last voyage. I can’t take it any more. Do you know how many times I make this trip? Sevastopol, Istanbul. Istanbul, Sevastopol.’

I told him I had no idea.

‘Four hundred forty-seven,’ he said. ‘It is no life. This is my last voyage. Four hundred forty-seven. It’s enough, I think. It’s making me crazy. If I don’t get off this ship, I will kill someone.’

I took what comfort I could from the fact that he had ruled out murder as a career option.

A bell rang twice from somewhere within the ship, and he turned to go. ‘We sail at six o’clock, Monday evening. Don’t be late.’

The following day, a Sunday, I went to morning mass at Our Lady of the Mongols. I felt a few prayers for the voyage wouldn’t go amiss. When I arrived the service had already begun but Father Alexandros broke off in mid-chant to usher me personally into a seat. As I looked uneasily about the church I realized why I had got the special treatment. I was the congregation. It is a measure of the decline of this ancient church here in its Patriarchal city that the only worshipper it could muster on a warm spring Sunday was a lone Irish Presbyterian.

There is not a lot to do in Presbyterian services except doze off in your pew while a flushed preacher warns of the fire and brimstone that awaits you just the other side of retirement. A couple of hymns, the collection plate, and we all went home. For Presbyterians even a common Anglican mass was a complicated affair involving a disturbing degree of participation – responses, collective prayer, not to mention the endless standing and kneeling at unpredictable moments. Now suddenly I was the crucial component of the most arcane ritual that the Christian church has to offer, here in the last remnant of Byzantium.

The only other people present were a neanderthal-looking altar boy who kept peering out at me through a door in the iconostasis as if he had never seen a congregation before and an elderly cantor, a cadaverous figure in a black robe. With a scythe and a grin the cantor could have doubled as the Grim Reaper. He stood to one side at a lectern chanting interminable passages in ancient Greek in a thin beautiful voice. In the pauses where the congregation were obviously meant to respond, he looked across at me from beneath lowered lids. I looked at the floor or examined the dome with a critical intensity. Amen was the only word I understood and whenever I heard it I joined in heartily to make up for all the important stuff I must have been leaving out. Otherwise I signalled my involvement by throwing in as many signs of the cross as I could manage – not exactly a Presbyterian thing, but I had seen people do this in films.

Later in the courtyard the Grim Reaper took his leave with a slow funereal nod while Father Alexandros and I lingered to have coffee with Nadia, the Syrian caretaker, as if it was already an established ritual between us.

I didn’t allude to the fact that there had been no congregation. It was like some dysfunction that one politely ignored. With the same courtesy Alexandros didn’t mention my own lamentable performance as an Orthodox worshipper.

‘How long will you stay in Istanbul?’ Alexandros asked.

‘I leave tomorrow.’

‘Do you fly back to London?’

‘No, I am going on to Outer Mongolia,’ I said, as if it formed part of some natural tour of the region. As I listed the stages of my route – across the Black Sea, then overland across the Crimea, southern Russia and Kazakhstan – he tried to disguise his shock behind a polite clerical façade.

He put his empty cup down on the ledge between us. ‘And what do you hope to find in Mongolia?’ he asked. Despite his best efforts, I felt a note of sarcasm had crept into his voice.

I expanded on the fascination of nomads, speaking rather too fast, overdoing the enthusiasm as I tried to convince him. I might have been speaking about the dark side of the moon. Alexandros was the epitome of the polished metropolitan figure: a Greek, a man of the city from the race that had created the city state, a man whose ancestors may have inhabited this city, one of the world’s oldest and greatest, since before the birth of Christ. He seemed to shudder involuntarily at the notion of nomads, people who lived in tents, people who built nothing. Confronted by his civilized sophistication, I was struggling to convince even myself that the Mongolians were not barbarians who had taken a historical wrong turn when they decided to stick to sheep rather than join the ranks of the committed settlers determined to create something that would outlast their own lifetime.

‘I have little opportunity to travel,’ he said at last.

He looked up at the old church. ‘I must look after Mouchliotissa. If we don’t keep the church alive, the Turks will take it from us. When the church disappears there will be nothing left of Constantinople, or of us.’

It was the irresistible tug of the city, the lasso of his own identity moored among these ancient stones.

When Friar William was invited to preach in Haghia Sophia on Palm Sunday of 1253, the great church was already very old. Built in the 530s by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great, it belongs to the architectural tradition of the Roman basilica, and thus indirectly to the pagan world of the Greek temple.

The brilliance of Haghia Sophia is the transition from the earthbound exterior to the soaring lightness of its interior. From the outside the great church is monumental and brooding, the original form much confused with buttresses and minarets added after the Turkish conquest when it began a new career as a mosque. Inside it takes flight. It is transfiguration in architecture. You may run your hands over the massive outer walls, a millennium and a half, stained and crumbling beneath your fingers, but the ethereal magic of the nave is less palpable. The air is gold- and rust-coloured, like some exhalation of the old mosaics and the red marble. Moted columns of light fall from the high windows onto the wide expanses of the floor. The walls, the columns, the distant vaults, might have been weightless; the great dome, Procopius wrote over fourteen centuries ago, seems to be suspended from heaven by a golden chain. Robert Byron compared the old basilica to St Peter’s in Rome. Haghia Sophia is a church to God, he wrote, St Peter’s merely ‘a salon for his agents’.

It is a daunting place to begin a journey to the nomadic steppes. I spent hours in Haghia Sophia wandering the upper galleries beneath the conch vaults gazing down into the great canyon of the nave. I had come to see it as my world and I lingered here as a kind of farewell. As the slanting afternoon light crept through the galleries, amid lengthening shadows, I listened to the crescendo of the great city outside as its inhabitants began their journeys home. In the golden embrace of Haghia Sophia, I suddenly saw the journey to Mongolia as a Byzantine might have done, a journey into emptiness, into some fearful void. I understood the ambitions and the richness of cities. The desire to carve the aspirations of the human heart into some permanent form was central to my own world. In Haghia Sophia that impulse had produced sublime transcendance.

On this day at the beginning of June, on the other side of Asia, the Mongolians would be packing up and moving to summer pastures, leaving nothing to mark their passage but the shadows on the spring grass where their tents had stood.