The Pillars of Hercules

“Oh, no, I was in another regiment—you wouldn’t be impressed by that one,” he said. “I only wear ties from fancy regiments. I get good results too. I’m always being saluted when I’m in London.”

14

The M.V. Akdeniz: Through the Levant

            Leaving the comfort of the Seabourne Spirit was so much like a secular version of the Expulsion from Paradise that I thought I would brood less if I moved straight on to Syria. It seemed a prudent move, too. For all its physical beauty, Istanbul was passing through a turbulent phase. A recent bomb in the Covered Bazaar had killed many people, including three tourists. That at once caused an immediate eight-thousand-visitor cancellation to Turkey. The Bazaar bomb might have been the work of Kurds of the Kurdish People’s Party (PKK). But there were other bombers, fundamentalist ones, from the Great Raiders of the Islamic East and the Devrimçi Sol—the Revolutionary Left. Liquor stores were a frequent target; so were banks, because they charged interest on loans, and it is written in the Koran that “Allah hath blighted usury” (11:276).

There had been a rocket attack on the residence of the United States Consul General. It missed, but if it had hit its target the building would have been demolished. Ten armed men guarded the house now, and the Consul General, and most foreign diplomats in Turkey, did not stir outside without a bodyguard.

Istanbul, even under siege, was still magnificent. Never mind that W. B. Yeats had not actually seen the city—it was everything magical that he had written about it in his two greatest poems. It had known three incarnations, as Byzantium for a thousand years, then Christian Constantinople, and finally Istanbul of the Ottomans. It was a labyrinth, ringing with the voices of hawkers, of ferry horns, of muezzins and of the plonking music that was called “Arabesque.” As Yeats implied. It was a place where there was no real distinction between life and art, it lay on both banks of the Bosporus, one continent nestling next to another—just a stretch of water, a ferry ride from Europe to Asia.

And though Turks moaned about the dangers in Istanbul, they were warier of the Turkish hinterland. My plan was to get a Syrian visa here, take the train to the south coast city of Adana and then trains and buses to Iskanderun, Hatay, Antakya (Antioch) and into Syria and down the Syrian coast.

“That is a bad area,” I was told.

“Which area?”

“Every place you mentioned.”

“But that’s my route,” I said.

“May it be behind you!” It was a Turkish expression: Gechmis olsen.

Soon after arriving in Istanbul, I checked into a third-rate hotel and applied for a Syrian visa. Feeling sentimental, I walked down to the Asian side of the Galata Bridge and looked for the Seabourne Spirit on the quay at Kadiköy. But it had sailed away. Another ship was in its place—Turkish, rusty, slightly larger, no one on board.

I seriously considered swimming the Hellespont.

Ömer Koç had swum the Hellespont, though he, of all people, could have found an easier way of crossing that stretch of water. His was the wealthiest family in Turkey. I looked him up, because I had an introduction and because my Syrian visa was taking a while to come through.

“I’ve also swum across the Bosporus, to Europe, and back,” Ömer said. The Hellespont swim was in homage to Byron. “It can be a long swim—three miles or more, because the current takes you.”

“I was thinking of trying it.”

“This isn’t the month to do it,” he said.

A handsome young man in his late twenties, Ömer spoke with an English accent acquired as a student in England. He helped run the family business, Koç Holdings. The walled compound of Koç Holdings was something of a landmark, in that its grounds had been scattered with Greek pillars and marble ornaments and statues. They had been gathered by his father, Rahmi, from sites all over Anatolia, to make it look like an ancient site.

“He had a wonderful sarcophagus, but in the end decided not to put it on the lawn,” Ömer said. “He decided that it would be frightfully morbid.”

Ömer lived on the Asian side of the Bosporus in a palatial Turkish house known as a yali, a summer house. It was the narrowest point on the Bosporus, where Darius had built a pontoon bridge and marched his army across in the fifth century B.C. On its carefully chosen embankment, the yali epitomized the great absorbing tendencies of Turkish culture—an appreciation of light and land and water, and a blend of East and West; the Ottoman house in its maturity.

Ömer’s yali, built a hundred years ago, had been occupied by a princely son of a khedive, one of the Turkish viceroys of Egypt. When Ömer’s father, Rahmi, bought it in 1966, it had fallen into disrepair. Rahmi Koç totally revitalized it.

“I was very small when we moved in,” Ömer said. “I spent my childhood here, and I still live in it most of the time.”