The Pillars of Hercules

The great man’s old telephone stood on his desk. One of the children giggled into the receiver until he was reprimanded by a caretaker. Ataturk’s bathtub, his washstand, his sofa, his tables, his chairs. Some objects retain the aura—the personal magic—of the owner; others do not. Wood does, big fuzzy chairs don’t; a bathtub does, a bed does not; a desk does, and a telephone, but not curtains, nor framed pictures.

A wooden, clinker-built rowboat was dry-docked in the reception room, and it was so well made it did not look out of place. Ataturk had rowed it in Izmir Bay, using those same oars that were counterbalanced with heavy upper shafts.

I left the house and walked down the promenade where, at the German Consulate, there was a long line of Turks, old and young, waiting for German visas. In spite of the dire news from Germany that Turks were being assaulted and their houses burned, that they were the target of both skinheads and opportunistic politicians, still there were plenty of potential migrants in Izmir.

As the sun exploded in its descent at the edge of the distant Aegean and became a slowly evolving incident, vast and fiery and incarnadine, I boarded the Akdeniz in time to eat a dinner that was like the parody of a heavy meal: cold meat, beans, fish, more meat, more beans. Never mind. I had gorged on caviar on the Seabourne. This was a different experience.

Then I sat under the lights of the deck, in the mild evening, and read the Turkish Daily News, an item about the Turkish Foreign Minister, Mr. Mümtaz Soysal. It was another act in the endless drama between Greece and Turkey, but it was timeless, too, and this episode could have occurred at any time over the past century, the same phrasing.

“If Greece extends its territorial waters from six miles to twelve miles, we will go to war with them”—and Mr. Soysal had actually used the word.

Mr. Soysal had made himself popular in Turkey because of his pugnacity. But the Greek Foreign Minister, Mr. Kaolos Papoulias, met Mr. Soysal in Jordan and they agreed in the future not to use the word war.

After that the Greek Defense Minister, Mr. Arsenis, accused the Turkish minister of “raving.”

It was like old times, and old times here could mean anything from the Trojan War to the partition of Cyprus. The newspaper said that Greeks and Turks were holding talks on the future of Cyprus. To aid their cause the Greeks had sent to Cyprus a specially sanctified holy icon from a monastery on Mount Athos. The Greeks seemed confident that this icon would do the trick, but the Turks were not so sure.

As I read, the anchor was hauled up and we were tugged to sea and away from the twinkling lights of Izmir.

At dawn we passed the island of Patmos, where an angel appeared to John and the result was the Book of Revelation. Patmos was Greek. All the islands were Greek, in fact, even the ones that were only a mile or two from the Turkish mainland. Turkey, to its irritation, possesses only a handful of offshore islands, which is why any mention of Greece extending its territorial waters sounds provocative and maddens the Turks. We passed Kos, then quickly Níssyros, Tilos and Rhodes. Turkey was a persistent shadow behind—always a low layer of dirty air behind the islands.

“The islands are so empty,” Mehmet said. He was again standing at the rail, with his mother. “Nothing on them. One town, or less.”

He grinned at me.

“Because there are nine million Greeks,” he said. “Maybe ten. Not many.”

I asked Mehmet about the Kurds. On the BBC morning news on shortwave I had heard that thirty villages had so far been emptied of Kurds and fifteen more had been burned, with crops and animals, the goats suffocated in their pens.

“I know many Kurds,” he said. “We have Kurds on this ship—some passengers. They look like us. Same face. They speak Turkish. We are friends.”

After the Gulf War the Kurds, who had been fighting for forty years or more, had become hopeful again of establishing a homeland. They fought with greater conviction, believing that the United States would take up their case. It did not happen. It only made the Turkish troops angry. They evicted Kurds from their villages in the southeast, and sent them into the mountains, and when some Kurds straggled back the Turks burned their villages to the ground. The radio program contained the voices of Kurds: We were given twenty minutes to leave by the soldiers. But some people were too old to gather their belongings, and they lost everything—all they owned was destroyed.

I reported this to Mehmet.

“But some Kurds are not troublesome,” he said. And then he raised his eyes and said, “That is Karpathos, also in Homer.”