Hotel Tiberias: A Tale of Two Grandfathers. Sebastian Hope

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       Chapter Six

      On a steep-sided spur overlooking the road to Antioch stand the remains of Baghras castle, which once guarded the southern approach to the Beylen Pass. In its shadow, an old man in a bobble hat was leading his pony loaded with field tools up the rough path behind the village, through the almond orchards and olive groves towards the scrubby hills beyond. The sound of hooves on stone, the clanking of metal on metal passed, an echo of ancient sieges, and quiet returned, the breeze making the poppies sway, rustling through the stunted trees growing out of the castle wall, a lark celebrating the bright air. Lizards basked on the fallen stones in the uppermost court, overgrown with bramble and dog rose, the castle’s only remaining defenders.

      It is everything a ruined castle should be, a perfect place for the village boys to play. They scramble up the slope below the walls and edge along their base, slipping through a breach into the long lower gallery where horses and livestock were once stabled. A rock fall at the far end provides a ramp to the next level, a dim vaulted chamber whose furthest window frames a bank of poppies drifting down from the upper court. There, between the Knight’s Hall and the Templar Chapel, the fiercest fighting takes place, the victors mounting the ruined ramparts and frightening themselves at the sheer drop into the ravine below.

      The Beylen Pass is the natural route for any southbound army to take across the Amanus Mountains. Alexander the Great marched through in pursuit of the Persian King Darius; Roman legions followed some two hundred and fifty years later. They called the pass ‘Pilae Syriae’, the Pillars of Syria, and it was probably they who built the first fortification at Baghras. The Byzantines strengthened the position as the armies of Islam moved northwards in the seventh century; it came to stand on the border of the two empires. When the Crusaders took Antioch in 1098 they built up its defences and much of what remains today dates from the twelfth century, despite subsequent sieges and occupations. While its design is Norman, Hackett concluded from the use of small roughly shaped sets its construction was probably executed by Armenian masons. Its defence, and that of Darbsak, the stronghold on the pass’s northern flank, was entrusted to the Knights Templar. Through the summer of 1188 the garrison watched the line of low hills to the south-east for signs of Salah al-Din’s approach.

      Standing in the Templar Chapel under a barrel vault that has stood for nine hundred years it is easy to think that not much has changed since Hackett visited on 1 May 1935, but his photographs show that the process of dilapidation has continued in the meantime. They show a sturdy aqueduct that is no longer to be seen bridging the defensive ditch cut through the spur; the stones have been carted off and reused elsewhere. The finer pieces of dressed masonry from the windows and the doorways have also disappeared. Geographical features have proved even less permanent. In the background of one shot of the aqueduct there is a glint of water from the shallow Amouk Lake; it no longer exists, drained and brought under the plough. The castle is even in a different country now; in 1935 Syria’s northern border reached the Mediterranean at Payas, bringing both Alexandretta and Antioch, now Iskenderun and Antakya, within the French mandate. At the outbreak of the Second World War this region, known as the Hatay, was ceded to Turkey partly in the hope of securing her neutrality.

      Both Baghras and Darbsak had surrendered quickly to Salah al-Din; Antioch was left without a single defence and seemingly at his mercy, but the expected siege never even began. With his skirmishers raiding up to the very walls of the city, dissension spread amongst his men and their commanders. They had been campaigning from May to late September. Ramadan was coming and they wanted to go home. They had land to plough. A truce was concluded that was to run until the end of the following April when, if no help had arrived, Antioch was to be surrendered to the Sultan. May 1189 came, but no Muslim army with it, rather news that Frederick Barbarossa, the 70-year-old Holy Roman Emperor, had just set out from Regensburg with a largely German army, more numerous than any Crusading force before it. As Salah al-Din foresaw, they took the land route, slowly, to Constantinople and Konya, where they defeated a Seljuk army the following May. The road to Antioch through the Christian Kingdom of Cilician Armenia was open to the Crusaders, but in June the German Emperor drowned while crossing a river and his army lost heart. Some stragglers reached Tyre by sea from Tarsus, but most went home. The real threat from Europe, the sea-borne armies of Philip II of France and Richard Coeur de Lion of England, did not arrive until the following spring. Antioch remained in Christian hands for another eighty years.

      Ahmad Bey scanned Hackett’s photographs of Antioch street scenes with the magnifying glass he normally used to read the newspaper, looking for people he knew; he was old enough to have appeared in them himself. Passing by the camera along the market street are Arab boys in galabiyas riding donkeys, men wearing Western jackets over the long robe, a youth from the hills in riding pantaloons, soft-soled buskins and collarless coat with embroidered sleeves. Three men in Western suits stand talking by a telegraph pole, the one in the homburg set at a jaunty angle looks straight into the lens. Only the Turkish greengrocer is bare-headed, wearing a waistcoat over his white shirt, standing with his arms crossed in front of his displays of fruit and vegetables; everyone else is wearing a skull-cap or a tarbush or a peaked cap. There is only one woman to be seen, swathed in a white veil. Taken together the pictures look like the raw material for an illustration from a Tintin adventure. Ahmad Bey maintained the sartorial conventions of yesteryear as well as his gentlemanly Ottoman title, wearing a jacket and tie even in retirement, smoking cigarettes through a yellowed bone holder. He called for a round of tea.

      Most days Ahmad Bey is to be found here, once a barber’s shop, now a sort of social club for his passing friends. It stands in the acute angle between two converging roads, a rhomboid room commanding the confluence, glazed on three sides, both observation platform and hall of public audience. Ahmad’s family were Turks who had been granted land in the Hatay at the time of the Ottoman conquest in 1516 and he still had large holdings. His tenants could bring their problems to him here. Turkish rule, administered by an army of bureaucrats, the janissaries, made up of Christian converts from the empire’s European lands, replaced that of the Mamelukes of Egypt, soldier-slaves from the Caucasus, but for the local peasantry the certainties of the seasons, taxes and death abided.

      Ahmad Bey’s tenantry was largely Arab. ‘But if you ask them if they want to be part of Syria again, they will say no, like me. They can see it is better in Turkey. They can see there is no freedom there. In Turkey there is democracy, in Syria a dictator. Yes, the economy could be better, but Syria’s is worse. Here there is modern education and a free press. Even the Christians,’ he gestured down the road towards the Orthodox church, ‘even they want to be in Turkey. The people who say the Hatay should go back to Syria are all in Syria. What about joining Europe? The people who say yes are also wrong. Look,’ he pointed to a calendar on the wall distributed by a political party, ‘that is what we Turks should join, the countries of the other Turks.’ On a map of the Middle East and Central Asia the countries of the Turks and the regions of other countries where Turks were in the majority formed a single green block, with Northern Cyprus stuck out in the Mediterranean: the lands of the Azeris, the Kazaks, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Kyrgyz, Uighurs as well as Turkey.

      The idea of a pan-Turkic federation is not a new one. It first found political expression in the 1880s among the Turks of the Crimea and lower Volga and its doctrine of the ‘unity of language, thought and action’ of all Turkic peoples was taken up in Istanbul as the Empire’s fortunes waned. The formation СКАЧАТЬ