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CHAPTER TWO

THE ARMY OF THE LEVANT

For most of its life, Alexandretta managed to avoid playing a role in history. In the Levant, this meant it rarely became a battleground. Yet armies often passed through, whether Asians on their way to conquer Europe or Europeans seeking victories in the East. In 333 BC Alexander the Great defeated one of the largest armies ever assembled in antiquity, that of King Darius and his 400,000 Persians, at Issus, about twenty miles north of Alexandretta. After the battle, on an empty piece of shore, Alexander established a port town to control the northern route to Syria and named it for himself.

After Alexander’s death, the heir to his Asian empire, Seleucus, established his capital inland at the other end of a pass through the mountains and named it in honour of his father, Antiochus. Antioch, not Alexandretta, became the centre of Hellenism in Syria and, later, the third greatest city in the Roman Empire. The city declined to a backwater in the Arab and Byzantine Empires, the Crusader Kingdoms and, finally, the Ottoman Empire. Although the Romans had abandoned it even as a port, preferring Seleucia Pieria to the south, it became popular with Venetian and Genoese merchants who established trading houses there for the caravan trade with China, India and Baghdad. The French and British later won concessions from the Ottoman Sultan to do the same. It became a pleasant Mediterranean outpost, only a short sail from Venice, from which to purchase the spices of Asia. The route went from Alexandretta, through the Beilan Pass, to Antioch and Aleppo, where the great caravans across the desert from India had their terminus.

In 1834, Alexandretta missed its chance at greatness. That year, the Duke of Wellington commissioned Colonel F. R. Chesney to establish a route “between the Mediterranean Sea and H.M. possessions in the East Indies by means of steamer communication on the River Euphrates”. The route, for which Parliament voted an initial £20,000, might have become another Suez Canal, which was not constructed until fifty years later. The plan called for an expedition to take two paddle steamers in pieces to the mouth of the River Orontes near Alexandretta. There the steamers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, would be assembled and sail upriver to a point nearest the River Euphrates. They would then be taken apart, carried to the Euphrates and reassembled to sail downstream to Baghdad. Chesney discovered at the beginning that his 20-horsepower engines were not strong enough to sail against the Orontes’ four-knot currents. So, he took the boats apart at the Orontes and carried them the 140 miles to the Euphrates. Although a storm sank the Tigris, the Euphrates steamed into Baghdad just after New Year 1837.

The expedition explored the possibility of cutting a canal between the Euphrates and the sea, but lacked the resources to undertake the digging. It had been difficult enough to hire local labour to carry the ships. Twenty years later, Chesney, by now a Major-General, and a group of businessmen in the City of London obtained permission from the Sultan to construct a railway along the banks of the Euphrates from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. When the British government refused to guarantee Chesney’s “Euphrates Valley Railway Company”, it was disbanded. Had either the canal or the railway been constructed, Alexandretta would have become the first Mediterranean outlet of the swiftest route to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, Britain’s lifeline to India. This might have led to a British invasion in the mid-19th century, to protect the route to India, as the British invaded Egypt in 1882 to seize the Suez Canal. Who knows what would have happened in 1956? One thing is certain: France would never have ceded the area to Turkey in 1939, because Britain would not have allowed France to enter in 1920.

When Kaiser Wilhelm II won the concession in 1898 from Sultan Abdul Hamid to build the Berlin–Baghdad Railway, the German engineers planned a branch line to Alexandretta to provide the first rail link between the Mediterranean and the Gulf. Luckily or not for Alexandretta, the branch line was not constructed, and the little town was left to sleep its way into the twentieth century.

Its last flirtation with history came during the First World War, when it almost became the scene of the decisive battle between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire. In 1914, Sherif Hussein of Mecca, whose son Faisal led the Arab Revolt with Lawrence of Arabia, proposed an Allied landing at Alexandretta to cut Turkey from its forces in Iraq and Syria and coincide with an uprising in Syria’s larger cities. Hussein’s plan had the support of the British strategists on the ground, Lord Kitchener, Sir Charles Monro, Sir John Maxwell and Sir Henry McMahon, but it was nonetheless rejected by the General Staff. The British had a commitment to their French allies, who, with no troops available, would not permit an invasion of Syria without them. The Allies decided instead to invade Turkey itself at a place called Gallipoli, a historic disaster which resulted in more Commonwealth dead than any other battle in the East.

The Alexandretta in which I had begun my tour of the Levant was the site of neither a decisive battle nor of a great trade route between West and East. It was merely the northern limit of what geographers, ever scornful of the changing maps of soldiers and politicians, called Syria. To the British, it was valuable, like the rest of the Levant, only as a passage to India. To the French, the Levant had special resonances, as Edward Said wrote in his book Orientalism: “In contrast, the French pilgrim was imbued with a sense of acute loss in the Orient. He came there to a place in which France, unlike Britain, had no sovereign presence. The Mediterranean echoed with the sounds of French defeats, from the Crusades to Napoleon.” For an American traveller like myself, the Levant was filled with reminders of broken promises, beginning with President Woodrow Wilson’s to the people of the Ottoman Empire that they would enjoy the right of self-determination in the post-war settlement. To the people themselves, from Alexandretta to Aqaba, avoiding all our attentions and staying well out of the movement of history was the most they could hope for.

When I awakened on my second morning in Alexandretta, I decided to move. I would continue my wanderings through the town, but stay on a quiet beach forty minutes to the south, near the end of the coast road in the village of Arsuz. The morning was pleasantly cool. There was no wind and not a cloud in the sky. Ships lay at anchor outside the port like ornaments on a cake, apparently frozen into the blue icing. Shopkeepers pulling up steel awnings and opening their doors were bringing the quiet of Saturday morning to an end. Small cafés were serving Turkish coffee and bread to workers, and old women were inspecting vegetables in the street markets.

Before leaving for Arsuz, I went to every bookshop I could find, coming upon them nestled inconspicuously between ironmongers’ and pharmacies. There seemed to be only four or five, and none specialised in books. They sold stationery, postcards, portraits of Atatürk and worry beads, and along one wall in each there were wooden shelves filled with books in no particular order. One shop had books in English, all paperback editions of Dickens, where I bought A Tale of Two Cities. There was a wide range of Turkish works: novels, poetry, engineering textbooks, children’s stories and biographies of Atatürk. There were Turkish translations of foreign writers, men like Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, and women like Ayn Rand, Rosa Luxemburg and Barbara Cartland. There were however no books in Arabic.

“Do you have anything in Arabic?” I asked an attractive young woman who worked behind the cash register in one bookshop. She did not look Turkish, her features more Semitic than Asian. I was speaking to her in Arabic.

“No, we don’t,” she answered in Arabic.

“No books? No newspapers?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

I asked for ink for my pens, and she wrapped a bottle in coloured paper like a gift. As I was leaving, a man who had heard me speaking Arabic invited me to his shop next door for coffee. While we drank coffee, other merchants drifted in and out; they seemed to spend much of their day socialising in one another’s shops. My accent in Arabic, obviously foreign, was basically Lebanese. They found it amusing, just as I found many of their pronunciations and words incomprehensible. Everyone, whether Turkish or Arab, was hospitable – in a way too hospitable. If I had accepted every offer of tea, coffee or lunch at home with a family, I would have had no time for anything else.

In the now crowded streets, many people spoke Arabic among themselves. I could hear mothers speaking it to their children, workers speaking it as they walked together along the cracked pavements. But no road, shop or advertising signs anywhere were written in Arabic. Everything written was in Turkish.

There was something disjointed about life in Alexandretta. Most people seemed to speak one language at home and among friends and another for official purposes. They thought in one language, yet they had to read another. Even the letters of this other language were foreign, since Atatürk had abandoned the “Old Turkish” Arabic script in favour of a modified Latin alphabet. They had one name at home, another on their identity papers and in public. When the names changed to Turkish, the authorities sometimes made arbitrary choices, often based on nicknames or profession. The same thing had happened in America, when new immigrants arriving at Ellis Island were greeted by Irish policemen who could not understand their foreign-sounding names, so simply gave them new, “American” names. When my grandmother arrived as a child from Mount Lebanon in the late 1890s as Nazira Makary, an Irish cop had re-christened her “Vera McCarey”, the name she kept until she married. Her stepfather, Semaan Zalloua, became “Joe Simon”. Under Turkish rule in Alexandretta, Hannoud Alexander was now Hind Koba. I discovered later that Mehmet Udimir had been born Mohamed Haj.

The Ottomans had not tampered with people in this way, leaving Arabs, Armenians, Circassians and countless other subject peoples free to speak and read their own languages, free to use their own names. Yet Turkey had become a “modern” nation, adopting Western nationalist ideology that forbade the old diversity of empire. No one complained in public. A few people, who had steadfastly defended the idea that Turkey was a democracy, begged me not to quote them by name on the subject of language and their sympathy with Syria for fear of arrest or reprisal.

I went back to the Hatayli Oteli to collect my bags. Ahmet the porter called for a taxi, several of which were parked across the road in the shade, to take me to Arsuz. Ahmet asked the driver the fare in Turkish. He then etched the figure 7,000 into the dust on top of the car. I said this was too high. The driver cursed in Arabic, so I began haggling with him in Arabic, dispensing with Ahmet as interpreter. We agreed on 5,000 Turkish Lira for a return journey, to include the wait in Arsuz while I checked in and left my bags. I wanted to be back in Alexandretta for an appointment at the old Church of the Annunciation with the Italian Franciscan priest, Padre Giovanni.

We drove along the coast road out of Alexandretta into green hills with the sea, except for a brief inland stretch, always at our right. The driver said his name was Mehrez, or Mehré in Turkish. When he asked me if I wanted to listen to Turkish music on his cassette player, I asked if he had anything in Arabic.

“Who do you like?”

“Feyrouz,” I said, the name of Lebanon’s most famous chanteuse.

“I don’t have Feyrouz, but I have Samira!” He popped in a tape of songs by Samira Tewfic, a popular Arabic singer who sang, like most Arabic singers, about love. With the music blasting in the old American taxi, we drove at speed along the deserted coast where green hills rolled gently into the blue sea.

Mehrez was curious about me. What was my nationality? Where had I learned Arabic? Where did I live? How many children did I have? What kind of work did I do?

“Sahafi,” I said, the Arabic word for journalist.

He had no idea what the word meant. I tried and failed to explain, but when I fell back on “kutub”, writer, he understood. It turned out we both had five children, two boys and three girls. When I said we lived in London, he seemed puzzled. I explained that my wife was English. He was silent. Minutes passed, and the hills which had until then hugged the coastline gave way to a fertile plain just north of Arsuz. He asked me again about London. “London is near where?”

Did he mean which part of London?

“No.”

Did he know London?

“No.”

“What do you mean?”

“Where is London?” “Fi Ingilterra,” I said. “In England.”

“Fi Ingilterra,” he repeated, knowingly. “Helou.” Helou means “sweet”, but has the connotation “pretty”. Then he said London was “helou”.

I admitted that London and England were “helou,” and after a few minutes we both agreed that Alexandretta too was “helou.”

Mehrez pointed out the sights along the Arsuz road, the onion fields, olive groves and grazing pastures where in summer people from Alexandretta and the villages went for picnics. He offered to stop at several villages where we could drink home-made arak. He seemed disappointed that I had neither the time nor, at eleven in the morning, the desire for a glass of the strong distilled grape with aniseed and asked, “Would you rather have beer?”

We reached the northern outskirts of Arsuz, hideous with new buildings in creative forms of ugliness, as though the houses had been modelled on the Lego designs of a particularly troublesome child. Most of the two-storey structures had just been built or were nearing completion. Trees had yet to be planted, so there was no shade. Concrete dust was everywhere, a side-effect of the Westernising of housebuilding in a land rich with stone and forests which had for centuries until our own provided the materials for beautiful villas, temples and theatres. It was a relief to cross the little bridge at the mouth of the River Arsuz into old Arsuz, with its small cluster of eucalyptus-shaded stone houses. Wooden fishing boats bobbed up and down beneath the bridge, beyond which, almost hidden by pines and eucalyptus, was the Hotel Arsuz.

“Rosuz is the Hellenistik name of this charming little town,” I read in Mehmet Udimir’s tourist brochure. “Coming to Antakya, Selevkos Nicador set foot to shore here. There are some mozaics and the remnants of stone pillars are to be seen in Arsuz, from the middle ages.”

Mehrez drove into the hotel courtyard, where young men were playing soccer. One of them stopped playing and took me inside one of the hotel’s two buildings. He was enormously fat, with a gentle, friendly face, and spoke English well. He told me his father owned the hotel, which had opened in 1965, and that his name was Sedat Mistikoglu. He gave me a room in the newer building, a simple bedroom with windows on two sides, one facing the sea and a sandy beach and the other with a balcony over the courtyard. In the bathroom, there was a shower. I left my bags and went downstairs, where Sedat and his younger brother Suat asked me if everything was all right. They were proud of the hotel’s modern conveniences, the telephones in each room and the new plumbing. “We have just installed solar heating,” Sedat said, beaming.

“What happens when the sun doesn’t shine?” I asked, dreading cold morning showers.

“The sun always shines here,” Sedat assured me.

Back in Alexandretta, I asked Mehrez to take me to the Catholic church. He interpreted this to mean a general tour of Christian churches. He drove to several small churches with tin roofs, first a Greek Orthodox, then an Armenian Orthodox, then a church whose denomination was not indicated. I said I was late for an appointment, that the church I wanted, the “Franciscan” church, was “old and large”. He took me to another Orthodox church, which was tiny with a miniature basilica on top. Finally, despite my limited knowledge of Alexandretta’s roads, I managed to direct him to the Church of the Annunciation. As we approached it, he made a gesture of recognition, as if to ask, “Why didn’t you say this church?”

In search of Padre Giovanni, I went into the rectory, along a corridor hung with old French morality prints. One contrasted the death of the sinner, being subsumed into hell, with that of a faithful man ascending to heaven, all in faded pastel shades. Another showed Adam and Eve in the garden, accepting the apple from the serpent. These were the visions of my own pre-Vatican II childhood, the simple messages of an older church. I heard voices coming from a room which turned out to be a large kitchen. Padre Giovanni was sitting with several other people at a long table eating lunch, but got up and walked with me to the courtyard in front of the church. The church was entirely surrounded by a high wall, leaving large gardens front and back. Both were overgrown and the façades of the church and rectory needed paint, at least, and probably repair. With only about 350 Catholics in all of Alexandretta, the cost of repairs would have been difficult to bear.

We sat on a bench, which the young priest wiped clean with his handkerchief, in the shade of a small pine tree. He stretched out his long legs, and his beard with its few flecks of grey lay over his chest down to his stomach. The beard made him look more Greek Orthodox than Catholic. He was tall and thin, with an austere face. He wore the traditional Franciscan footwear, sandals, but otherwise dressed in civilian clothes – a plaid shirt without Roman collar, a cardigan and a beige jacket. The hair on his head was the same colour as his beard, brown with a little grey, cut short.

I asked Father Giovanni why I had met Franciscans in every Muslim country, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, I had visited. For years in west Beirut, the Muslim half of Lebanon’s divided capital, Franciscans said mass in their chapel whatever the battlefield conditions outside. They turned up in such unlikely places as Libya, serving Polish, Filipino and other Gastarbeiter. They offered the sacraments to visitors like myself in the wilds of Somalia and on the banks of the Nile in Cairo.

“In St Francis’s time,” he said, in English with a strong Italian accent, “he thought there should be cooperation between Christians and Muslims. For all Muslim people, he became the possibility of living in peace between these two peoples.”

“It’s too bad he’s dead,” I said, thinking of Christian – Muslim bloodshed in Lebanon and Egypt.

He told me that there were 4,000 Christians in Alexandretta, the largest community being the Greek Orthodox with 3,000. As well as the 350 Roman Catholics, there were a few Armenians, Assyrians and Protestants.

“In the Orthodox Church,” he said, “according to tradition, they say the Mass in Arabic. The Orthodox youth who want to pray in Turkish, they come to our church.” Other communicants from outside his congregation were the many foreign seamen, mainly Filipino and Italian, whose ships berthed at Alexandretta harbour.

How were relations between the Christians and the overwhelming Muslim majority?

“Relations are normal,” he said. “Unfortunately, I see that between Christian and Muslim people there is no theological understanding. Generally, there is indifference. I heard it said, they are Muslims, we are Christians. Unfortunately, I say, because I am interested in how Muslims live their own faith. I was lucky myself to become friends, because God gave me the occasion, with an Imam. He is young. He came to our church, so we started to become friends. I pay a visit to him. He pays visits to me, and so on. I’m proud of this friendship, because I take it as a gift from God.”

“What kind of Muslim is he?”

“I know he is a special confession of Muslim, but I don’t know which. Not an Alawi.”

“Is there any intermarriage between Christians and Muslims?”

“There are ten or fifteen couples I am aware of, but I know they have some difficulties. Generally, Christians and Muslims don’t marry each other. That is a problem, of course. The Orthodox Church believes differently from the Catholic on marriage between faiths.”

“How?”

“The Orthodox requires that the partner who is not a Christian must be baptised. As Catholics, we do not ask this. The Catholic Church blesses the marriage, even when the other person is not baptised. If someone, man or woman, accepts to be baptised in order to be with his beloved, what kind of conscience has he about the sacrament of baptism? It is a problem I face with my Orthodox colleagues.”

The Orthodox may have been closer to the Muslim outlook. An old friend, who had converted to Islam for what he felt might have been base motives at the time, later became devout. “We believe,” my friend explained, “that motive in accepting God as God and Mohammed as his Prophet does not matter. It is important to become a Muslim, to submit to God, whether to get married or to avoid tax on non-believers or whatever. In time, God will act on you, and you become a true Muslim.”

I asked Padre Giovanni whether the Christians tended to be richer, as in Lebanon, or poorer than the Muslims.

“The Catholics,” he said, “generally come from families who were originally European. They are mostly Latin Catholic. They work in trade and are rich. If we speak of Christians here though, we have to discuss the Orthodox Church, which is much larger. As a minority, Christians face difficulties. For instance, it is not easy to find important jobs in this society. The better jobs go to Muslims. Here in this country, the Christians are second-class people.”

“Do the younger Christians want to leave the country?”

“It’s not a problem of young people, but of families. That is, there are a lot of families who leave to go to Germany, France, Italy, New York. Of course, it’s a problem especially for young people who don’t easily find work. This is worse in eastern Turkey, where the Christians are much poorer ...”

“Do the Muslims you know face the same problems?”

“Among the Muslims, there is the problem of secularisation. Many people do not go to the mosque, don’t have a religious feeling. Materialism and secularism are problems for both Islam and Christianity.”

The garden was quiet, but for the chirping of small birds, and cool despite the sunshine. Padre Giovanni stood to lead me on a tour of his church, where he said I could come to Mass the next day. We were on the steps of his church when an old woman walked up to him and told him in Italian with a strong southern accent to come inside and finish his lunch.

“This is my mother,” he said. “She and my father are visiting from Italy.” He promised to return to lunch in a few minutes. She walked back to the rectory, clearly disappointed.

“They built this church in 1888,” he said as we walked in, “when Alexandretta had large Italian, French, English and local Catholic communities.”

I imagined what it must have been like on a bright Sunday in those last years before nationalism and modernisation crept into the Ottoman Empire. The priest would have said Mass in Latin at the high altar, while several hundred Catholics who spoke different languages in their daily lives worshipped together. Despite changes in the world outside, the interior of the Church of the Annunciation looked unchanged, except that a new altar now faced the twelve rows of pews and the priest would say Mass in Turkish. The marble floor, in large slabs of alternating black and white, was freshly washed, looking as it must have a century earlier. The Mediterranean sun still shone through the rounded windows above the columns that lined the church, near which old women made the Stations of the Cross. Above the old altar, which symbolically faced God rather than the people, were six large baroque golden candelabra. The tabernacle was gold. There were two side altars, neither recessed, the one on the right with a large plaster statue of St Theresa, the one on the left with a similar coloured effigy of St Francis of Assisi holding the child Jesus in one hand. On the right-hand wall of the church at the back was a large frieze of St George, patron not only of England but of most eastern Christians. Above the caption, “Sancte George Ora Pro Nobis,” the saint astride his white charger held a real spear, red tipped with blood, poised to strike the already wounded green dragon, whose teeth were exposed menacingly, like a monster’s in an old horror film, sneering at the horse’s hooves and the spear at his head. This was the religion of my youth, the religion that was born in the Levant, in which St George vanquished the dragon with his spear and the Archangel Michael conquered Lucifer by the sword. Yet it was the followers of the pacific St Francis of Assisi who kept Christendom alive here. The heroes of the Crusades, the marauding Knights Templar and Hospitaller, had fled long ago.

Padre Giovanni excused himself to discuss something with the women who were cleaning the church for Palm Sunday mass the next day. I thanked him for his time and left.

Walking out of the church courtyard into the road facing Mehmet Udimir’s library, I saw a small cinema, the profane neatly adjoining the sacred. A torn poster stapled onto a board in front advertised an Italian soft-porn film starring the Eritrean actress Zeudi Araya. I went in to take a look, but found the cashier fast asleep in a chair. I decided not to wake him. A doorway covered with a blanket led into a bare room with iron and plastic folding chairs set haphazardly on the cement floor. A flat wooden ceiling above and an arched window along one wall gave the room the feel of an abandoned Spanish mission. A white sheet stretched across one wall served as the screen.

Twenty-five men and boys sat in a room that could comfortably seat 200. There seemed to be no minimum age to watch this film of a bad Italian actor fondling the breasts of, first, a bad Italian actress, and then of Zeudi Araya, a lithe African, who herself soon fondled the breasts of the Italian actress, who reciprocated by fondling Zeudi’s breasts. I feared for the young boys, some aged eight or nine, not because they were exposed to the sight of bare breasts, which I took to be harmless, but that they might grow up to believe the sole object of sex was breast-fondling. The sounds of the lovers’ heavy breathing could hardly compete with the creaking of the old projector. What little dialogue there was, mainly expletives of one and two words, had been dubbed into Turkish. The film itself was grainy, obviously the last print of an extremely cheap production.

Every so often, some of the men got up to leave, no doubt bored. A few more pre-adolescent boys drifted in, without disturbing the somnolent cashier, and sat down to watch the Italian couple find the meaning of life on a tropical island inhabited by a naked black girl. On the wrinkled sheet, an appropriate medium for projecting this particular film, Zeudi Araya sadly waved good-bye to her Italian lovers. They were sailing back to Italy and out of her life forever, which I took as my cue to depart. I did not disturb the cashier. I was certain he preferred his dreams to the twenty pence I would have paid him for my ten-minute excursion into Turkey’s world of soft porn next to the “very old” church.

I returned to the church on Palm Sunday. The old altar and pulpit stood as empty reminders of the old Latin Mass, while microphones on the new altar and lectern carried the voice of Padre Giovanni in Turkish to the eighty people, mostly well-dressed women and children, of the congregation. When the priest reached the Pater Noster, he sang it in Latin. Perhaps he did that so that his mother and father, seated at the front, would understand at least part of the ceremony. They sat like two humble Italian peasants, the mother with a black mantilla on her white hair, and the father dressed in a shirt without tie buttoned at the collar. They were indistinguishable from their fellow Mediterraneans in the church and could easily have been Turkish, Greek, Syrian, or any other race of the civilisation at the “middle of the earth”. Behind them, children dressed in white held leafy twigs, though I wondered why they did not have palm leaves from the trees outside. The Mass ended, and outside other young boys were drifting into the cinema next door for a glimpse of Zeudi Araya’s breasts.

That evening, I strolled about the town. Alexandretta was pleasant, but run-down, with unrepaired roads and crumbling buildings. There was the smell of sea-air, mixed with that of diesel fuel, and the smoke of meat grilling on coals in the popular restaurants. Most of the streets were dark, only half lit by old street lights.

My exploration of Alexandretta’s limited night life was brief. On one street near Mehmet Udimir’s library, two night clubs stood side by side. One was the Kazablanca, and the other was the Tanca Bar. Their exteriors were lit with coloured lights, blinking in the darkness like Christmas trees, lights that were identical in border towns and ports from Tijuana, Mexico, to Trabzon. They beckoned the stranger into a forbidden world which, at its best, would be merely disappointing. There were men standing outside in cheap light suits, bright ties and pencil moustaches – the uniform of cabaret doormen throughout the world. Two of them were beckoning unwary pedestrians into the Kazablanca, so I walked into the Tanca, which at that moment had no one at the door.

As soon as I was inside, I knew I had made a mistake. It was so dark I could not see. I felt my way along a short, low corridor to a doorway which opened onto a long, only slightly less dark room. When my eyes adjusted, I saw that the ceilings were vaulted, strangely covered in a knitted pattern of wood slats. The twining wood all round gave the cavern a sylvan feel, in the worst and most forbidding sense, recalling fairy stories in which the child is warned not to go into the woods alone at night. I waited for the wolf.

The head waiter, dressed like the doormen of the Kazablanca, motioned me to an empty table. Men, alone or in groups, sat at other tables in rows along either long wall between the door and the bar. In the central file between the men’s tables were those of “the girls,” who sat together impassively, more than a dozen of them. None was sitting with any of the men. In ill-fitting dresses, with costume jewellery and dyed hair, they appeared to be either plain bar girls, there to encourage men to buy more drinks, or prostitutes. They were unusually ugly and unforthcoming for either. On the wooden dance floor, in front of which a three-man band was laconically playing “Oriental” music, there were no dancers, strippers, or even magicians.

I sat quietly for a minute trying to discern the sights in the room. Suddenly out of the darkness a waiter was standing in front of me. He had dark, greasy hair, and a moustache out of a 1930s film. He spoke to me in Turkish, which I could neither hear because of the music nor understand. I asked for “bira,” beer in Turkish and Arabic. He returned a moment later with a bottle of Tuborg, an empty glass on a metal tray and a tin dish with a few pistachios in it. He put the tray down on my small round table, and, with a flourish worthy of the uncorking of a bottle of vintage champagne, pulled the cap off the beer bottle. As delicately as any sommelier at Simpson’s with a choice claret, he poured the beer into the glass. Then he smiled and asked me to pay.

I did not understand. He repeated the price. I thought he said “bes” something. I recalled from the Farsi name for backgammon, “Shesh-Besh,” that “besh” was five. Perhaps he was saying “five something,” maybe 500. The band was still playing its loud, discordant music, so it was impossible to be sure. Was it 500 Turkish lira? I handed him a 500 lira note, a little less than one American dollar, but he shook his head. He wrote down a figure: 8,000.

“Eight thousand?” I asked, incredulous.

He nodded.

I did some quick figuring in my head. “That’s over ten dollars!”

He raised his eyebrows, then waved his hand to indicate the beer and the nuts. So, that explained it. With pistachios, a fifty cent bottle of beer cost ten dollars. Perhaps I had to take into consideration the cost of the entertainment and the presence of the girls at their private tables.

“That’s too much,” I said and stood to leave.

The waiter was clearly displeased, but he did not follow me or argue. The band continued playing its awful tune, and the girls sat as placidly as before. I walked into the blackness of the corridor and outside to the cool night. I knew that if I had been somewhere else, say Beirut, the waiter would have tried to force me to pay. He would have chased me and summoned assistance in the form of a security guard with ham fists and a .38 revolver. (In fact, that is exactly what had happened to me on my first night in Beirut in 1972.) The people here were mercifully more relaxed. I decided not to sample the delights of the Kazablanca, although a more serious investigator of the joys of Alexandretta’s night clubs would have persisted.

I walked along the same street to a normal, non-cabaret bar. It was open to the road with large windows and the inside was as lively as the Tanca Bar had been dead. Scores of mostly young men were talking and drinking beer, seated at stools along the curved, marble top bar or at the wooden casks which served as tables. There were no women – no bar girls, no wives or girlfriends, no young Alexandrettan ladies out on their own.

I ordered a pint of draught lager, which was served with a bowl of nuts by a smiling barman and cost 300 lira. The bar was not exactly clean or well lighted, but it was friendly and relaxed, and cleaner and better lit than the Tanca. There were two television sets, one in each of the two rooms separated from each other by the bar. They were playing the video of a Turkish thriller. In every scene, men were either punching or shooting at each other. In one segment, a group of men chased another group of men in cars. When nearly everyone was dead, the video ended and the barman turned it off and put on a cassette of Turkish pop music. But for the language spoken and the absence of women, it could have been a college beer bar anywhere in the Western world – young men in jeans, glasses of lager, music, a kitchen serving hot sandwiches. One man kindly offered me a beer and tried to welcome me into his conversation, but we discovered we had no common language. I tried English, French, Arabic and a few words of Spanish and Italian. He tried Turkish and what might have been Kurdish. He settled for a clink of glasses and a hearty pat on my back. What more could anyone ask?

At breakfast in the Arsuz Hotel, the old waiter in a uniform of black trousers, white shirt and tie, walked slowly across the terrace carrying breakfast on a tray. He tilted his thin body towards the table as he laid out the small breakfast dishes of olives, bread and white cheese. He poured tea from a tin pot into a cup and asked in Arabic if I wanted anything else.

“No,” I said. “Thank you.”

The waiter, whose name was Iskandar, Arabic and Turkish for Alexander, had somehow adopted me in my few days at the Arsuz Hotel. From the time we struck up a conversation in Arabic when I arrived, he would not let the Turkish waiters serve me. He was moody and would run his hand through his thinning grey hair and shake his head disapprovingly if I asked one of them for anything. He would always try to give me something extra, sometimes new green olives alongside the black, sometimes fried eggs, which I could see were not being served to the other guests. Despite his moodiness, he was a gentleman who moved and spoke with great dignity. He was proud that he came, not from this village, but from the ancient city of Antioch. He sympathised when I told him my shower that morning had been cold. Apparently, I was up too early for the sun to have had time to heat the water. I suspected he was solicitous because he enjoyed having a guest in the hotel who spoke his language, however badly and with however strong a Lebanese accent.

When I asked Iskandar where I could find a taxi to take me into Alexandretta, he advised me to save money by using the “dolmüs,” a taxi which picked people up and dropped them off anywhere on a fixed route.

“Why do you want a taxi?” he asked reproachfully. “Taxis cost 5,000 lira. The dolmüs is only 250.” In Turkey, the dolmüs was usually a micro-bus. Like the service in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel, the dolmüs was the normal transport for the poor. They called it “dolmüs”, here because it was “stuffed” with passengers, the way they called courgettes or vine leaves “stuffed” with rice and meat “dolma”.

When I reached the Ford micro-bus parked in the main square, it was already filled with fifteen people in twelve seats. We waited a few more minutes to stuff in another passenger before the bus began its journey north. The driver, his dashboard decorated with a turquoise stone to ward off the evil eye, stopped every so often on the way to let someone off or on, often leaving the road altogether to seek out passengers in the villages.

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.