Rihla (The Journey) – was the short title of a 14th
Century (1355 CE) book written in Fez by the Islamic legal scholar Ibn Jazayy
al-Kalbi of Granada who recorded and then transcribed the dictated travelogue
of the Tangerian, Ibn Battuta. The book’s full title was A Gift to Those who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels
of Travelling and somehow the title of Ibn Jazayy's book captures the ethos
of many of the city and country journeys I have been lucky to take in past
years.
This
rihla is about the ancient city of Diyarbakır.
There is an exciting exhibition due
to commence on the 11th July 2014 in the Chester Beatty Library, in
Dublin entitled Chester Beatty’s A to Z: from Amulet to Zodiac. It is a curated
exhibition of widely diverse but little known and seldom exhibited items from
the huge Chester Beatty collection.
Beatty was a voracious traveller,
and by this I mean that wherever he travelled he was on the lookout to add to
his diverse but very important collection. One of the planned exhibits is a
pamphlet entitled,
A new and large discourse of the travels
of sir Anthony Sherley anight, by sea, and over land, to the Persian Empire.
Wherein many straunge and wonderfull accidents: and also, the description and
conditions of those countries and people he passed by: with his returne into
Christendome.
The pamphlet was printed by
Valentine Simmes for Felix Norton in London in 1601 and was,
Written by William Parry, Gentleman, who accompanied Sir Anthony in his travels.
Parry was part of Sir Anthony
Sherley’s group of Elizabethan adventurers, dispatched by the Earl of Essex in
1598 to help the Duke of Ferrara in a dispute with the Pope only to find on
arrival in Italy their services to be redundant due to the fact that the Duke had
submitted to the Papal authority. Rather than return to London the adventurers
went onwards, having concocted up a plan to establish diplomatic and trade
links with the Shah of Persia, and borrowing money and credit along the way to
enable this purpose.
On their return to London in 1601
William Parry rushed into print his account of the journey but in an
introductory harangue against ‘home-bred vulgars’ who dismissed many travellers
accounts as tall-tales wrote,
And as sure I am that many honest
and true Travellers, for speaking the truth of their own knowledge (for in the
world are many incomprehensible miracles of Nature) yet, because it exceeds the
belief of the inexperienced and home-bred vulgars, they are by them concluded
liers for their labours.
William Parry was not the only
early 17th century traveller to suffer this dismissive fate, and it
was to happen to a lesser or greater extent to a far more important ‘gentleman’
traveller, this time from the Ottoman Empire: Evliya Çelebi (1611- c.1685),
author of a famous ten-book (five volumes) work, the Seyahatname, The Book of
Travels.
Çelebi is the Turkish word for
‘gentleman’ – almost akin in application to hidalgo in Spanish influenced
countries or Esquire in Anglo-Saxon usage – and thought to be a derivative of
the Greek work kurios or kyrios: master.
Snowdrift clearance on road to Mt. Nemrud
These thoughts came to mind as I
waited in my car beside the small ramshackle café-office that controlled the
ferry river crossing on the Route 360 between Adiyaman and Siverek in April
2012. I had descended from the peaks of Nemrut Dag where snow-drifts had made
access to the mountain-top temple complex impossible to the dry, intense heat
of the river valley.
The Ferry from Hutkoy to Firat Iskelesi across the Euphrates (Firat)
My slight irritation with chaotic queuing evaporated when
I took in the scene before me of the lazy snow-fed brown-green waters
meandering by. This was the Euphrates, the Akkadian Purattu, the Turkish Firat;
one of the great rivers of the world and one of the arteries of western
civilisation’s evolution. Kurdish families and tobacco traders with their vans
piled high waited rushed to embark, sharing ice cream and excited chatter.
Looking North along the Euphrates from Firat Iskelesi
I
thought of these fellow passengers and the peoples who had crossed and
re-crossed the great geographically defining river over the millennia; in
pleasure or pursuit, in fear or in harmony: Neanderthal and sapiens, hunter
gathers and pastoralists, Hurrians and Akkadians, Assyrians and Hittites,
Uratians and Medes, Macedonians and Romans, Achaemenids and Selucids, Sassanids
and Pathians, Bedouin and Kurd, Mongols, Tartars and il-Khans, Armenians, Georgians and Turkomen,
Byzantine and Seljuk, Ottomans and Safavids, Sunni and Shia, Nestorian and
Uniate, Crusader and Jihadist, traveller and trader.
Terrain of the route from Mt. Nemrud to Diyarbakir
Road Route from Mt Nemrud to Diyarbakir
Leaving this Irish traveller for one moment I want to return to Evliya Çelebi:
“Let it be known to you all, that
the bearer of this present letter
from our humble self, Evliya Çelebi by name,
is an honourable,
and a man of peace. He has the desire and inclination to
be a
world-traveller and to investigate places, cities, and the
races of men, having
no evil intention in his heart to do injury
to or harm anyone.”
Letter of introduction from the
Oecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul
for the traveller Evliya Çelebi, circ.1667
Evliya Çelebi, was born in
Istanbul in 1611. Known initially as Mehmed Zilli he was the son of the chief
Ottoman court goldsmith and a relative of the later Grand Vizier of the Ottoman
Empire, Melek Ahmed Pasha. Educated in the Palace schools he became an
accomplished linguist, musician, a reciter of the Koran from memory, and
acknowledged wit and raconteur. In his early 20s he was ensnared by the desire
to travel, to observe and to describe the places and peoples of his world. Most
of the journeys had some official function either for the army or as a diplomat
but all involved diversions to try and satisfy his insatiable curiosity. Finally
retiring from those travels in 1672 after a pilgrimage to Mecca and an exploration
of the upper Nile he settled in Cairo and began to write his enormous
description of those travels.
After his death Çelebi’s
Seyahatname remained in the private library of Ozbek Bey, the Emir ul-Hac for
Egypt until sent as a present in 1742 to the great bibliophile, Kizlar Agasi
Haci Besir Aga, the ruler in all but name of the Ottoman Empire under Sultan
Mahmud I between 1730 and 1746. Early translations of small parts of the entire
work and its very unconventional style seemed to confirm the ‘home-bred vulgar’
suspicion that the Seyahatname was an entertaining fairy-tale, due in part to
some of Çelebi’s ‘artistic’ exaggerations, but analysis by succeeding
generations of scholars highlighting the amount of detail recorded and
transmitted in regard to folk-memory, languages, buildings, administrative
practices, and peoples has proven the Seyahatname to be the supreme source for
Ottoman historical research.
Between April and May 1655 Evliya
Çelebi stopped off in Diyarbakır,
while journeying with his relative Melek Ahmed to Van, where Ahmed had been
appointed governor and that was where I was also heading, 357 years later, once
safely across the Euphrates.
Arriving from the Siverek road I
booked into my hotel located near the northern gate, Dag Kapi (Mountain Gate)
of the old city. In a scene reminiscent of Belfast in the early 80s I then had
to dodge around police cordons and huge water cannon mounted armoured trucks to
pass between the bastions of Dag Kapi before turning left to enter the old
sixteen bastioned, four entrance gated citadel on the north-east corner.
Ruins of Roman building NE corner of Diyarbakir Citadel, overlooking the
Secret Gate, Ogrun Kapi from Citadel to River Tigris below.
In the small tourist office I met
by chance the very friendly manager of the restoration team. In my ignorance I
cannot remember his name but he was a true gentleman so I will remember him as
Çelebi, or Çel for short. Çel personally conducted me on a tour of the site,
dodging the goats, including the beautifully restored St George’s Church, the
old jail and the Artukanian palace in our perambulation. Afterwards he
organised for tea to be brought and warned me in my travels in Diyarbakır not
to wander too late into the Hasirli quarter of the city: ‘thieves live there’,
he said. I burst out laughing, and Çel wondered why.
I told him that on the plane to
Konya where I had started this particular journey to Diyarbakır I had told my
next seat passenger, an off-duty Turkish Airlines pilot accompanying his
elderly mother home from a visit to the city for medical treatment, that I was
heading east. He said I should avoid the east because of the ‘Kurdish problem.’
Too many ‘thieves and scoundrels live there,’ he emphasised. Later still on the
trip, while wandering around the ancient site of Harran with a local
schoolteacher I also told him that I was heading further east. He told I should
go wherever I want but to avoid Diyarbakır. ‘Too many thieves live there,’ he had
grunted. I then said to Çel that now I finally made it to Diyarbakır he was now
saying to me, like the pilot and the schoolteacher before, that the city was
entirely safe except for the Hasrili quarter because of ‘thieves’. I’d bet, I
said to him, that if I did wander deep into the Hasrili quarter some helpful
local would then tell me the quarter is entirely safe…. except for one street
or one particular house because ‘thieves’ lived there. Çel smiled and nodded,
yet shrugged his shoulders in a resigned fashion before heading back to his
office.
William Parry, the so-called
"Gentleman" who had travelled in this part of the world in 1601 wrote with stereotypical
ethnic ridicule,
“…we had six days’ journey to
pass (ere we should enter the confines of Persia) through the Courdes’ (Kurds)
country, which is by interpretation the thieves country. The people whereof are
altogether addicted to thieving, not much unlike the wild Irish…”
I knew the Kurds and the ‘wild’ Irish would have a real affinity! However despite a real inclination to meet the mythical
Ali Baba and his henchmen who had spawned such rumours that permeated across
the centuries and the country I never did wander deep into the warren of high
walled but very narrow streets that made up the Hasrili quarter. Only to say it
is the only quarter in the city where the surrounding and enclosing basalt medieval
walls have been torn down and not repaired!
On Gözlü bridge (c.1065) over the Tigris (Dicle)
Around the time that Evliya left Diyarbakır,
another previous ‘gentleman’ resident of that city, the far more formal
historian and geographer Kâtip Çelebi, known also as Mustafa ibn ‘Abd Allah or
Hajii Kalfa(1605-1657) died in Istanbul. An accounting officer with the army he
was as obsessed with collecting reference books and recorded knowledge as
Evliya was with collecting stories. Also multilingual he spent the winter of 1626
and 1633 in Diyarbakır studying with the various religious authorities. His
best-known book in the West is called The Balance of Truth, but from historical
and geographical perspective his Tuhfat al-kibar fi asfar al-bihar (Gift to the
Great ones on Naval Campaigns) and Jihannuma (Showing of the Whole World) are
works of outstanding scholarship.
I am not sure if Evliya and Kâtip
ever met in Istanbul or elsewhere, but they did have one teacher in common and
Kâtip Çelebi was the accounting officer for the sipahis cavalry to which Evliya
was attached. As Evliya had not yet committed his travel diaries and
observations to an integrated whole when Kâtip died and Kâtip the scholar would
not have been aware of the incalculable social and vocal history, that Evliya
had recorded, albeit that of everyday life rather than the permutations of
states.
Four-legged minaret of Seyh Mutahhar Mosque
As I wandered through the old
town of Diyarbakır, I stopped to examine the famous detached ‘four-legged’
minaret of the Seyh Mutahhar Camii, built in 1512 at the request of Kasim Han.
Locals believe that if one passes through the supporting columns seven times
then their wishes will come through.
Decorative interior of Seyh Mutahhar Mosque
Stopping to have a strong coffee
in a nearby café I and tried to imagine Kâtip and Evliya sitting there four
hundred years previously arguing over the coffee the price of a good book or a
watermelon.
Diyarbakır is the watermelon capital of Turkey, if not the world,
and the varieties have many names such as: pembe, surme, ferikpasa, yafa, kara,
alaca and Melek Emir.
It is certain however that Evliya
would always have been good company if somewhat too scurrilous for the bookish
Kâtip. For example in Evliya and Kâtip’s writings they both always referred to
the military campaigns that they had participated in as the “little Jihad” but
thereafter they differed. Evliya, tongue in cheek given the fact he remained a
bachelor, called the “greater Jihad” making love to one’s wife whereas Kâtip
referred to the “greater Jihad” as his endless quest to acquire knowledge.
Despite these differences in approach they both made enormous contributions to
Ottoman history and social geography and the streets of Diyarbakır still
resonate with that contribution.
Diyarbakır (the Land of Copper)
or as Evliya punned Diyar-ı Bakir (The
Land of Virgins) [bakır is the Turkish word for copper and bakir for virgin! the I is pronounced e as in open, whereas i is pronounced ee as in feet. Atatürk changed its name from the former commonly used name Diyâr-ı Bekr (Land of
the Bekr Tribe) in 1937, after expressing concern about the etymology of the
name] still has its medieval black basalt walls. The blackness of the stone
resonates with the long shadows of politics and fate that Diyarbakır has
suffered, and continues to suffer as the ‘capital’ of the Kurdish area in
Turkey. It is also a city struggling from a recent and enormous expansion with a current
estimated population of 1.5 million souls it cannot cater for.
It is interesting to note from newswire
reports in the past few days of Turkey’s willingness to recognise formally a
Kurdish State, Kurdistan in Northern Iraq to thwart the ISIS (ISIL) fanatical new
Caliphate Islamic State expansion, a willingness that is in complete contrast
to sustained efforts by the Turkish state over the years to supress any notion
of Kurdish nationhood.
Restored Interior of Surp Giragos Armenian Church (first built 1376)
Diyarbakır is also the only city in Turkey to have officially acknowledged and
publically commemorated the Armenian Genocide of 1915. There is a memorial
plaque near an old historic fountain in Anzele Park in the North-West corner of
the old city which states in six languages,
We shared the pains so that they
are not suffered again.
The newly-proclaimed Islamic
Caliphate with their policy of Mongol-like barbarous terror and murder – previously
visited on a previous Caliphate by Hidalgu and Tamerlane – of fellow Muslims have
ignored this plea. I have a real concern that Diyarbakır will soon become the
staging point for an all out war between the Kurds and ISIS.
Adapted Mirhab to Christian Prayer Niche in Mar Petyun
Chaldean Church, Diyarbakır
