Marius Kociejowski - The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool

Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime? Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle, Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime?

Lord Byron, TheBrideofAbydos.ATurkishTale

A s we passed through the Syrian Gates my thoughts were not where Id trained them to be, on Strabo or Alexander, but on a turtle I had encountered a few days earlier on the road from Urgp to Mustafapasha. I had been walking the five miles that separate those two places with a young American woman, Grace, who was all that her name implies, a ghost of the Old South in her voice. Although oddly out of place, she had come to Cappadocia in search of the late Byzantine. We were walking through one of the worlds stranger landscapes, the tufa formations like dream cities in the distance, when we came upon a turtle standing at one side of the road, debating whether or not to cross over to the other side. I had a grim vision of asphalt spattered with turtle, so I picked up the creature, intending to move it a few feet over onto the grassy verge. At that moment a red car sped around the corner, from the direction of Mustafapasha, and screeched to a stop. The driver jumped out, opened the boot of his car, came up to me, muttered a single word in Turkish, plucked the turtle out of my hands, dropped it into the boot clunk and, as if this were his sole mission in life, jumped back into his car, made a U-turn and drove back from whence he came. All this happened so quickly that any protest I might have made was only just beginning to take shape.

Well, I reckon there goes somebodys supper, said Grace.

Was this mockery in her voice? The fact is, by drawing attention to the turtles existence I had become the agent of its destruction.

A couple of days later, I met Grace again, on a guided tour of Cappadocia. Our guide, Mustafa, whose enthusiasm for his subject was genuine, was pointing out some of the more extraordinary rock formations near Greme, inviting us to draw visual comparisons.

You see Napoleon over there, he said, the joke dying on his lips, probably for the thousandth time.

And there youll see one resembling a

Turtle! Grace and I simultaneously exclaimed.

What we saw, perched upon one of the pillars of stone, like some terrible ghost summoned to remind us of old crimes, did indeed resemble the hapless chelonian of a couple of days before. (I have to confess that although, by and large, Ive shed the skin of a North American childhood I am still prone to call a tortoise a turtle.) Mustafa smiled uneasily at the tears of laughter in our eyes.

Do Turks eat turtles? I asked him.

A look of disgust formed around his mouth.

No, the French do.

I told him the story of my turtle.

Maybe he was rescuing it from you, he answered.

My spirits lifted to an imagined newspaper banner:

Our bus climbed slowly through the twisting pass of the Amanus Mountains, the Syrian Gates, where Alexander the Great came, fresh from victory, in 333 BC , over Darius on the plain of Issos. The Crusaders came this way too. Along the roadside were small trees which the harikaya, the winter mistral that blows through these parts, whipped into grotesque shapes. The fertile plain of Amuk was in the distance and beyond that, Antakya, the modern Turkish name for Antioch.

Antioch, ah, the very sound that word made.

I had read about the fair crown of the Orient (Orientisapicempulcrum) whose streets were positioned at such an angle that they would catch the breeze blowing off the Orontes. Antioch was, after Byzantium, the most magnificent city in the eastern Roman Empire but, as though such beauty were not sustainable, it was built over two zones of seismic disturbance. The ancients said that when Jupiter in his rage struck the dragon, Typhon, at the foot of Mount Amanus, Typhon, fleeing the gods thunderbolts, burrowed deep into the ground, his subterranean panic resulting in earthquakes. It was here, in the middle of the first century, beneath the gaze of the goddess Tyche, that Christianity got its name. Antioch has also been described as the eye of the Eastern church. What fascinated me above all, though, were the third-century figures of Libanius, the last great pagan orator, author of the Antiochikos, the celebrated encomium of his town, and his pupil, John Chrysostom, John of the Golden Mouth, arguably the greatest Christian orator of his time. If the legend is true, and it sounds too attractive not to believe, when Libanius was on his deathbed his disciples begged that the school he founded be put in the hands of his most brilliant student, and he answered, It ought to have been John had not the Christians stolen him from us. Libaniuss melancholic disposition could be put down to his having been struck on the head when young by a bolt of lightning. We know he suffered from migraine. Christianity, which in his own writings he disdains to mention by name, must have struck him like a second bolt. A habitual bather, Libanius recoiled from the unwashed monks in their dark sackcloth, these fools spouting pieties. If they wished to free themselves of earthly passions, he reasoned, why undo the very education that provided them with the means to do so? Was not classical Greek literature mankinds most precious possession, its study the most effective means of receiving moral training? And was not a rhetorical education the main ingredient of civilisation? My sympathies were with this old heathen whose singed head ached all the more to see the ancient Hellenistic world with its civilised values possessed by the Galilean madness.

As for Chrysostom, he truly was one of Christs athletes. Like so many ascetics of the day he ate but little, went into the desert to engage in contemplation and wore threadbare clothes. What distinguished him from the Great Unwashed, however, was his magnificent eloquence. When he preached the cathedral filled and it is said his sermons were frequently interrupted with applause. The common people who spoke only Syriac would gather around a deacon who translated from the Greek while Chrysostom spoke. Moreover, Chrysostom knew the hearts of the people he preached to, and with his acute sensitivity to matters of the human soul and his deep knowledge of the Scriptures he would render even the most difficult concepts in terms to which his listeners could immediately relate. If the world were about to break in two, with Antioch perched on its fault line, it would do so to the clamour of great voices. Antioch was already becoming for me a poetic landscape, every bit as potent as Yeatss Byzantium, a theatre of the imagination where pagan and Christian are locked in perpetual struggle. Historically, Syria is almost unthinkable without Antioch. If Damascus were Syrias historical centre, Antioch would still be my mythical one.

A young man in a turtleneck sweater, who how shall I say this? resembled a turtle, kept glancing over at me. He was reading a newspaper, the front and middle pages of which appeared to be devoted to some woman with a slightly mannish face or perhaps a man with a rather womanish one.

Zeki Mren is dead, he said with a curious grin on his face.

The previous night Zeki, one of Turkeys most popular singers, collapsed and died of heart failure, only minutes after being presented, on live television, with the gift of his (or her) first ever microphone.