John Freely - The Art of Exile

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John Freely was born in 1926 in Brooklyn. In 1944, at the age of 17, he enlisted in the US Navy and served for two years, including combat service in the Pacific and ChinaBurmaIndia theatres. In 1960 John and his family moved to Istanbul, where he taught physics and the history of science at Boazii University. Aside from his travels across the world, he has lived there ever since. He is the author of over 60 acclaimed travel and history books, including Strolling Through Istanbul, The Western Shores of Turkey, Strolling Through Venice, Inside the Seraglio, Children of Achilles, Light from the East, Celestial Revolutionary and The Grand Turk.

Imagine Zorba the Greek as a wandering Irishman from Brooklyn and you have the beginnings of John Freely. His odyssey has been a wild ride across continents, a microcosm of modern history. Freely is a born storyteller and an expert on everything from mysticism to physics to the back streets of Athens, Istanbul and Venice. The only danger of reading this book is envy for such a dazzling life. Stephen Kinzer

Always, as he writes, sailing against the wind, John Freely provides a wonderful portrait of Istanbul and Athens in their Bohemian heyday, before they turned into harassed business cities.

Philip Mansel, author ofLevant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean

Published in 2016 by

I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd

London New York

www.ibtauris.com

Copyright 2016 John Freely

The support of Boazii University in the publication of this book is gratefully acknowledged.

The right of John Freely to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.

References to websites were correct at the time of writing.

ISBN: 978 1 78453 498 1

eISBN: 978 0 85772 987 3

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Typeset in Goudy Old Style by A. & D. Worthington, Newmarket

In Memory of My Beloved Toots
My Penelope
And for our Crew
Maureen, Eileen and Brendan

Love Also is a Dream
Eaven Boland

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

. Brooklyn, 1927: Peg

. Brooklyn, 1927: John and JF

. Ireland, 1931: JF, Tomas Murphy and Dorothy

. Brooklyn, 1936: JF

. US Navy, 1944: JF

. Brooklyn, 1947: Toots

. Red Bank, 1951: JF and Toots

. Iona College, 1951: JF

. Princeton, 1960: Brendan, Eileen and Maureen

. Istanbul, 1960: Maureen, Brendan, Toots and Eileen

. Spain, 1961: JF

. Skyros, 1962

. Cairo, 1962

. Naples, 1963

. Paris, 1963: Toots

. Athens, 1962

. En route to Naxos, 1965

. Venice, 1996: Toots

. Venice, 1996: JF

. Istanbul, 2009: Toots on her 80th birthday

. Istanbul, 2014: JF

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the help of my editor Tatiana Wilde, who believed in this book and nursed it through to completion. I would also like to acknowledge the support of family and friends who kept me going through the most difficult time of my life: Glen Akta, Selcuk Altun, Tony Baker, Hulya Baraz, Maureen Freely, Eileen Freely Baker, Brendan Freely, Tony Greenwood, mer Ko , Nina Kprl, Emin Saati, Memo and Ann Marie Sarolu, Aye Soysal and our nurse Aye.

INTRODUCTION

I live alone in the House of Memory, in one or another of the suites know as Youth, War, Love, Age and Dreams, where I spend most of my time these days, moving along the interface between remembered Past and fleeting Present. The many rooms in my house are inhabited by the people whom I loved and who are no longer with me; the places where Ive lived, worked, fought and visited; a voyage through tumultuous and uncharted seas; an odyssey which has taken me beyond the Pillars of Hercules in search of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides together with my Penelope, who now dwells in the Country of Dreams, waiting for me. This is the story of our journey.

TWENTY YEARS AGROWING

M y travels began even before I was born. According to my mother, I was conceived in Boston and arrived in New York by train three months before my birth, concealed in her womb, travelling without a ticket on the first of my lifes journeys.

My mother was born in Ireland as Margaret Murphy, but everyone called her Peg. She never used her married name, Mrs John Freely, always identifying herself as Peg Murphy. This was not uncommon among the Irish women of her time, but it was mostly her fierce spirit of independence that made her keep her own name, for she was Peg Murphy and not Missus Somebody Else, she always said. We were led by her to believe that she had been born in 1904, but I eventually discovered that her true date of birth was 1897, though I never learned why she subtracted seven years from her age. Perhaps it was to be eternally young, for she often spoke of going off to Tr na ng, The Land of the Young, where in Celtic myth no one grows old. Years later I read of this land of eternal youth in the first lines from The Wooing of Etain:

Fair woman, will you come with me

to a wondrous land where there is music?

Hair is like the blossoming primrose there;

smooth bodies are the colour of snow

There, there is neither mine nor yours;

bright are teeth, dark are brows,

A delight to the eye the number of our hosts,

the colour of fox-glove every cheek.

Peg was one of 11 children, all but one of whom left Ireland and emigrated to the US. They were helped by relatives in Lawrence, Massachusetts, from an earlier family migration. Her paternal grandfather had died on the roads when he and his family were evicted from their home during the Great Hunger, after which his widow and surviving children had emigrated to America and found refuge in Lawrence. But her eldest son, Pegs father Tomas Murphy, had not taken to life in America and returned to Ireland, though there was no one of his family left there.

Tomas was born in County Kerry on the Dingle Peninsula, the south-westernmost extension of Ireland. When Tomas returned from America he found work as a porter for the Irish Railways on the narrow-gauge line that operated between Tralee, capital of County Kerry, and Dingle, the main town on the peninsula. At the beginning of his first day at work, an English tourist, getting on at Tralee, pointed out his trunk on the platform and arrogantly ordered Tomas to put it up on the luggage rack. Put it up yourself, said Tomas proudly, walking away to help an old Irishwoman board the train. The conductor, observing this, said, Murphy, you will not grow grey in the service of the Irish Railways.

Tomas kept the job for about a year, but then he was dismissed for giving another English tourist a piece of his mind about Britains treatment of Ireland. It was just as well that he did, for the following Whitsunday there was a terrible accident on the Tralee Dingle railway. Locomotive Number One swerved off the tracks on the Curraduff Bridge and fell 30 feet into the river, killing the engineer, the conductor, the porter and 90 pigs, who were the only passengers that day. An old woman in Dingle remarked to Tomas that he had been spared by the hand of God, to which he responded, according to Peg, Im sure the Almighty had more important matters to think about that day than the fate of three Irishmen and 90 pigs.

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