The sun was slow to set. The sea, where it met the breakwater, was quiet and unmoving. Nothing had disturbed Alexandretta for fifty years, an unpredicted moment of dull tranquillity in a bloody history of more than two millennia. The Bay of Alexandretta lay at the undefined point where the Aegean gave way to the Mediterranean. It was the northern frontier of the Levant – the 440 miles of coast between here and Al Arish in Gaza. Every port on this eastern Mediterranean shore, and every inland city each port served, had been invaded, besieged and destroyed dozens of times before and after Alexander the Great briefly united them in his empire. How long would this historic moment last? And when would the rest of the Levantine coast to the south, troubled by war and insurrection, enjoy again a generation of evenings like this one in Alexandretta?
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