The Pillars of Hercules

From Bursa, then, came Mehmet Saffiyettin Erhan, an architect and historian of old wooden buildings, traveling with his shawled and aged mother, Atifet. And the Sags (Sevim and Bahattin), and General Mehmet Samih, three-star general and ace fighter pilot, known to all as Samih Pasha, who boasted of the windows he had broken with the boom of his jet engines over Nicosia, just before the partition of Cyprus. And Mehmet Cinquillioglu and his wife, Fatma, the four Barrutcuoglu, including little Lamia, the three Demirels, and the Edip Kendirs. And there were some Kurds, too, ones I thought of as concupiscent Kurds, and …

Oh, give it up. But studying the names outside the Purser’s Office on the Akdeniz passed the time. We had traversed the Dardanelles during the night, and now, in sunshine, I was standing at the rail with Mehmet Erhan, the architect.

“If architecture is frozen music, that looks like a minaret in D.”

“Pardon?”

We were sailing past a mosque, into the port of Izmir. The ship was three hours late, Mehmet said, not that it mattered. Mehmet was a fund of information. Canakkale—the Dardanelles—meant “cup” in Turkish. The Turks were rather proud of having slaughtered so many foreign troops at Gallipoli. Under the leadership of Kemal Ataturk, the Turks had driven the Greeks out of Smyrna (Izmir) in a decisive battle in 1923, and founded the Turkish Republic. Ataturk’s house was in Izmir, if I wanted to see it.

“What dots Akdeniz mean?” I asked.

“White Sea,” he said. “It is the old Turkish name for the Mediterranean.”

The Black Sea was Kara Deniz, the Red Sea Kizil Deniz, and beyond that headland was the Greek island of Chios, where Homer was born.

“If there was a Homer,” I said. There seemed to be some doubt whether Homer ever existed—that the poetry just accumulated over the years, with recitation, and that the idea that Homer was blind came from the description of Demódokos, the blind minstrel in The Odyssey.

… that man of song

whom the Muse cherished; by her gift he knew

the good of life, and evil

—

for she who lent him sweetness made him blind.

—The Odyssey,

Book VIII, II. 67–70 (translation by Robert Fitzgerald)

Mehmet, who had read The Odyssey in Greek, said he had also heard of that possibility.

The Akdeniz docked and we were told that it would not leave until late afternoon. I had time to take a taxi down the coast to Ephesus, the great Graeco-Roman harbor city, where St. Paul had preached and was buried, and where the Virgin Mary spent her old age. Mary was not buried there; there was no body. At death she had been levitated from the planet Earth in a cosmic transportation known as the Assumption, an article of faith among Catholics. It is an incident the New Testament neglects to mention—that Mary “was assumed body and soul into Heavenly glory” like Enoch and Elijah was made official by Pope Pius XII in 1950—though you would have thought someone would have noticed it at the time. The idea of a little Jewish woman, known variously as the Mother of God and the Queen of Heaven, being propelled by divine force bodily into outer space (“angel wing’d, gorgeous as a jungle bird!”) cannot be called unmemorable.

The Panayia Kapili, or House of the Virgin, five miles down the road from Ephesus, had been spruced up and was no more than a novelty, but it had a lovely view, which was all that mattered.

There were brothels in Ephesus, as there had been at Pompeii, and graffiti, too, but this was altogether a greater city, and more of it remained from antiquity. My problem was that the whole time I was in Ephesus I worried about the ship leaving Izmir without me, so I hurried back. At the gangway, a crew member said there had been a new change of plan—the ship would not be leaving until nine.

I needed money. The banks were closed, and so were the money changers. But on a back street of Izmir I saw embedded in an old wall something that looked like a cash machine. I stuck in my ATM card, issued by Fleet Bank in East Sandwich, Massachusetts, punched in some numbers, and out came ten million Turkish liras ($280), just like that.

Some screeching schoolchildren were leaving a large building on the seafront. A sign on the front door said that it was Ataturk’s seaside house, the one that he had used in the 1920s, when he was leading the war against the occupying Greeks. I went inside and recognized my dinner companions from the previous night on the ship, and their children and grandchildren. One of the ten-year-olds spoke English. They were all from Ankara, he explained. They had taken the train to Istanbul to catch the ship. He said that his parents and grandparents were impressed that I had chosen to visit the house of their famous Ataturk.