The Pillars of Hercules

As I read this book, dayspring in the shape of a rising tide of pinkness gathered in the sky over the low hills of Anatolia, and the moon still showed in the clear sky. Then, towards Adana, bright daylight heated the bus, and field-workers and vegetable pickers traipsed down the road all bundled up, carrying hoes. Farther on, people bent double were already working in the fields. This green and fertile part of Turkey was chilly and sunny and flat, in the delta of the Seyhan River, the tucked-in corner of the Mediterranean, next to the Bay of Iskenderun.

Iskenderun itself, its puddled streets lined with thick palm trees, lay at the foot of a range of the dark Amanus Mountains, and beyond its small houses, and its onion fields, was the sea again, small waves slapping, the surface hardly disturbed, like the shore of a lake. It was the old sloppy Mediterranean Sea, not a body of water with many moods, but looking shallow and tame and almost exhausted. There was no fishing here, not even any swimming. And this place which Alexander the Great had founded after a great battle—until fairly recently it had been known as Alexandretta—was just a little tiled-roof town. Its beach, littered with windblown trash and dumped junk, was also reputedly the place which, when “the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomitted Jonah upon the dry land,” the land that was this very beach. But here, as elsewhere, the sea is now no more than a backdrop to olive groves and fruit trees.

This province, Hatay, is disputed. The Syrians claim it as rightfully theirs, but the Turks control it. The people themselves speak a heavily guttural Arabized Turkish, and the markets both in Iskenderun and in Antakya—where I gave up and got off the bus and staggered, followed by hawkers and small boys, through the market to a hotel—seemed as Middle Eastern as it was possible to be, without many veils.

Recovering from the bus ride to this town on the border of Syria, I stayed here in Antioch (Antakya) for a night, and the next day hiked from monument to monument—the Roman bridge, the mosque and aqueduct, the Church of Saint Peter. There were ruined fortresses outside of the town, and one of them, the Castle of Cursat, had been built by crusaders.

More impressive to me than anything else was the market at Antakya, which was almost medieval in its bustle and its mud, small boys quarreling and fooling among the fruit stalls and meat markets, and the full floppy costumes of the country people, the women in pantaloons and shawls, the men in beards and gowns. The commerce was brisk—the selling of fruit and fish, the retailing of tonics and potions—and it was also a meeting place of people from the mountains and the seashore, from Turkey and Syria and Lebanon. It was not a covered bazaar but rather a large area of rough ground, where people were yakking and striking deals and watching staticky television and talking over bundles and sacks of lemons and heaped-up blankets, as boys rushed around selling glasses of tea on trays, or barrows of dried fruits and nuts. Cripples, beggars, beards, deformed people with boils and knobs on their faces, all the sects of Islam, and mud puddles and flaming braziers and the sizzle of meat, and a great sense of filth and life.

In this remote place people came up to me, and it was either a shaven-headed boy or else a hobbling old man, and they greeted me in Turkish, asking “Saat kach?”—What time is it?—because I was wearing a wrist-watch. I was perversely gratified because they had asked in Turkish, which proved that my long bus trip had had the effect of making me seem somewhat Turquoise, as rumpled and muddy as the rest of them. So I went about feeling anonymous and happy. The disciples of Jesus spent a year in Antioch preaching and it was in Antioch (Acts 11: 26) that, perhaps in answer to a puzzled question, “What sort of Jews are you?” they first began to call themselves “Christians.”

Looking for another bus to the Syrian coast, I was told that the western border was closed and that I would have to enter Syria by the Bab el Hawa—the Gate of the Wind—and proceed to Aleppo, before heading for Latakia, on the coast. It was hundreds of miles out of my way, but it was all right with me. I had heard that Aleppo was a pleasant place with a famous bazaar. And there was a railway train from there through the mountains to the Mediterranean.

There were only four of us on the Aleppo bus. Turks are not welcome in Syria, and not many Syrians ever get across the border. I sat with Yusof, a talkative and untruthful-seeming Tunisian who gave me several conflicting reasons for going to Syria.

“See this? Tunisian passport,” he said, shuffling the thing. “And this is an Iraqi passport. Why? Ha! You have so many questions.”

But even when I stopped asking questions he volunteered some strange information.

“I have a U.S. visa. I have lived in Verona. You speak Italian? Buon giorno! I sell gold—no, not always.”