Children of War Read online

  He was one of the reasonable, undogmatic Greeks and I benefited a lot from his great mind as well as his knowledge of Turkish.

  I almost forgot to add the most important thing was our religion. The one thing that kept Cretan Turks from being paralysed by the fear of falling victim to either individual or mass murder was our religion. Our villages were blockaded, our brothers and sisters were killed, and the priests and schools subjected us to a “Greekification” campaign, but they all came to nothing. Our mother tongue had become Greek, and when we were in mourning, we wore black like the Greeks, but our religion ensured we never forgot our Turkishness. So much so, that if someone asked a Cretan Turk, in Greek of course, “Mehmed, are you a Turk?” the typical reply would come, in very poignant Greek, “I swear in the name of Mary that I am a Turk!”

  We were always immersed in both worlds. You can say as often as you like that it is religious unity that makes a nation a nation, as I’m sure in most cases is true, but the Cretans were an exception to the rule and in the most positive way.

  We said, “We are Turks!” but that was as far as it went.

  It’s not that I want to put down our other communities of Turks, I just want to demonstrate how strong both our religious beliefs and our sense of community were. I’ll give you an example of how it was that some Cretans didn’t think they were completely descended from the Turks.

  The first Turkish soldiers that came to the island in 1645 couldn’t have brought any women with them; it was some time after the final conquest of Crete, in 1669, when Turkish women came, or were brought from Rumelia and Anatolia; but that doesn’t mean to say that all of us had mothers from Anatolia or Rumelia. The Cretan Turks were descended from the Ottoman soldiers that came to the island: traced from a patriarchal line that completely overlooked women. It was through this patriarchy, this discounting of women, that we survived and nurtured Turkish Muslim identity in our children. Sultan Ahmet III’s mother, her noble highness Rabia Gulnus Emetullah, was a Cretan. She was from Rethymnon, one of the first places occupied by the Ottoman soldiers. She gave birth to Ahmet in 1673, just four years after the final conquest, so in other words the Sultan’s future mother was a trophy of war, born and taken to the palace in Istanbul well before the seizure of Crete, thus making her of Venetian, Byzantine or North African origin. Nevertheless, as I said before, we never forgot our allegiances and that’s a fact. During the First World War, the Greeks took Cretan Turks into the army, dressed them in Greek uniforms and sent them to the front. These Turks in Greek uniforms were now Greek soldiers, and as such they were to battle with the enemies of the Greeks, to open fire on them. As it turned out, the soldiers hadn’t forgotten their Turkishness. They knew the Greeks’ enemies, Germany, Austria and Hungary, were the Ottomans’ allies, so they cast aside the rules of war and refused to open fire, saying, “Whoever is on the side of the Turks is with us.” They ended up in a military court where they were sentenced to face a firing squad. If I remember rightly, the sentence was never carried out due to pressure exerted by a French general. I’m sure you will remember that it was this war that was the beginning of the end for the Ottoman State.

  Let’s change the subject. When you think of war, with its dead bodies, destruction, massacres, hunger and sickness – what does it all matter in the end? To hell with it all!

  __________

  * Blockade of Chania 1897: An international fleet made up of ships from Austria-Hungary, France, the German Empire, Italy, the Russian Empire, and the United Kingdom blockaded Crete.

  † Eleftherios Venizelos: Leader of the Greek national liberation struggle against the Ottomans and later prime minister of Greece. He was a Cretan and played a significant role in the uprisings.

  * There were numerous Sufi orders on Crete, predominantly in the Bektashi tradition.

  2

  Our village of about 300 people was called Kamish and the Greeks called it “Kalami”; both words mean “reed”. Years later, during the Second World War, from miles away in Ayvalık in Turkey, I heard on the radio that our village, along with the Kandanos district of which it was part, had been razed to the ground by Nazi war planes because of its relentless resistance to Nazi parachutists.* Just a pile of rubble was left behind. What a bitter twist of fate and history – the place that had spewed our blood for forty days during my childhood was, forty-five years later, being punished by another barbarian force.

  It was considered a fairly rich village with its olives, chestnuts, vineyards and vegetable plots. Mostly it produced olive oil and wine but also carob. There was plenty of the fruit we called “kitro” or “tree melon” growing there and we used it to make jam. People were always taken aback when they caught sight of it on the trees. Each branch could only hold one of these fruits, which weighed about a kilo, and they needed a little support from the ground to stay attached. Our Turkish girls, the Ayses and Fatmas, gathered olives and worked in the vegetable allotments, while the Greek girls, the Marias, Evredikis and Photinis, harvested grapes for the wineries. The Greeks produced olives and vegetables as well, but they produced much more grapes and wine. Our village soil was fertile. At the edge of the village, there was a small meadow with a huge plane tree in it. Around the area of the tree was the meeting place of two peoples who had grown into each other; I could say peoples of two separate races, but it would be more honest to say two separate religions. There was just one taverna and it belonged to the Greek, Manusakis. In my early childhood, we used to pass by the door on the way back from the allotments and olive groves and I would greet him with a boyish “good evening” which at the time I thought was very grown up. Manusakis would laugh and reply very sincerely, “Good evening, little Hassan.”

  In later years, as a reward for running to the Greek grocer Hristakis for him, he would place a few pieces of the liver he was frying for the customers on to a coffee-cup saucer and hand it to me saying, “Just taste that, little Hassan!”

  Sometimes it was a few whitebait that were brought in once or twice a week by villagers who had been to the seaside town of Paleochora in the south. The journey used to take them three hours but the five or six oka of fish didn’t lose their freshness. The thought of those crispy fish fried in fresh olive oil! Don’t tell anyone I said this, but you don’t find wholesome, tasty snacks like that in today’s tavernas. The whitebait were held by their tails, two or three at a time, rolled in flour then tossed into a pan of red-hot oil. For lambs’ liver the method was different: the liver was placed in the pan in large pieces and once both sides were fried it was split into pieces with two diagonal cuts of the knife then turned over in the oil a couple more times before being served. In the less crowded world of yesterday, the taverna owners were patient enough to prepare mouth-watering, fresh snacks – even in small villages like ours. The two black olives and slice of red radish that he placed carefully on the side of a small plate did more than just make the table look pretty, they also made the wine go down with gusto. At the end of the day, sitting amongst the five or six tables inside, and around the taverna opposite the tall plane tree, you would always find either a Turk playing his baglama or a Greek turning the handle of his barrel organ.

  Our villagers were respectful and sincere people: there was an instinctive collectivism that meant it was natural for a Turk to help out a Greek at harvest time or for an entire Greek family to gather olives and hoe the land for a Turkish neighbour. The men, with their moustaches worked together in their long boots and the baggy trousers we called “vrakia”. We were a compatible community where both women and men covered their heads in black if they were Greek and white if they were Turkish. Because of our religious beliefs we were called the Turks, the Muslims or the Mohammedans, but there was no more to it than that. Our holy days were called Bayram, whilst those of the Greeks were known as Yortu, and the mutual respect that bound our communities together was never clearer than at these traditional times. During a Greek festival, the Turks would greet their neighbours in Greek wit
h “Happy Yortu,” and on Turkish holy days the Greeks would say, “Happy Bayram.” In the winter evenings, it was usual for the women to visit each other and all of us children loved the visits. I for one was passionate about Aunt Evangeliki’s sausage-shaped Turkish delight. When I ate too much, Aunt Evangeliki would catch sight of my mother’s reproachful glances and say, “Let him eat, Zeynep – the child loves it,” at which my poor mother would bow her head.

  I don’t know why I’m rambling on about these things; instead of telling you about our house, I’m reminiscing about community relations. Who knows why! Probably because it was an undeniable fact that our communities were utterly melded together; but also because those beautiful years stamped a glorious, indelible impression on my childhood memory. The quarter where we lived wasn’t a separate one; we were together with the Greeks. The only separate things were the mosque and the church. I should add that the village imam, Sherif Efendi, and the priest Trasakis always greeted each other pleasantly and asked after each other’s wellbeing. At that time, these two holy men had a constructive attitude towards each other, our people got on well, lived in peace and were happy. But later…

  Our village house had two floors: to the right of the entrance was a room not much higher than two span from the ground, and in the room after that was the stove and a space to store kitchen utensils. The toilet and stable were in the yard outside. On the top floor were two rooms, one of a fair size and another smaller one. My parents and sister Nazire slept upstairs and I slept downstairs, with my older brother Mahmut, in the small room to the right of the entrance. There was an empty space under our room that provided night-time shelter for the chickens, and first thing in the morning I would stretch my arm through the gap behind the steps into the room, pick up a couple of eggs and take them to my mother who would be working away at the stove. She would add the egg yolk and a generous scoop of sugar to a glass of milk, give it a good stir and then make sure I drank it.

  Summertime guests would be seated on the divan by the entrance and winter visitors were sent to the room I shared with Mahmut. The beds were always tidied away in the morning so the place always had an orderly look about it. There were no big changes made at home between winter and summer because the village had a mild climate. In fact, the only significant shift was to bring the small outside stove into the house, along with the kettle that was constantly perched on it, steaming away, stuffed with chamomile, sage and lime leaves for those with a chill, which was pretty much everyone in the case of us kids with our constantly runny noses. At the side of the stove hung bunches of thyme and clusters of garlic and onions. In winter, the house was filled with the scent of healing herbs and bulbs from the allium family, whilst in summer the air inside and outside the house was filled with the sweet fragrance of carnations and basil, planted in earthenware pots and troughs of all shapes and sizes. They were in every sense the typical smells of a country cottage, changing with the seasons.

  Now here I am in Ayvalık, a seaside district in Turkey, my motherland, and it fills me with sadness when I look around at the narrow streets and houses with neither garden nor yard; I feel strangely out of place. There are no smells of chamomile, sage and lime in the air – just the stink of mould, which seems to rise up from every corner of the dark buildings, deepening my homesickness. Believe me, I know how pointless it is for me to sit here in the land of my distant ancestors, reminiscing about Crete. So what if about fifteen generations of my family lived there? In the end, the Greeks cried “Turks out!” They wanted to throw us from the land where we were born and bred and that’s just what they did. The protestors in Istanbul at the time might have shouted, “Crete is our soul, for our soul we’ll give our blood,” but as my colleague Vladimiros, the printer, kept repeating at the time, over and over again like a record, “Hassanakis, believe me, Crete is done for! You people don’t know what our politicians and church are capable of. They’ll stop at nothing. They’ll fool everyone and, believe me, they’ll throw you all out. One day you’ll be saying, that’s just what Master Vladimiros said would happen.”

  So we ended up here, in Anatolia, where the people, our fellow Turks and Muslims, tell us we are “half infidel” or “spawn of infidels”. As for our customary diet, full of vegetables and fresh herbs collected from the hills and valleys, they just can’t understand it and instead mock us saying, “They steal from the cow’s mouth.” They look down on us and keep their distance. Way back in history, our ancestors were scattered far and wide like seeds. We grew and spread, then, just when we were reaching maturity, they ripped our roots from the ground and threw us out. In one sense, it’s true that the place we have been brought to is where we started out from all those years ago, but it doesn’t compare to the soil, the water and the air that reared us – not at all. Would you call that human fate or the handiwork of those that stand to profit from manipulating two peoples, who peacefully co-exist, into fighting amongst themselves?

  My father, Ali Agha, with his huge white moustache and ruddy complexion, wore the short boots characteristic of Crete, a waistcoat and the Greek baggy trousers, vrakia, that were just like the trousers we call shalvar in Turkish. Doubtless he was a hardworking man, so much so that even after Friday prayers he would go straight to our allotment at the edge of the village and put in a few hours’ work. My mother was always telling him he should rest, even if just on Fridays, but his answer was always the same, “It’s no sin to work once prayer time is over. In any case, Nazire is grown up now and we’re getting her married! And Mahmut and Hassan will need a house, land, animals. If I don’t work I don’t see that happening!”

  He had never been to any school, not even the religious kind, but he was one of those people who was born wise. He spoke slowly, taking care over his words, and earned the trust of his companions with the experience he had gained on the land and from life in general. He used to ask the local imam to calculate how much he should have been paid for the fruit, vegetables and olive oil he had sold; this was how he found out if any of his customers had tricked him. He was an affectionate man. I always remember, when I was about nine or ten years old, it was the only time it had ever snowed in the village, and none of the children even knew what snow was. In the excitement of seeing it for the first time, I spent most of the day running around throwing snowballs, barefoot and bareheaded, so needless to say I caught a chill and ended up in bed. My father had been in the garden, shaking all the snow from the leaves to prevent any damage to the trees as people said it turned the citruses black. In the evening, my back was swollen, and he massaged olive oil into my back and chest saying, “Come on, it will be good for you if I rub this oil in all over,” and smiling away he massaged the oil in everywhere, right up to my groin.

  He was easy-going, but what stays in my memory about him is that he was the sort of man who made sure he was listened to; that, and his breakfasts. On the days when he wanted to take Mahmut and me to the allotment or olive grove, he would wake us up before daybreak, lay the table with cornbread, or if there was none, some of the homemade rusks my mother made from leftover bread, and some olives taken from the jar. He would fill the large earthenware cups with sage tea and place a few pieces of cheese on the table. After breakfast we set off to work. He never smoked and barely knew the meaning of the word taverna. In the evenings, he drank a huge bowl of milk that we got from Aunt Evangeliki in exchange for some fruit or vegetables as we didn’t have any sheep of our own. He was such a strong and powerful man that when he walked, I and Mahmut, who was five years older than me, could only keep up with him by running flat out. In the days before I could read, he told me our great-grandfathers came from Konya in a place called Anatolia. To me, a child who knew nothing of the world, let alone where all the countries were, they were magical words. I have no idea about my mother’s roots, no one ever mentioned her ancestors or where they were from. She was a quiet, placid woman who, when speaking to my father, used the respectful term Efendi, but more often than not she call
ed him “Agha”.

  My big brother Mahmut was another matter altogether. He studied with the imam, Sherif Efendi, for two years but only learned to read the Qur’an. He wasn’t up to reading much and still couldn’t work out the sums for the thirty or forty oka of oil my father sold. When he wasn’t working on the allotment or olive grove, and had some free time such as on Fridays, he would go and play with his friends on the other side of the meadow. He was tall for his age and had a certain charm about him. By the age of fifteen he was already making headway with the girls. Father didn’t let my older sister Nazire help with hoeing the allotment and he would only take her to the land to gather vegetables or olives. She took care of the barn and the chickens at home, or helped mother at the loom, sewing our clothes, sashes, blankets and kilims for the floor. Weaving, weaving, weaving. I don’t remember the loom ever being still. Sometimes she even earned money weaving for the neighbours and placed it in a chest to go towards the shortfall in her dowry. She was promised to the Turkish grocer, Arif, and the wedding preparations were underway. She was of medium height with dark features and was a skilful woman, accustomed to housework – the type who would be a great support to her husband. The wedding was supposed to have taken place already but had had to be postponed because of rumours about Arif and a Greek woman. The Muslims had watched the Greeks closely afterwards and started making enquiries about the story. It turned out that Arif’s relationship with the woman was little more than tradesman’s patter and that there was no shameful scandal behind it. It was concluded that the gossip probably emanated from the Greek grocer Hristakis and it occurs to me now that it was a ploy to prevent Arif going into the village grocery business. Some people were not happy to see him exchange his life on the land for the grocery trade.