word hali, for example, is translated as carpet, but does that mean it corresponds exactly to our word carpet? I’m not sure. What we call a carpet is the thing we order from a store that sells rugs. We choose the colour, say, rose or a simple beige weave, and that’s it. Or we might purchase a throw rug at Ikea because it’s on sale or because it looks as if it might match our wallpaper.
In Turkey a halim (the full root) is an ancient art form. I saw women working on looms, painstakingly weaving intricate patterns one line at a time so that a single carpet might take months to finish. I’d seen the sheep’s wool and the silk cocoons — little beads, smooth and shiny — that rattled with the remains of the insects still inside. I’d seen the great vats for dying colours: real indigo, saffron and the milk of daisies, chestnuts for brown. I felt the heat beneath the vats, and I’d grown dizzy with their vapours.
All this magnificent feast of the senses is wrapped up in halim. It’s not there in carpet.
The same could be said for the verb to buy, which in Turkish, almak, involves much more than the slapping down of a credit card. For any self-respecting Turk there’s the interminable game of haggling to be undertaken — with counter-offer after counteroffer slowly being whittling to a middle ground. After and only after these long negotiations does the shopkeeper pause and slowly nod, graciously accepting a final deal.
And so, no, the two languages — English and Turkish — aren’t merely reversed grammars of the same thing. The individual words are place holders for our concepts, our whole way of thinking about a thing or an action. It’s quite simple: by words our thoughts are given wings.
I did, however, want to sample one thing while I was in Istanbul — a Turkish bath. It is, or at least was, something central to the culture. So, just up from Sultanahmet, I found Cağaloğlu Hamami, a three-hundred-year-old bathhouse. From the very beginning I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was doing. Apparently, some pretty famous people had been there in the past — Kaiser Wilhelm II, Franz Liszt, and even Edward VII, king of England. So what were these guys up to exactly?
I confess I had visions of a harem. I’d seen the one true Harem just that morning over at Topkapi Palace. It was the name of a certain part of the palace where the sultan’s girls actually lived. So at the bathhouse my suspicions were confirmed when I was shown into a little room and told to take off all my clothes. This was going to be good, I thought. I had visions of the dance of the seven veils, ill-begotten dreams of nubile young Turkish maidens feeding me grapes.
The door opened, and a large hairy man stood there. He looked like Joseph Stalin in a tight white T-shirt. “Çabuk,” he growled. Later I learned that this meant “Quickly.”
I stood up, radiant in my nakedness. With hairy arms, the man wrapped a towel around my midsection. “Çabuk Çabuk,” he said. That meant “C’mon, you lard-assed white man, get a move on.” In Turkish there isn’t really a word for “very much.” To emphasize something you say it twice. You might call a pretty girl (of which there are a surprising number in Turkey) güzel or beautiful. Whereas a real humdinger of a supermodel would be “Güzel güzel.”
My bath attendant, the ever-faithful Stalin look-alike, nodded his swarthy head down the hallway. Suddenly, I felt as if I were in prison. What had I gotten myself into?
He led me to another door and all but pushed me in. I was alone in an ancient domed room. Water plopped from somewhere. I started sweating profusely, but then realized this huge area was a steam room. High above in the domed ceiling were little holes covered inexplicably with coloured glass so that the place reminded me of a cathedral. The coloured beams of light angled through the steam, and I found a piece of rock to sit on. It wasn’t overly hot, and after ten minutes or so, sitting alone in the dreadful echoing silence, I figured I would at least wash my hair. It needed it, and though I hadn’t brought shampoo, I had smuggled in a bar of soap. There were rock sinks built into the walls and taps above them, so I lathered up my hair. That was a mistake. The sinks had no drains. They were just big bowls really, and surely, I could see now, only meant for splashing cold water onto your face. I left a floating scum of soap bubbles and stray hair, committing a diplomatic gaffe and an insult to all of Turkey.
What about Stalin? What would he do to me when he saw what I’d done? Carefully, I snuck out through the massive wooden door on the large clackety wooden clogs I had to wear on my feet. So I didn’t even make it halfway down the hallway before Stalin appeared again, tipped off by the footwear. I’d thought about kicking the clogs off, but the floors had several centuries of green mildew on them, and I figured I’d take my chances.
Stalin beckoned, a ham-hock palm waving me toward him. He grabbed me by the arm, and in a swift movement removed my modest towel. Then he led me into a proper shower room, sat me in a wooden chair by the wall, and watched as I went through the motions of washing.
I smiled at him once or twice, but he only grunted. When I finished my absurd pantomime, he moved toward me again, and in as neat a move as I’ve ever seen, folded a towel over my head and another around my midsection. They were neat folds, the kind a waiter in a fancy restaurant achieves with napkins. I felt like a walking piece of origami.
He took me back to the room where my clothes were, and I sat in silence for a while, then dressed and strolled out. There was no one to see me out, and I wondered if this was the same treatment kings once received. Or what about Kaiser Wilhelm — surely, that brusque Teutonic emperor had required something more?
Later I learned that Stalin would have given me a massage if I’d paid him more money. I talked with other travellers who had gone for this treatment and been soundly thrashed like a slab of meat in a packing plant. Perhaps I’d missed the richness of the cultural experience, but I was happy Stalin had kept his oven mitts off me.
Turkish is a fascinating language. It’s an agglutinating tongue, which means it piles suffixes onto the ends of root words in an almost endless train of syllables. The verb to break is, for example, kirmak (the undotted i is a particular feature of Turkish, giving an i sound such as in the English word sir). From this root you can get agglutinized constructions like kirilmadilar mi, meaning “Were they not broken?”
Turkish, moreover, is related to most of the languages of central Asia — to Uzbek and Azerbaijani, even to Mongolian. Recent scholarship has collected substantial evidence that Korean and even Japanese might also be members of this same wide-ranging family. There are even scholars who see a link between Turkish and the Uralic agglutinating languages — Hungarian and Finnish, for instance.
So how was Turkish peppered across half the world? The answer lies in the fabled Silk Road.
It was from the shores of Constantinople that Marco Polo began his journeys. He came up to Constantinople from Venice but didn’t bother to write about that part of the trip, since the route was well-known to European travellers. Constantinople, after all, was then the seat of the Byzantine Empire. There wasn’t much left of the Byzantines’ magnificence, but their territory had served as a base for the Crusades of the past few centuries and they were still Christian.
From Constantinople, Polo crossed the Bosphorus and began his famous journals. He accompanied his father and uncle along the Silk Road, east across Afghanistan and into the western deserts of China. In time he came to the pleasure palaces at Ta-tu, court of the great and wise Kublai Khan.
Ta-tu
