of the Taurus Mountains to the Suez Canal. The buyers of the timber offered to pay with gold or, if the brothers preferred, shares in the Suez Canal Company. The Nader brothers chose gold, and with it they bought land in the burgeoning port of Mersin. They planted orchards and, in 1875, built two large stone houses for themselves on Mersin’s main drag. The houses formed a single immense building two stories high and a block wide, with the ground floor given over to commercial units; sixty or so years later, these premises were transformed by my grandfather into the Toros Hotel.
Such fragments of lore aside, the Christian community is fully implicated in Mersin’s general lack of retrospection. I never grew up with a clear sense of what these strange French-speaking Turks were doing in Mersin, or who they – we – really were. I knew that some families had connections with Lebanon, but I had little idea of what that meant. We were in Mersin now, and there was very little else to say.
In order to gain a picture of historic Mersin, I had to leave the city – leave Turkey, in fact – and track down the writings of travellers kept in European libraries. I read that in 1818, when Captain Beaufort went there, Mersin consisted of nothing more than a few wretched huts raised on piles. Some years later, a long-term English resident of Tarsus called William Burckhardt Barker noticed that on the slightest appearance of bad weather, Arab lombards from Syria would take shelter at a spot known as Zephyrium, or Mursina, where the roadstead was excellent. Mursina was a name derived from the Greek for myrtle, because immense bushes of that plant were practically the only thing to characterize the site. In 1838, there were only a few magazines and huts there, and bales of cotton were left out in the rain until French vessels arrived to ship them to Marseille. Barker saw an opportunity. He built large warehouses capable of holding the cargoes of fifteen vessels at one time, and soon these were filled with the produce of the hinterland for export: cotton, wool, wheat, barley, wax, sesame-seed, linseed, madder-roots, Persian yellow-berries, hides. Imports – sugar, coffee, indigo, cochineal, soap, Persian tobacco – also brought traffic to the area, and before long others had built magazines and settled there.
However, a Frenchman who visited Mersin in 1853, Victor Langlois, saw only a damned, marsh-covered, fever-devastated land with a population that decreased every year; the air was lethal, the water insalubrious, the fruit harmful. (He was not exaggerating: in the Adana plain, entire colonies of Circassian refugees, escaping from Russian anti-Muslim oppression, would be rubbed out by malarial fever.) By April 1875, things had noticeably improved. The Reverend E.J. Davis, arrived from Egypt, gained the impression of a bustling scala whose success he attributed to the active demand for cereals consequent upon the Crimean War. Mersina, as the port was known to westerners, struck the Reverend as a ‘flourishing little place; its bazaars, thronged by the various races who have settled here, present a scene of great animation; some of its streets are paved with square blocks of limestone; and there are many really good stone houses’. Officials apart, the Reverend observed, very few Turks lived in Mersin: ‘As usual in ports of these regions, Greeks and Christians of Syria are the principal inhabitants – the Greeks being energetic, enterprising, and many of them rich. The purely European residents are very few in number; an unhealthy climate and the lax commercial morality of the place, render it almost impossible for a European to thrive, or even live there.’ He noted that nearly all the Syrians spoke French – ‘it is remarkable how great an influence France has had upon the Roman Catholic population of Syria’ – and was impressed by the Greek hospital and church and, especially, the Greek school (which, forty years later, my grandmother would attend), where masters fluent in French taught ancient and modern Greek, sacred history, French, geography, arithmetic. Then, in July, when he returned to Mersin to catch a steamer home, Davis saw a dark side of the town that almost cost him his life. Descending from cool mountains, he was horrified by an intensely humid and enervating heat and the spectacle of sick people lying on mattresses at the door of their houses. To make things worse, cholera had appeared in Syria, and the service of the Russian steamers had been suspended due to a ten-day quarantine imposed by the Ottoman government on all arrivals from Syria. Davis was forced to sweat it out in Mersin. He almost didn’t make it. With the whole town in the grip of fever, and funerals passing regularly under his windows, and sleep impossible during nights he compared to a ‘damp, yet hot, oven,’ Davis fled for the relative relief of Boluklu, a village in the foothills about an hour’s ride away, where the air was marginally better. He stayed in the Mavromati house – the house, that is, of my uncle Fonda’s great-grandfather. Eventually, after eight feverish days during which he lay tormented by horrid dreams and visions, he booked a passage on a French mail steamer to Marseille and escaped Mersin’s ‘entrancing beauty and deadly air and heat’.
There was one book, however, that I came across not in London libraries but in Mersin, at my grandmother’s apartment in the Toros Hotel. A first edition with crumbling leather covers, La Syrie D’Aujourd’hui, by Dr Lortet of the Faculty of Medicine of Lyon University, was an account of the author’s travels in the Near East in 1875, the year that saw the visit of the Reverend Davis and the acquisition of Mersin property by the Nader brothers. Dr Lortet observed that there wasn’t much more to this port than thirty or so houses, and there was not even a proper harbour, vessels having to anchor in the roadstead some distance out at sea. His description was illustrated by an etching of Mersin and its ‘miserable buildings’: a strand, jetties, some beached rowing-boats, a huddle of two-storey buildings. Dr Lortet did say that the town had the most picturesque population you could wish to see, a commingling of Turks, Arabs, Syrians, negroes, Ansarians and others, all dressed in brilliant, variegated clothing. Behind the houses, orchards surrounded by verdant hedges grew vigorously; the pear and apricot trees were particularly fine, producing fruit much sought after in Beirut and Rhodes. Dr Lortet took a horseback trip to Tarsus. The countryside he passed through seems to have been paradisal. Ploughs drawn by buffaloes and camels and oxen churned up dark, fertile earth, clouds of aquatic birds rose from waters full of turtles, and storks pecked in the wake of the ploughs. The plain of Mersina, noted Dr Lortet, saw an abundance of boars, francolin, yellow-necked vultures, gazelles and a tigerishly striped deer. Beavers, black otters, jackals and hyenas were still in evidence, and the hunter in the pine forests might encounter the leopard. In the dark forests of the Cilician mountains were also bears, badgers, black squirrels and, at the highest summits, gigantically horned goats. ‘The English,’ Dr Lortet commented, ‘have been inspired in their recent annexation of Cyprus. From that island, they are the absolute masters of the beautiful gulf of Alexandretta, which delivers to them, through Mersina, eastern Asia Minor, and, through Alexandretta, Aleppo and the upper valley of the Euphrates; thus they hold the key to the Mesopotamian railway line which is soon to be the great route between the Far East and Europe.’
The significance of this comment would only later become evident to me. My immediate attention was fixed on the next sentence: ‘A great future evidently lies in store for the port of Mersina,’ wrote Lortet, ‘once [blank] is no longer an obstacle to the creation of lines of communication to the surrounding valleys.’
The blank was arresting. Three or four words had been removed from the text – scraped away so as to leave a vacancy. A few pages later, there was a second such intervention. The port of Alexandretta, Lortet wrote, was a dreadful settlement lost in swampland and half-invaded by green, pestilential pools. The majority of its houses were huts swarming with pale, emaciated wretches, the children particularly afflicted by typhoid fever and dysentery. ‘And yet all it would take is a few channels and a few swings of a pick to make all of these stagnant waters run to the sea and save these pour souls condemned to an early death. But this work will never be done [blank].’ Here, three whole lines were scraped away. What instrument the censor had used for this purpose, I couldn’t be sure; perhaps a knife, or a specialized print-scraping instrument from a censor’s tool-kit of effacers. I couldn’t say who the censor was, when he did his work, or what (presumably anti-Turkish) sentiments he obliterated. Nor, for that matter, did I know how this book had come to be in the possession of Joseph Dakad’s brother, Georges, from whom my grandmother had received it as a gift. I meant to ask Mamie Dakad about this, as I meant to ask her many other questions; but, a reluctant interrogator, preoccupied by swimming and eating, I never did. In January 1995, while I was in India on my honeymoon, my grandmother died
