To Diyarbakir.

The Mayd Hotel had two female staff, one who cleaned the rooms and got them ready for guests, and one who prepared breakfast and light snacks during the day. Both women, one of whom wore a headscarf, liked to smoke and were occasionally encountered sucking on cigarettes on balconies or in empty bedrooms. They worked harder than the males in the hotel, the owner himself and his four other employees. The latter shared duties on reception, carried guests’ bags to their rooms, assumed responsibility for the laundry and undertook odd jobs to ensure the smooth running of the hotel.

It was the last breakfast of the trip, so I went for broke. I had honey with yoghurt, borek, fried potatoes, grilled peppers, four types of olive, two types of cheese, tomatoes, boiled egg, simit, cherry jam, strawberry jam, melon, tea and water. I wanted to delay leaving the hotel for as long as I could so I had less time to spend in Diyarbakir, from where my flight was not scheduled to depart until just after midnight.

Elazig.

I went for a walk, calling first at the main square to examine for the last time the brightly painted buildings surrounding it and the bunting hung up by the different political parties. A block south of Gazi Caddesi was the street emerging as the place for up-market consumer goods including clothes, so I went there next to confirm that it aspired to be Elazig’s miniature version of Kensington or Knightsbridge in London. It did have aspirations to emulate Kensington or Knightsbridge, and every so often, I passed a new or yet-to-be-completed office or apartment block manifesting enviable attention to detail to make it look attractive. The more I walked around, the more the area looked as if it would emerge as an inner city middle class enclave where the devout and the secular lived together, but still somehow in parallel universes that never quite connected or interacted.

Elazig.

Elazig.

After walking past a small park sheltered by mature trees, I arrived at a sterile open space where buses arrived and departed for destinations around the city. I then entered what was overwhelmingly a residential area north of Gazi Caddesi, but small business premises were in most of the apartment blocks at street level. I zig-zagged north and east until arriving at a wide street running north to south where a narrow ribbon of greenery and a dry water feature turned the road into a dual carriageway. An attractive modern mosque overlooked the road from the west. In a shop window on the east side of the street, two women were making gozleme. The older woman had used a scarf to cover her face except for her eyes and the top of her nose, but the younger woman used her scarf to cover only her hair and ears. I wanted to take a photo of the two of them sitting on the floor as they rolled out the dough before cooking the gozleme on convex circles of sheet metal over a wooden fire, but could tell that they were reluctant to be immortalised, even though a man in the shop urged them to let me do so. I was on the Sunni side of the street and did not want to cause the women any embarrassment.

Elazig.

Once again, hypocrisy was writ large. Females from about the age of 14 or 15 were discouraged from having photos taken of them by anyone other than relatives or close family friends, but males of all ages urged you to take photos of them all the time, even if you had only just met them. When photography first became popular in Muslim societies, males and females were reluctant to be photographed because the rumour spread that the photo somehow captured part of a person’s soul and that the part of the soul thus captured would never return to the body which once possessed it. In time, however, males overcame their fear that part of their soul would be lost forever and allowed themselves to be photographed with ever greater enthusiasm. But females were still discouraged from being photographed, partly because of the ludicrous idea about the “theft” of part of the soul, but also because males did not want female family members to be looked at in photos by people who might have lustful inclinations toward them. That photos might be taken of Muslim males by photographers who had lustful inclinations toward them did not seem to count. As ever, therefore, females were required to inhabit the background while males got to strut their stuff.

I returned to the hotel to arrange things in my bags in such a way as to ensure the weight was as evenly distributed as possible, then showered, ate a peach given to me in Solhan, drank lots of water chilled in the bedroom fridge and went to reception to settle the bill. It was about 10.40am when I left the hotel and I arrived at the minibus garaj just in time to catch the 11.00am departure for Diyarbakir.

I could not recall the hills and mountains south of Elazig ever looking so pretty or so tempting to walk through. The visibility was excellent, so much so that my last day in Turkey was very good for photography, even though I was going south into less elevated surroundings on the last day of May when temperatures were definitely warmer than when I had started the trip. There were just enough white clouds to render the sky interesting and the clouds cast shadows over the fields, pasture, orchards, forests, hills and mountains. The mountains north and south of Hazar Golu still had smudges of snow on them, but they were smaller and fewer in number than two weeks earlier.

In Elazig, the railway station was conveniently located just a few blocks south of the main square, the otogar was not as far from the centre as in many cities of comparable size and even the airport was only 7 or 8 kilometres south-east of Gazi Caddesi.

At first, we followed the railway on its way to Palu, Mus and Tatvan, then that line veered off to the east as we went south to Hazar Golu. The Elazig to Diyarbakir railway left Elazig from the south-west, then swung to the south-east to take a route along the very sparsely populated south side of the lake. It was only when the road reached the east end of the lake and turned south-east for Maden that the railway and the road embraced each other so they could negotiate the direct but meandering route to Maden and Ergani.

The small town of Gezin was the last settlement the road passed through before leaving Hazar Golu. Most of Gezin comprised of villas that were the second homes for city slickers who loved the lake and its surroundings. A few businesses overlooked the main road and they were overlooked by a large modern mosque in the mock-Ottoman style with lots of domes and semi-domes of different sizes.

A short distance beyond Gezin, the hills and mountains embraced the road and the railway and the very pretty part of the journey to Maden began. Forest, pasture, beehives and villages on the valley walls added to the pleasure gleaned from watching the railway make progress south by means of short tunnels, bridges and cuttings. There were lots of yellow flowers, but for how much longer would they last? The deep red poppies of Dersim came to mind and I wondered how many were still looking their best. So delicate did they look that their petals reminded me of butterflies’ wings.

Between Elazig and Diyarbakir.

Just before Maden station, the minibus stopped at a roadside lokanta and small market where people were preparing gozleme and meat dishes such as patlican kebaps. A large pile of melons from Adana, some of the first such fruit of the year, were examined by families who had stopped in their cars. A white van hired by the HDP pulled into the car park and I chatted with its occupants. One of the occupants was a woman aged about 40 dressed in traditional Kurdish clothes. She was the same person who featured in a picture on the exterior of the van. She was going to Diyarbakir to take part in an HDP rally during which she would sing and dance. She was ready to go on stage as soon as she arrived at her destination.

Between Elazig and Diyarbakir.

As always, Maden’s location in a deep valley with houses stacked on the hillside above the railway and the river made me want to get out to look around, but I could not do so now with bags heavy with booty for home. Flights of stone and concrete steps meandered among the buildings to provide pedestrians with short cuts from one group of houses to the next. Shadows fell across the heaps of spoil that confirmed how important mining had once been. For a town with an official population of not much more than 5,000, Maden appeared to have a lot to offer its visitors.

Between Maden and Ergani, the bus boy brought everyone something to drink. I had a fruit juice.

Makam Dagi and the large cement works confirmed that we were approaching the northern edge of Ergani, from where the scenery took on a more worn-out appearance with rounded hills in the distance and the plain assuming the first shades of brown redolent of the long hot summer ahead. The road, a dual carriageway from Ergani almost all the way to Diyarbakir, allowed us to get to the northern suburbs of our destination very quickly, but it was then that we meandered through the extensive new suburbs to the main otogar dropping people off as we did so.

The meandering drive through the northern and western suburbs of Diyarbakir was other-worldly. Most of the buildings (the first few were encountered in ones and twos, but further into the city they clustered together en masse) were very new, very tall (blocks with at least ten storeys were many in number), carefully designed (balconies of generous proportions were commonplace) and brightly painted. Where such buildings clustered together they were invariably clones of one another, but there was something compelling about the views they created, despite being the opposite of all that I liked best about architecture in the Middle East (it was this alien character of the new suburbs that made them other-worldly). The buildings lay along new roads, some of which were wide and dominated by curves and roundabouts, the latter at intersections. Families wealthy by local standards occupied some of the apartments. The ground floors of many of the apartment blocks had businesses in them and, in time, the suburbs will emerge as places where local people can meet most of their routine needs without having to visit the city centre. Some of the most impressive businesses were large lokantas and cafés with ultra-modern air conditioned interiors and outdoor patios raised above the level of the pavement. Family groups sat on the patios enjoying a very late breakfast or very early lunch (some such groups may have been eating brunch. The suburbs were not without their American characteristics). Blink and the suburbs of Diyarbakir could have been in parts of Mediterranean Europe. Moreover, it was obvious that some of Diyarbakir’s best dining experiences were now in the suburbs and not in the old city or the streets immediately enclosing it.

The benefits of the peace that had prevailed in the south-east for some years impressed themselves in a manner as substantial as that of the Syriac Orthodox Christians who had returned to the Tur Abdin region around Mardin and Midyat.

Inevitably, not everywhere surrounding the apartment blocks and other large structures such as offices and shopping malls had been landscaped, with the result that many families and office workers overlooked patches of open space marred with litter and the debris of construction work. In time, of course, such open spaces will be built over or turned into parkland and/or playgrounds, and very large billboards had artists’ impressions of what the brave new world will eventually look like. My heart inclined for obvious reasons toward the old city, despite its considerable challenges in terms of overcrowding and economic decline, but I could see the appeal of Diyarbakir’s new suburbs, especially for Kurds in the region who, for the first time ever in many families, were encountering economic security and well-being.

We arrived at the newish otogar, itself increasingly enclosed by the brave new world of wide boulevards and large structures with brightly painted walls, and some of us transferred to a servis bus that took us to the edge of the old city through streets busy with pedestrians and motorised traffic.

Diyarbakir.

I had a cunning plan. I would identify a small hotel where rooms came with en suite facilities where I could leave my bags and wash and rest when I wanted, then check out at about 9.45pm. With the temperature about 30 degrees centigrade and likely to rise another degree of two by 4.00pm, I knew I could not get to the airport feeling and looking presentable without at least one shower. I also wanted to have a good look around the old city, which would inevitably mean I would get a bit grubby. I found just what I wanted between Kibris Caddesi and Inonu Boulevard. Moreover, the hotel was about 150 metres from where taxis left for the airport for a very reasonable flat fare.

Diyarbakir.

I showered and changed into grubby but still presentable clothes to keep clean the clothes I had travelled in from Elazig (the clothes worn in Elazig and to Diyarbakir I would put back on for the journey home), then set off for the trip’s final good look around. Surp Giragos Church was my first destination. I made my way via the narrow streets of the old city east of Gazi Caddesi and south of Biyikli Mehmet Sokak.

Diyarbakir.

Elazig.

I left about 2.30pm to confirm that minibuses departed for Diyarbakir the following morning, a Sunday, from the same garaj from where I had travelled to Keban. Not far from the garaj, the stalls of a large market had taken over some of the streets and many people had come to buy fruit, vegetables, cheese, olives, honey, clothes, shoes, bedding, tools, toys, kitchen utensils, plastic bowls and buckets, and many other things for the house and garden. The atmosphere was delightful, so much so that I decided to look around more slowly after visiting the garaj.

The market, Elazig.

The market, Elazig.

As I continued on my way, I became aware that a woman was following me. She was aged about 35, did not have a headscarf and wore a blouse that revealed most of her arms. As I entered the garaj, she asked what I was up to. It was soon confirmed that minibuses left for Diyarbakir roughly every hour the following day, then the woman asked if I had some spare time. I said I had plenty of spare time so she said, “Good. I would like to show you around this,” and she pointed toward a large but incomplete hotel beside the garaj. “I am the general manager of the hotel and we plan for it to be the very best in Elazig.”

Staff at the incomplete hotel, Elazig.

I am not used to attractive women much younger than me asking to spend time with them, so the hour or so that followed was great fun.

The hotel’s general manager was called **** and, by the standards of almost any nation state, she was a remarkable woman, but to achieve what she had achieved in Turkey was astounding. Despite decades of the Turkish Republic being dominated by secular aspirations before the rise of the AKP, secular aspirations that included commitment to gender equality, Turkey had never provided girls and women with the same opportunities as boys and men, so the fact that **** had bubbled up to assume such a high status role in an industry still dominated by men was itself a rare achievement. But ****, who was married to a Turkish academic teaching at Elazig University, was Armenian. Yes, **** belonged to the very ethnic group, the Armenians, that had suffered genocide during the first world war.

****’s career path had been an interesting one. She used to be a tour guide before entering hotel management in Bodrum, which she said she missed because of her affection for the sea. It was her experience of hotel management at that popular Mediterranean resort which opened up the opportunity that had arisen in Elazig.

View west from the incomplete hotel, Elazig.

**** showed me around the hotel and introduced me to some of her colleagues, including two of the men whose money has made the whole project possible. I could not believe the ambitions **** and her colleagues had for the hotel. I was shown the basement where the car park would be and the rooms nearby that had all the equipment required to provide gas, electricity and water, the latter both hot and cold. I also saw the spacious lobby, the offices, the restaurants, the kitchens, the outdoor café, the function and conference rooms, some of the bedrooms and suites, the hamam, the sauna and the salt room. I hoped that their considerable investment in money, planning, labour, high quality construction materials, luxury facilities and recruitment of staff would meet everyone’s expectations and long-term aspirations for a good but not excessive profit.

View north-east from the incomplete hotel, Elazig.

It was only gradually that **** revealed things about her Armenian background. Home was really Istanbul, but her husband was from Elazig and he had wanted to return to the city of his birth when a teaching post arose at the university. **** came with him, obviously, and managed to secure the role of general manager at the soon-to-be-opened hotel (which overlooked the wide ring road, so views from the upper floors were very good in all directions, even to Harput in the north over the concrete jungle that comprised the city centre). She missed Istanbul very much, partly because its lifestyle was far more secular in character than that in Sunni-dominated Elazig, partly because she loved fish and Istanbul had many excellent fish lokantas, and partly because she was a long way from her Armenian family and friends (she did not know of a single Armenian in Elazig other than herself, so I told her about the Armenian I had met in Sahinkaya almost a fortnight earlier).

**** and her husband had recently entertained an Armenian film-maker in their home on the west side of the city, so this led me to wonder if they and I had encountered the same person, but, the more **** spoke about him, the more it was obvious we had met different people. I told the story about “my” film-maker hanging the Armenian flag from the damaged dome of the church near Sahinkaya and **** was visibly moved. The focus of our discussions shifted from the hotel and its final appearance toward the plight of the Armenian people past and present.

It took a while before I convinced **** that my interest in things Armenian was sincere and long-standing (a quick look at my blog entitled “In Search of Unusual Destinations” proved decisive), but once I had done so, she shared some interesting information. A relative of hers had recently bought a house in Arapgir to re-establish a family link with the town severed by the mass murder of Armenians in 1915, and the film-maker she and her husband had met had been in the area because of family links with Harput.

It turned out that **** was 44 years old. Despite all the pressures that existed if you wished to succeed as an Armenian woman with strong secular inclinations in overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim Turkey in a sector of the economy still dominated by men, **** was thriving and remained far more youthful in appearance than I would have imagined possible.

At one point in our discussions, **** asked what I was doing the following day (she wanted to invite me to her home, Sunday being the one day of the week she had off work). When I said that I had to go to Diyarbakir to catch my flight home late on Sunday evening and would therefore be leaving Elazig in the morning, she said, “Okay. Never mind. That gives me a chance to buy some new shoes. I love shoes, but they get ruined at the hotel. Just look at these,” and she pointed to a pair of once-smart flat but expensive shoes that had many scuffs on them. “I will replace them with four new pairs tomorrow.” Here was a woman with strong secular values who thrived in a man’s world dominated by Sunni Muslims. Here was a financially successful Armenian living among people who may have been the descendants of Turks and Kurds who perpetrated genocide against her forebears 100 years earlier. All this was remarkable. Also remarkable was that **** had not compromised her femininity to get on in life.

How exciting it was to find an Armenian doing well in Turkey, even though the number of Armenians in the country was now so small and thousands of Armenian monuments had disappeared, lay in ruins or suffered from such outrageous official neglect that their survival for another generation was very much in doubt.

Elazig.

I eventually got away about 4.15pm and went directly to the market to take some photos. The market was still very busy, but everyone seemed relaxed rather than boisterous. A chat with a very vivacious woman aged about 30 (she did not cover her head, but walked around with two female friends who had scarves) led to a nice photo as she gave the HDP’s V-sign. We parted company, but met again further into the market. On this occasion, the woman pressed into my hand a boiled corn-on-the-cob that made an excellent snack.

The market, Elazig.

The market, Elazig.

The market, Elazig.

By now I was thoroughly enjoying the atmosphere, so went to the lower end of the pazar to take more photos. I also walked to the main square where a group of men who sat on a bench engaged me in conversation as we consumed glasses of tea, then I had a last look at the covered pazar and spent time in a shop specialising in honey and all the equipment required to produce it. The man in the shop tried to give me a jar of honey to take home, but I explained about the problem of getting it through customs (it was unlawful to bring Turkish honey through UK customs, not that the law had stopped me doing so in the past. What was my excuse for breaking the law in the past? The law was an ass).

Elazig.

Elazig.

The pazar, Elazig.

I returned to the hotel to freshen up, then went out to find somewhere serving a pide. I had not yet had a pide, despite it being a favourite of mine. I did not have far to walk from the hotel to find a suitably clean and bright lokanta. Once inside, I ordered an ayran and a pide with meat and cheese. The excellent pide arrived with a refreshing salad, but I could not get away until I had consumed two teas on the house.

I had a chat with one of the waiters. He was Iranian. He said that he had had to flee from Iran because the authorities regarded him as a dissident. He did not sympathise with the religious character of the constitution. He said, “I don’t like Muslims.” I said, “Are you Christian, Zoroastrian or Bahai?” He replied, “No. I have Muslim parents. I am Muslim. But Muslims treat Muslims badly. I have lost my belief in Islam because Muslims cannot treat even their brothers and sisters like brothers and sisters.”

Iran was an Islamic state predicated on a mainstream Shia understanding of how such a state should function. My encounter with the waiter was a reminder that tyranny and oppression were not confined to Sunni Muslims alone.

Elazig.

Elazig.

I went for a last walk around central Elazig concentrating on the streets east of the main square. It was now almost completely dark and girls and women were very rarely seen. I passed four of the city’s older hotels, one of which I had stayed in a few years earlier. The hotel had had a face-lift that included plastic double-glazed windows (I recalled that sleep had been very difficult because of the noise from the traffic in the street below). In fact, all the hotels had been up-graded to such an extent that I did not recognise them except for their names.

Elazig.

When I stopped to admire some over-the-top wedding dresses in a shop window, the owner invited me inside to take a few photos. The owner had no customers, but his shop would remain open until about 9.00pm in the futile hope that some might arrive. However, with dresses far outnumbering suits, the chance that anyone would pop in was very small because women, his most likely client group, were deserting the city centre streets as quickly as they could. But it was great fun examining the clothes (many dresses cost at least £400, which was a lot of money by Turkish standards, and they came in many colours and styles), so much so that I stopped at a second shop specialising in wedding garments before walking to the west side of the city centre. Here, only two or three blocks south of the Mayd Hotel, a street had attracted some very exclusive shops. Some of the shops met the needs of rich pious Sunni women who wanted clothes which, although they ensured that everything but the face and hands were covered (some young women might also reveal their toes if they were wearing shoes without socks or tights), would nonetheless guarantee that people admired their appearance. The headscarves, tops, trousers, coats and other garments had been carefully designed and made (leaves, flowers and intricate patterns were on some of the fabrics), but by Turkish standards, they were extremely expensive. I also saw a shop with a vast selection of expensive and brightly coloured handbags, some of which were enormous (pious young Sunni women liked large handbags almost as much as eye-catching headscarves, tight-fitting jeans and make-up. A few of them were keen on shoes with high heels), but a shop selling chocolates detained me the longest.

Elazig.

Elazig.

What did my walk around the shops reveal? Pious Sunni women were still required to cover up to a wholly inappropriate degree, especially given how hot most of Turkey got in summer, but if the Sunni women were young and rich, they knew how to make an impression. If you were young, female, Sunni and rolling in liras, you did not hesitate to flaunt what you had by splashing out on clothes, shoes and accessories of unquestioned quality. However, you did not dare show off more than your face, hands and an occasional toe because, if you revealed too much, you had only yourself to blame if men wanted to sexually assault you.

Elazig.

Just before turning in, I witnessed an alarming incident at a street corner not far from a large city centre mosque. Two police officers drove up on their motorbikes and began interrogating a male aged about 16 or 17. The young male looked frightened as one of the officers unleashed a torrent of words in a raised voice. The second officer began rummaging among some litter carelessly pushed into plastic bags and cardboard boxes, thereby spilling the contents onto the pavement. He was looking for something, but his search proved unsuccessful. He walked over to a plastic chair, presumably the property of the young male, and stamped on it with his heavy boots. The chair very quickly broke into many pieces, thereby rendering it of use to no one. A few last stern words were directed toward the young male, then the officers rode off in a hurry sounding their sirens, the latter perhaps for extra effect. Were they going to deal with another incident or were they getting away quickly before members of the public could establish their identity?

Elazig.

As for the young male, he melted away among the pedestrians along a dark side street, his self-respect and street credibility severely dented. The many onlookers, all male, briefly chatted among themselves before resuming whatever they were engaged with. Their lack of emotion suggested that the incident they had witnessed was not abnormal and one that had to be put up with, even though some of them must have felt the police had over-reacted. Their apparent indifference about the plight of the young male suggested that they were grateful they themselves had done nothing to incur the wrath of the police officers. But their indifference also suggested that ordinary Turkish citizens still felt powerless in the face of state institutions or when confronted by uniformed representatives of the state. Even in 2015, it looked as if the police had power and authority that remained undiminished from earlier more deferential and dictatorial times. Or was it the case that in recent years Erdogan had encouraged the police to be more assertive in how they exercised their power and authority?

All I can assume is that the young man had been selling things on the street, perhaps without permission to do so (people trading on the streets probably needed a licence), but the police officers had acted in a manner both inappropriate and disproportionate. The incident brought back memories of how uniformed representatives of the Turkish Republic had acted in inappropriate and disproportionate ways in the past. I wondered if enough had been done to bring the police and other uniformed personnel under control. Such servants of the state were meant to protect members of the public, not oppress them.

Elazig.

To Elazig.

I ate breakfast with five men who had arrived overnight, three of whom were responsible for the open-topped lorry destined to deliver a heavy load in Ankara. The best elements of the meal were the honey in its comb and glass after glass of tea.

I settled the bill, then walked to the office of VIP Taksi from where transport departed for Elazig. After a short wait, I and six other passengers got aboard a small but comfortable minibus and, for 25TL each, were driven to our destination with only one break of about 15 minutes. One man was destined for Elazig Airport from where he was catching a flight to Istanbul and, when we arrived at the edge of the city, the driver let him out at a major intersection from where a minibus or taxi would take him to the terminal.

Solhan.

There were two women on the minibus. The older of the two – she was aged about 55 – wore loose-fitting clothes that she had layered over the top half of her body. Shalwar completely covered her legs and a large headscarf covered her hair and ears. All the items of clothing had flowery patterns on them, but, because the pattern on each item was different in design and colour and burst forth from dark backgrounds, her clothes looked shabby and did not complement one another. On her feet were dark-coloured socks with a bold geometric pattern that had probably come from her husband’s chest of drawers and flat leather shoes black in colour. The shoes were very old and had not been polished for weeks. The number of items worn on the top half of her body was inappropriate on a day when the temperature promised to reach about 30 degrees centigrade, but this was how women in Turkey were expected to dress on the Sunni side of the street, especially once they entered their mature years.

The other female passenger was aged about 25. She wore jeans, a tight-fitting blouse and no headscarf, and knew she was being watched closely with lustful intent, both before getting into the minibus and while in transit. She was that rarest of things in Solhan, a woman defying the dress conventions encouraged by orthodox Sunni piety.

Of course, there was no expectation that males had to conform to a dress code, provided they dressed in a way that kept most of their body covered. Heads could be uncovered at all times, even when visiting mosques, and younger males were very keen on baseball caps, some of which confirmed an affection for the USA. Tight-fitting clothes were the norm for men until a majority had attained middle-age, after which tops and trousers sagged and flapped as portliness set in. Only the very oldest Kurdish males wore shalwar nowadays, but the number who did declined with every visit I made to eastern Turkey. This was sad.

Needless to say, the vast majority of Sunni Muslim males seemed happy for such inequality in terms of the dress code to persist because it conferred on them advantages of a somewhat dubious nature vis-à-vis girls and women. Did the Sunni males who enjoyed such advantages ever stop to consider how unfair this was on girls and women, and how uncomfortable it must have been for girls and women to comply with the dress code, particularly in the hot summer months? Of course not, otherwise the dress code would have been modified ages ago to remove the inequality that prevails.

Perhaps because it was the last time I would be in such green and pleasant upland surroundings, I thoroughly enjoyed the drive through the hills, the mountains and the forests as far as Bingol. There were many places where we passed beehives arranged in lines on hillsides and in pasture full of wild flowers. There were also about six tented camps where semi-nomadic families lived during the summer to look after the beehives or their large flocks of sheep. Cattle grazed on some of the pasture.

Bingol was about 1,000 metres above sea level and had an official population of just over 100,000. As it did the day before, it looked overwhelmingly modern and, with lots of construction taking place, it would look even more modern in two or three years time. Despite the attempt to make the modern buildings attractive with a few post-modern embellishments and brightly painted walls in more than one colour, large areas of Bingol looked rather sterile and impersonal. This was due partly to the sheer size of many of the structures, which had been designed in a similar style and built at more or less the same time. Because wide boulevards with a lot of traffic were overlooked by many of the largest structures, the feeling increased that contemporary Bingol was more dystopian than utopian. However, the central business district probably had some redeeming qualities such as narrow and winding streets lined by thriving businesses, and the city was enclosed by seductively attractive landscapes. One of Bingol’s up-market hotels would have made a very comfortable base for two or three nights to visit some of the surrounding towns and villages, few of which were known by people other than the ones who lived in Bingol province itself.

The young woman began coughing, but everyone ignored her. I reached over to give her my water bottle and she accepted it gratefully.

The delightful upland scenery persisted west of Bingol, but the mountains gradually became rounded hills and the valley widened until it became in effect gently undulating but verdant upland plain. Pasture mingled with fields and orchards. Sheep continued to outnumber cattle.

We stopped so the driver could have a rest at the point where the road led north to Kigi. I regretted that I did not have another one or two nights in Turkey to travel to Kigi to spend longer among Armenian ruins in the mountains.

Between Bingol and Elazig.

Between Bingol and Elazig.

At Kovancilar, a road led north to Mazgirt and Tunceli, and a sign at the junction pointed toward Ekinozu Kilisesi. Back home, I found that Ekinozu Kilisesi was that rarest of things, an Armenian church that enjoyed official recognition by the provincial Turkish authorities. Photos of the church on the internet suggest that it remained in quite good condition and other ruins, a cesme included, were nearby. The church had probably been part of a monastic complex.

The church and its associated ruins were in the village of Ekinozu, which used to be called Habab, Hebap or Khabab. Armenians knew the village better as Havav. An article I accessed on the internet suggests that the cesme had been restored and that, during Ottoman times, the village had a population of about 500. The same article suggests that the village once had two cesmes, three Armenian churches and an Armenian monastery.

Sinclair has a short description of Havav. He refers to “the village church of Surp Lusavorich (the Illuminator)”, Surp Astvatsatsin (Mother of God), the church of the “monastery of Kaghtsrahayats Vank, probably medieval”, and Surp Kataoghike, a “partly ruined church”. This makes it more likely that Ekinozu Kilisesi had been part of the monastic complex.

I recognised the very pretty mountains south of Kovancilar that overlooked Palu and the Murat Nehri, and the extension of the Keban Reservoir that the road ran beside for about 30 kilometres to Elazig. The scenery was now merely pretty because gardens, orchards and fields of wheat dominated the gently undulating valley floor and pasture the rounded hills to the north and south. I detected a hint of yellow among the shades of green, which, along with the visibility marred by a slight haze, suggested that the hottest months of the year were not far off.

The journey from Solhan to Elazig was about 180 kilometres, but I had been charged less than £7. I had travelled in a motor vehicle not dissimilar to some taxis or minicabs in the UK. Even if I had travelled a distance of 180 kilometres in a bus in the UK, I would have been charged far more than £7, but it would have taken much longer to complete the journey and the seat would have been far less comfortable than in the Turkish minibus.

The minibus dropped me very close to the city centre and less than ten minutes later I was in a room in the Mayd Hotel. I had decided to stay overnight in Elazig rather than Diyarbakir knowing I could do my shopping more easily in the former than the latter. The price for the room was the same as before. I was given a slightly better room than when I had stayed almost two weeks earlier, but the balcony was at the back of the hotel overlooking a small, litter- and rubble-strewn open space enclosed by ugly buildings. But the upside was that the room was very quiet at night.

View from the balcony, Mayd Hotel, Elazig.

I was out of my room not long after 1.00pm and spent a pleasant hour or so in the pazar buying black olives, green olives, dried apricots, fruit leather and a kitchen knife. I bought the kitchen knife in a small shop not far from the covered section of the pazar and one of the two men working behind the counter sharpened the blade while I waited. Both men were aged about 50 and had beards that suggested they had undertaken the haj to Makkah. I then went to the large shed where men sold flour and dried beans to buy four bars of bittim sabunu. The bars cost only 1TL each. I toyed with the idea of buying many other things, pistachios included, but so many Turkish food items were easily found in the UK now, albeit at prices higher than in Turkey. I confined my avaricious inclinations to essentials.

Elazig.

I returned to the hotel to drop off my purchases, then went to the pazar a second time to buy a pair of black leather shoes and smart but casual trousers. The trousers were significantly discounted and the length of the legs adjusted in a tailor’s shop so they fitted perfectly. As I waited for the trousers to be finished, I chatted with some very friendly men who owned the nearby shops, including the ones from where I bought the shoes and trousers. Tea and coffee were generously provided. Business was slow and I provided some much-needed diversion.

The pazar, Elazig.

The pazar, Elazig.

My walk around the pazar confirmed that most shops selling clothes, shoes and scarves for older girls and women stocked items that would appeal only to conventionally pious Sunni women. Shops selling fashionable clothes that might appeal to non-Muslims in Europe or North America were for males only. Such shops sought to target local males aged about 15 or 16 to their late thirties.

Between my two visits to the pazar, I called at a small café for a portion of borek washed down with limon. This proved exactly what I needed to sustain me until the evening, when I intended to eat a proper meal.

Borek and limon, Elazig.

As I finished the borek, I gave some thought to the money that remained. The trip had proved so inexpensive that, even with over a day to go and the possibility that I might buy a few more things for home, I would probably get by without having to use an ATM. This would mean that I would get through the whole of the trip with only the money I had brought from the UK. Remarkable. Moreover, despite having a significant sum of money with me at the start of the trip, not once had I felt vulnerable to theft, even in Diyarbakir which had a reputation for tourists falling victim to thieves. This said, I had always found theft far more of a problem in Istanbul than in Diyarbakir.

Elazig.

Elazig.

To Palu and Eski Palu.

Before breakfast, I walked to the ferry terminal to put the previous night’s empty beer bottles into litter bins, then went to eat in the garden of the hotel overlooking the reservoir. The sun was shining. As I waited for the food and tea to arrive, I looked at the roses in the flower beds. A man arrived in the garden and sat a few tables away. Three friends soon joined him for breakfast. Borek replaced the chips of the morning before and there was an excellent jam made with what looked like blackberries. But the jam contained karadut, of black mulberries. Once again, honey was in the comb.

I packed the last few things into my bags, paid the bill, thanked staff for what had proved a delightful stay and walked to the ferry terminal knowing I could find a seat in one of the five or six minibuses for Elazig that had arrived for the next crossing. However, as we waited for a ferry to arrive (two ferries made the crossing all day long timing their departure so they set off at almost exactly the same moment, but from opposites sides of the reservoir), I chatted with a man driving an almost new Volvo. An Alevi with the usual misgivings about Erdogan, the AKP and Sunni Muslims, he kindly offered me a lift to Elazig where he was undertaking a day’s business. Because Elazig was from where minibuses would get me to Palu, my destination for the night, I agreed without hesitation to join him.

The ferry terminal, Pertek.

The ferry, Pertek.

Once all the motor vehicles had been driven aboard, the ferry set off. Passengers could walk around the deck, which meant that the views of the castle and the reservoir were very good. I was not allowed to pay either my fare or for the car. The crossing took about only 15 minutes and it did not take long to disembark. The drive thereafter was pretty rather than spectacular, but, as the car began to descend into Elazig, we passed a very large but incomplete hotel commanding extensive views over the city and the wide valley beyond.

The ferry and Pertek Kale.

Pertek Kale.

The man who had given me the lift left his Volvo in a car park next to where minibuses departed for the minibus garaj serving towns and villages to the east. Because Palu lay to the east of Elazig, this was the garaj required for the next leg of my journey, so I got into the right minibus and, ten minutes later, asked from where I could find a service to Palu. In the fashion characteristic of the trip so far, a minibus for Palu was leaving in about five minutes. Perfection.

Most of the journey to Palu was of moderate interest scenically, especially as we drove beside another reservoir with rounded hills to either side, but as we made our way into Palu, which lay beside the Murat Nehri with high mountains nearby, my spirits lifted. A steep, meandering descent from a plain into the town confirmed that I would enjoy what remained of the day. Some unattractive urban areas lay between Elazig and my destination, most obviously in Kovancilar where we turned off the main road to Bingol and Mus, but, although Palu was now overwhelmingly modern, its situation was stunning and it was small enough not to be much of a blot on the landscape. Moreover, because Palu lay beside the railway from Elazig to Mus and Tatvan, the small town was worth a detour even without the dramatic scenery and Eski Palu, the latter being the main reason why I was staying overnight.

A search on the internet before leaving home suggested that Palu did not have a hotel, and this was confirmed by men at the garaj in Elazig from where the Palu minibuses departed. However, in Turkey, even small towns had accommodation of some sort for visitors whether expected or otherwise, and the men at the garaj had assured me that staff at the ogretmen evi would put me up. Palu’s town centre was so small that the minibus terminated almost opposite the ogretmen evi, so I walked across the road to enquire about a room. A room was available because most teachers had departed for home. The term was almost over and exams dominated the working day, but only a few teachers were needed to supervise them. The manager of the ogretmen evi, who was summoned from the nearby large and very new Hukumet Konagi, showed me around the facilities (the facilities included rooms where games such as pool were played and a kitchen where breakfast was prepared), then he offered me a room with three beds near a smaller room with a sink and toilet (showers and more sinks and toilets were upstairs and easy to access). I said how grateful I was for the room, which had lots of storage space, especially for one person, but was even more amazed when I was told that the room cost only 15TL a night. I said that the cost was very low and was happy to pay more, but more could not be accepted. I was in the middle of the town with the pazar, shops, businesses and lokantas nearby; the railway station was a few blocks to the south-west; and a road leading toward Eski Palu began near the Hukumet Konagi less than 300 metres away. I could not believe my luck. We drank tea, my passport was photocopied and a few personal details were committed to a ledger.

I paid for the room in advance, then the manager led me to a small courtyard where the teachers could sit in the evenings drinking tea or soft drinks as they chatted with friends. From a tree, the manager picked a green fruit not unlike a very small apple, but it had a stone rather than pips inside. I bit into the sour but refreshing flesh, itself firm like an immature apple, and the manager gave me about 20 to take for my walk to, around and from Eski Palu.

The best way from Palu to Eski Palu on foot (there was a way by car, but it was much greater in length and required crossing the river twice) was to follow the railway as closely as possible as it went east. When some of the ruins were in sight to the left, it was necessary to ascend a rounded hill while aiming for one of the surviving minarets. The centre of Eski Palu, which had long been abandoned and replaced by the town in which I was staying overnight, lay among the ruins just mentioned, but the ruins of a citadel were on the massive eruption of rock behind them. Eski Palu was a destination that deserved to be far better known and, as I was soon to find out, its ruins were more extensive and rewarding than the ones at similar but more famous places.

View east between Palu and Eski Palu.

Between Palu and Eski Palu.

There were footpaths for most of the way to Eski Palu. Some of the footpaths were directly above the river with the railway to my left, and some were a little to the north with the railway to my right. However, all the paths eventually disappeared among new grass and late spring’s wild flowers. I had to ascend a hillside using one of the minarets to keep me roughly on course. When I arrived on the more level ground that must have once been the centre of Eski Palu, there were the ruins of two mosques, a hamam and a cesme in close proximity and, some way to the east, a ruined church. High above me to the north were the ruins of the citadel. The ruins of the hamam were the most impressive and they were the ones most obviously benefitting from a lengthy restoration programme.

View west to Palu.

I had been looking around the ruins for about 15 minutes when I met six workmen who had been resting nearby before resuming their task of restoring the hamam. One of the workmen kindly encouraged me to enter parts of the ruins not previously examined, then he invited me to join two of his colleagues for glasses of tea in a large portacabin that was where they slept at night. The portacabin was also their daytime retreat when the heat became oppressive or they wanted to eat a meal. They said it was quite a long walk to the citadel, but it could be reached along a gently inclined road that turned into a path with stone steps. However, the effort would be worthwhile because I would enjoy the views, some Urartian remains and a tunnel of unknown origin. I took their advice, but did not realise at the time that the walk would also lead to other ruins associated with Eski Palu.

Kucuk Camii, Eski Palu.

Kucuk Camii, Eski Palu.

Kucuk Camii, Eski Palu.

To Asagitorunoba.

I left Ovacik’s cemevi to take a few more photos of it and the grassy plain on which it stood. As I put my camera away, a car drove past, drew to a halt about 50 metres down the road and backed up. The driver asked, “Where are you going?” I said, “To Asagitorunoba.” The driver had three companions with him and discussion followed before the driver said, “Come on. We are not going to Asagitorunoba, but will take you as far as we can.” I got into the car and a bottle of Efes Malt was offered, which I took gratefully and consumed far more quickly than politeness required.

Between Ovacik and Asagitorunoba.

The men were going to a wedding in a village to the west of the road to Tunceli and, to access the village, they had to cross the Munzur Cayi on a rather dilapidated suspension bridge before ascending a dirt road for a few kilometres. Predictably, I was asked to join the wedding party, which would have been a wonderful experience because it involved Alevis (segregation of the sexes, so often encountered in Sunni Muslim weddings, would probably have been frowned on, as it should be), but had I done so, there would have been problems getting back to Tunceli and I would have had to sacrifice seeing Asagitorunoba. I politely declined the kind invitation, but thoroughly enjoyed the company of the four men, albeit briefly (three men described themselves as Turkish Alevis. The fourth said his grandmother had been Armenian, but he described himself as a Kurdish Bektashi). When we arrived at the bridge leading to the village, only the driver remained in the car to get across it. His three companions walked.

Between Ovacik and Asagitorunoba.

Not long after waving the car and its passengers off to the wedding and about only 500 metres further along the road, a minibus appeared and I flagged it for a lift to Asagitorunoba. Because the minibus was crowded, I was ushered to a stool between two fixed seats. I found myself beside two female students in their last year at high school. One of the young women was very pretty and the other handsome, and the handsome one had an unusual example of metalwork piercing her nose on the right-hand side. Dressed in European or North American clothes and without headscarves, it was obvious they were Alevis, but I was still surprised when they introduced themselves and initiated a conversation. Most of the other passengers must have been Alevis because no one thought that what they did was in the least improper; in fact, I think they were glad the young women had such self-confidence because it meant they found out a bit about someone who was, by local standards, a somewhat exotic individual (foreign tourists were still very rare in Dersim in general and Tunceli in particular). Interestingly, we shook hands at the beginning of the conversation and when I left the minibus at my destination. Moreover, the driver refused to accept any money for the ride.

As I waved the minibus off, I thought about how different the journey would have been had most passengers been Sunni Muslims. Males and females unknown to one another would have sat apart, they would have ignored members of the opposite sex and the journey would in all likelihood have passed in silence unless a baby or young child had been present and ill, in pain or in distress. During the journey just completed, males sat next to females they did not know, people chatted with total strangers, a relaxed atmosphere prevailed and men and women who had never met before could make physical contact without anarchy breaking out.

Asagitorunoba.

Asagitorunoba.

Asagitorunoba.

Asagitorunoba was a small but dispersed settlement on the north side of the river that spread over a gently inclined grassy bank just below a quite steep hillside. Two bridges crossed the river, one of which carried a road that led to a nearby village to the south. Beside the road bridge was a suspension bridge no longer suitable for motor vehicles. Although the old wooden decking was in a state of disrepair, I could not resist walking across it. Another road led into the hills to the north of the river where there were two more villages.

In all, there were about only 20 houses in Asagitorunoba and a small but abandoned jandarma post. The houses were a mixture of old and new, and the old ones outnumbered the ones of more recent construction. Most of the old houses were single storey and had flat roofs. They were constructed with a brown stone with a hint of red and I assumed the stone had been quarried locally. However, there was a stone house with rooms that spread over two storeys. A veranda at ground level on the south-facing façade was crowned with a balcony above. Tall wooden columns rose from the floor of the veranda to support the balcony, and from the floor of the balcony to support the roof. These features and the size of the building suggested that the house may have been built for a relatively wealthy family, by local standards at least, although the building’s current shabby appearance implied a poor family lived in it now. In fact, none of the houses in the village looked as if they sheltered anyone wealthy.

Asagitorunoba.

Asagitorunoba.

Asagitorunoba.

Beekeeping was popular. When I saw wooden beehives resembling long but slim barrels indistinguishable from beehives I had seen in the Hemshin area not far from Rize, I asked a few men and women sitting around a table on the veranda of an old stone house of one storey if I could take some photos. I was encouraged to shoot to my heart’s content, after which I was invited to join them for glasses of tea.

Asagitorunoba.

Asagitorunoba.

There were seven people altogether, five men and two women aged roughly 30 to 70. Both women wore headscarves, but in a way that was becoming increasingly common the more time I spent in Aleviland. The headscarves were arranged loosely on top of the head like a hastily tied turban and no attempt was made to cover the ears or all of the hair.

Both women smoked cigarettes. If a woman smoked cigarettes in Turkey, many pious Sunni Muslims regarded the habit as one that suggested considerable immorality, perhaps of a sexual nature, but to the great majority of Alevis and Bektashis, all they saw was a woman asserting her right to do as men did. Put a little differently, when a woman smoked a cigarette, Alevis and Bektashis saw a female asserting her independence vis-à-vis males.

Asagitorunoba.

I had assumed I was in the company of Alevis, but things were not as they appeared to be to someone who still had a lot to learn about the region’s ethnic complexity. The women and four of the men were Kizilbash and the fifth man was Armenian. I confirmed with my companions what was obvious from the evidence of my eyes, that the Kizilbash regarded the Armenian as their good friend and vice-versa, and then we chatted about how everyone earned their money. The Kizilbash concentrated on making honey and growing crops in fields and orchards, but the Armenian reared sheep and goats for the meat market. A little later, I saw the Armenian drive his large flock of sheep and goats along the road leading to the two villages to the north. About half a kilometre from Asagitorunoba, he waved the livestock off the road and onto pasture on a hillside overlooking the river below.

Asagitorunoba.

Turks, Kurds and (a very small number of) Armenians; Alevis, Sunni Muslims, Kizilbash and people with no religious faith; and speakers of Turkish, Kurmanji, Zazaki and Armenian were living together in what appeared to be friendship and mutual respect. Dersim was my kinda province.

Asagitorunoba.

I walked up the road leading to the two villages north of the river, primarily to secure views over Asagitorunoba and the glorious scenery that enclosed it. A man stopped his motorbike and kindly carried me a little further into the mountains from where the views were even more spectacular. By the time I got back to Asagitorunoba, I had seen the village and the Munzur Cayi from high above, the hills enclosing the valley and the more distant mountains with their forest and smudges of snow. Wild flowers grew everywhere and most of the sky was blue. It was now late afternoon and the visibility was excellent.

View south above Asagitorunoba.

View west over Asagitorunoba.

Asagitorunoba.

Small though Asagitorunoba was, I spent another half hour examining some of its houses, small gardens and beehives, then chatted with a young man who lived in a house with his parents at the easternmost extremity of the settlement. I was reluctant to leave because, as so often happened in Turkey, I had found a dot on the map that had got under my skin. But why had it got under my skin? Because I was in one of the most beautiful areas of a country with hundreds of beautiful areas, and the people I had met were reassuringly liberal and inclusive. This said, Tunceli shared with Asagitorunoba the same qualities, although it was obviously much larger. Was I onto a winner? Of course I was.

Asagitorunoba.

Asagitorunoba.

I began walking along the road to Tunceli knowing a minibus to my destination would eventually catch me up, but, after about 15 minutes spent beside the river mostly in the shade cast by mature trees, a car stopped and the driver offered me a lift. The driver had two male friends with him and they were in a hired car they had picked up a week earlier at Elazig Airport so they could tour Dersim, the region from where all three originated. They had a 9.30pm flight to catch to Istanbul where they now lived and worked. The driver of the car ran his own company in the town of Gebze not far from Istanbul’s second airport.

Leaving Asagitorunoba.

Two of the men were Alevis and one was Kizilbash. They considered themselves Turkish by ethnicity. They were very pleasant company, but all of them had the usual concerns about Sunni Muslims, Erdogan and the lack of minority rights. They came across as gentle but perceptive and reflective individuals, individuals who knew what it meant to suffer discrimination and oppression because of their identity.

To Keban and Arapgir.

The Mayd Hotel in Elazig was at number 11 Horasan Sokak, but Horasan Sokak was better known locally as Kofteciler Sokak because of the large number of lokantas, many of which served meatballs. The place where I ate twice the day before was just off Horasan Sokak and other lokantas were along the same street as well as at least five nearby ones.

Keen to make an early start just in case getting from Keban to Arapgir proved a problem, I was eating breakfast by 7.00am and impressed with what the two-star hotel provided (I was correct. With a woman in the kitchen, the food was better than normal). Beside all the usual items such as olives, cheese, sliced meat, tomatoes, cucumber, bread, butter, jam, honey, chocolate spread flavoured with hazelnuts and boiled eggs, there were lentil soup, yoghurt, simit, borek stuffed with egg and vegetables, cooked tomatoes and peppers, fried potatoes and as much tea and water as my body required. I went for broke and tried just about everything, enjoying in particular the borek, yoghurt, honey and sour cherry jam. If I had problems later in the day with transport, I could get to the evening before having to eat again.

I settled the bill and left for the minibus garaj I had arrived at the day before. By utilising a short cut through the side streets, I got to my destination in under 15 minutes. The next minibus to Keban was leaving at 8.30am; I had almost half an hour to wait. I chatted with a man bound for Keban and the nearby dam.

Two boys, one with a grubby improvised bandage on his hand, approached us and asked for money. Aged about eight and ten, the boys were Syrians displaced by the civil war that had raged for three years and was now further complicated by the emergence of the Islamic State. We did not learn much about their circumstances. Were they alone? Had their parents died or were they alive but not with them in Elazig? I gave them some money. They thanked me and slowly walked away counting the coins in their hands.

I was reminded that Turkey was now caring for 1.8 million people displaced by the conflicts in Syria and Iraq. 1.8 million people. This was a humanitarian exercise for which Turkey deserved international recognition and immense praise. But we in the UK had refused to take just a few thousand of the vast number of people who had fled poverty or conflicts in the Middle East, North Africa or sub-Saharan Africa and crossed the Mediterranean to be cared for in Greece or Italy.

The UK used to have an enviable reputation for providing people in need with a place of sanctuary. Despite our relative wealth, we are now increasingly inward-looking, xenophobic and intolerant of people seeking the same life chances as us. But you know what makes this so ridiculous? If every UK citizen looks back far enough into his or her family history, he or she will discover something we all have in common. We are all foreign in origin. Even the people who have inhabited the islands of Britain the longest, people of Celtic descent in Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Cornwall, are foreign in origin. The point I am making is this. If we are all foreign in origin, how can we deny to other people the opportunity to migrate to the UK, especially if they are migrating for precisely the same reasons our ancestors did? The suggestion that we are already full is nonsense. Even our densely populated urban areas in south-east England have lots of plots of land that can be developed to good effect, and I am not including the plots of land that are parks or green open spaces which must remain exactly as they are for the well-being of people, flora and fauna.

Before the civil war, Syria was the Middle East’s most intriguing nation state because of the ethnic, cultural and linguistic mixture of its people; the considerable beauty of some of its landscapes and many of its urban areas; and because of its remarkable monuments, some of which had survived from thousands of years ago. But now, at least 150,000 people have been killed, millions of Syrians are refugees, vast swathes of urban Syria resemble Gaza after it has been bombed by the Israelis, and the Islamic State is doing all it can to destroy monuments that it deems unIslamic (recent reports suggest that the wonderful desert city of Palmyra is the latest world heritage site to attract the Islamic State’s hatred of things not Muslim).

Even if peace breaks out in Iraq tomorrow, it is obvious that the great majority of non-Muslim Iraqis will not return to their homes because they believe that they will never again be certain of their safety and security in an overwhelmingly Muslim nation state. Unless the civil war ends soon in Syria and the Islamic State is crushed forever, the great majority of non-Muslim Syrians will not return to Syria for precisely the same reason. And who, in the end, will be the biggest losers because of disrupting the delicate ethnic, cultural and linguistic balance that once existed in both nation states? The people who remain in Iraq and Syria, the vast majority of whom will be Muslims.

Already, too many Middle Eastern and North African nation states have suffered the loss of minority groups, thereby becoming far more monocultural than they have ever been. The question for the future therefore becomes this. Can the few overtly multiethnic nation states in the region such as Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Israel remain as diverse as they currently are? The indicators are not encouraging. Coptic Christians in Egypt live in constant fear that they will be subjected to massacres in their residential districts or bomb attacks in their churches; religious minorities in Jordan know it is only a matter of time before Islamist inclinations gain greater popularity among the Sunni Muslim majority; the Lebanese fear that the war in Syria will once again ignite conflict among its ethnic and/or confessional communities, but in any future conflict, non-Muslims will not be able to defend themselves as effectively as in the past; Turkey is far less multiethnic than it was even a generation ago; and Israel is increasingly blighted by Jewish religious fundamentalism of the most alarming kind, fundamentalism that often morphs into racism directed against the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular. Such Jewish racism is sufficiently violent in its rhetoric and physical expression to have already driven some Palestinians from their homes. Moreover, such racism causes growing numbers of Jewish people in the diaspora, and many non-Jewish people who support the existence of the state of Israel, to despair that peace with the Palestinians will ever be achieved.

As my trip to Turkey was confirming, Turkey could emerge as an exception to the rule in this troubled part of the world. Yes, Turkey has seen an alarming decline in the extent to which it is an ethnically, culturally and linguistically diverse nation state since the 1950s, but all sorts of substantive and symbolic indicators point toward a growing number of Turkish nationals, whether ethnic Turks or Kurds, anxious to celebrate the diversity of the country’s population, past and present. The Greek and Jewish populations may now be only a few thousand strong each, but the Armenian population seems to have stabilised at around 70,000, although it is evident that some people who describe themselves as Turks, Kurds or Laz are in reality Islamicised Armenians. Because a majority of them are Muslims, no one need worry too much about the long-term prospects for the Arabs, Georgians or Laz in Turkey, and it cannot be denied that, since the war with the PKK concluded a few years ago, prospects for Turkey’s Syriac Orthodox Christians have improved significantly. Instability in Syria and Iraq might increase the size of Turkey’s very small Yazidi and Chaldean communities (leaders in both communities say that many of their people never want to live in Syria or Iraq again), but for Yazidis and Chaldeans to remain or settle in Turkey, they will need convincing guarantees from the Turkish government that sympathy for their dire plight is not merely a temporary phenomenon.

I am more confident about the prospects for multiethnicity in Turkey than in any of the other nation states just identified, but I also realise how quickly things can change in the Middle East. Should conflict once again break out between the PKK and the Turkish government, all the good work of the last few years will be undone in months. It could also be undone in a few months if the AKP tries to impose a legislative programme more Islamist than it has proposed to date, or if Turkish nationalists of the more extreme kind allege that Turkey’s minorities pose threats to the integrity of the republic and/or idealised notions of what it means to be a Turk. There is a lot at stake in the forthcoming general election, believe me.

Although my love affair with Turkey began in 1978, there are still things about the country that bring tears to my eyes, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for bad. Tears come to my eyes for good reasons because of the astounding hospitality and friendliness of most of the people; the way that things almost always fall into place when visitors need transport, accommodation, food or drink; how easy it is to find places that should be internationally renowned despite very few people knowing about them; and how Turkey has provided sanctuary for so many refugees from recent and on-going Middle Eastern conflicts. Tears come to my eyes for bad reasons because of the barriers that still remain for the great majority of people with disabilities, special needs and learning difficulties; the discrimination that confronts all the country’s minority ethnic groups and its gay, lesbian and bisexual communities; the poverty that exists in many rural communities, especially in eastern Turkey; the gender inequality that penalises millions of girls and women in countless substantive and symbolic ways; and the boundless energy, enterprise and intelligence that lie untapped among a majority of the country’s female population because, other than in a few sectors of society in which secular principles have not given way to Islamic ones, girls and women cannot compete as equals with boys and men. Today turned out to be one of the days when I often fought back the tears, and occasionally for some of the reasons just listed.

Because the 50 kilometre journey to Keban in a comfortable minibus cost only 5TL, or about £1-30, I tried to work out how much a bus journey of a similar distance would have cost in the UK. £4-50 to £5 seemed about right. The fare to Keban was very small despite the fact that petrol in Turkey was almost the same price as in the UK, thereby making it very expensive in relation to the average income, which was about a fifth or a sixth that of the average income in the UK.

The minibus went past the football ground, the incomplete park with the water features, the large dental hospital, lots of very new apartment blocks of crisp and clean design, the Ramada Hotel and a wall painting of Ataturk dressed in a soldier’s uniform while sucking a cigarette. Some progress had been made in recent years to convince Turkey’s citizens that smoking was a danger to their health, so much so that many people no longer smoked and far fewer smokers offered cigarettes to people they knew, which were both in marked contrast with past decades. However, smoking remained more popular in Turkey than in the UK and seemed to have been taken up by more women in recent years. It was still quite rare to see pious women in headscarves smoking, but the ones that did were usually earning a living in a full- or part-time job while still constrained by all the responsibilities of motherhood and home-maker. It was the start of day five of the trip and I had smoked only two cigarettes since arriving in Diyarbakir. I never smoke at home and have not done so for at least a decade, and for the decade before that, I confined consumption of the evil weed to only the occasional cigar. But the flesh is weak.

Elazig had spread so far to the west that it was only when we arrived at the turning for Sahinkaya that we escaped the clutches of the city. I had never travelled the road to Keban before. The gently undulating terrain was dominated by fields, pasture, orchards and grapevines, and hills and mountains were always in the distance. Some of the orchards produced apricots and many of the apricots found their way to Malatya, the city in the centre of one of the world’s best regions for their production. As I was soon to find out, some of the grapes were turned into wine and quite a lot of the wine was consumed locally by Alevis and Bektashis. In fact, I was temporarily leaving the Sunni side of the street for an area dominated by Alevis. It was almost as if I was leaving one nation state for another.

For most of the way to Keban, lots of wild flowers grew in the long grass. There were many places where beehives had been arranged in lines not far from sources of nectar and pollen. We passed a large modern mosque built where only five houses were in walking distance. I was reminded that Alevis and Bektashis rarely engaged in ritual practices in mosques. I knew for certain that the mosque will have been recently built in the hope that Alevis and Bektashis could be persuaded to adopt mainstream Sunni Islam. Was there much chance that this would happen? No, and above all because of the discrimination that Alevis and Bektashis had suffered for centuries at the hands of Sunni Muslims.

Almost every village along the road to Keban had a new mosque and the mosque was always far larger than the size of each village justified. The AKP had engaged in a massive mosque-building programme in recent years, but in all the parts of Turkey with substantial Alevi and Bektashi populations, its efforts to reinforce the influence of Sunni Islam had been largely unsuccessful. How sad that such a lot of money and effort had been wasted on a pointless exercise.

We drove beside Poyraz, a widely dispersed village. Just beyond the settlement, a road veered off to the north and led to the vast and elongated Keban Reservoir where a ferry carried vehicles and passengers to the north shore from where another road led after a few kilometres to the town of Cemisgezek, which I hoped to visit in a few day’s time.

The road gradually ascended for quite a long way and every so often we passed very large modern houses that had been carefully designed and brightly painted. The houses belonged to guestworkers who, on retiring from their jobs in countries such as Belgium, Germany or the Netherlands, were rich enough to build exactly what they wanted in the area where they had been born.

We reached the highest point on the road and mountains dominated the view ahead. We began to gradually descend, but drew to a halt at a road junction where a man wanted a lift to Keban. A sign indicated that the road led to two villages. The villages were 3 and 11 kilometres away. In Turkey, such signs tempted me to take a detour even if they might to lead to nowhere of great importance. However, I knew that the chances of something interesting lying along the road were very high, so the risk of being disappointed was very small.

When the baby in front of me dropped his dummy, I reached forward to pick it up. I handed the dummy to the young mother, but she did not acknowledge my existence in the slightest way. I was not surprised because she wore a headscarf and was dressed in a manner that confirmed she was a conventionally pious Sunni Muslim who should have no contact with an unknown male.

The road entered a meandering valley, but remained above the river. A few minutes later, we arrived at the edge of Keban and I got off the minibus at the point where a road to the left led downhill into the centre of the old town.

Keban.

People confirmed that minibuses did not travel between Keban and Arapgir, but I was not unduly worried because it was just after 9.30am. Since Keban was small and situated in such pretty surroundings with hills pressing against it on all sides, I decided to walk into the town centre because the minibus driver had told me earlier that there was a pretty mosque and an old church.

Keban stood on a slope above a narrow tributary of the Euphrates. It was a town of considerable importance until the mid-19th century because of nearby lead and silver mines, the abandonment of which caused the settlement’s population to decline. When the mines were open, smelting took place locally. Many of the miners were Greeks, but Sinclair suggests that “there was always a Turkish supervisor”.

In the 1830s, Germans and Hungarians worked one of the lead mines, but in 1840, Austrian engineers arrived and improved production for a short period of time. The main problem that confronted the miners and engineers was the lack of wood for smelting, so in the 1840s, attempts were made to force the people living in nearby villages to supply wood. But such coercive efforts resulted in people leaving the villages and the males becoming brigands or bandits. Production dwindled and the mines and furnaces were abandoned for good in about 1871.

The very pretty mosque was Yusuf Ziya Pasa Camii. It was part of a kulliye, or complex, and therefore proved an unexpected delight. Sinclair notes that the mosque and its related buildings dated from 1795 or 1796:

The mosque lies at the s. side of a courtyard dug out of the hillside. The dome is taken on four slim, widely spaced pillars. Between the pillars and the walls are sprung high pointed vaults. The dome and space beneath it are broad, airy and light in relation to the thinner, darker vaults. Women’s gallery to the n. The mihrab is plain, but the stone mimber is excellently decorated… The son cemaat yeri is a portico on pillars whose pitched roof continues the slope of that covering the prayer hall. It has a single dome (in the middle). The minaret to the w. is clear of the prayer hall’s wall and was built two years later than the prayer hall. It has an octagonal base: the slender shaft is twelve-sided.

Library. This is to the w. of the courtyard. It is on two storeys and domed. The dome sits on an octagonal drum which is pierced with windows. Next to the library is the medrese. Turbe for Ziya Pasa’s daughter. It is square with two windows in each wall (except that one window is replaced by the door) and domed. By the turbe is a cesme whose shallow iwan has a keel-shaped vault… Of the caravansaray only the portal and parts of the walls stand. By the entrance there are animal reliefs and other decoration.

Yusuf Ziya Pasa Camii, Keban.

Yusuf Ziya Pasa Camii, Keban.

I walked the short distance to the church, which Sinclair says was Armenian. It had a basilican layout and the faintest remains of frescoes on the walls. The roof was intact. The windows, whether still in existence or blocked with stone, were easily identified externally. Internally, I was confronted with columns supporting semi-circular arches. The structure was in such good condition that the Belediye, or Town Council, used it to shelter some of its motor vehicles, dustcarts included.

The Armenian church, Keban.

The Armenian church, Keban.

The Armenian church, Keban.

The Armenian church, Keban.

The doorway leading into the church faced the local police station where a few officers engaged me in conversation as they stood on the steps leading inside. One officer held a large automatic rifle which hung from a strap over one shoulder and the others had handguns in holsters attached to belts around their waists. I was offered a large glass of tea, for which I was very grateful. After an officer received a message on his phone, he and two of his colleagues made their way to a police car and prepared to leave to sort out a problem. Amazingly, I was asked to join them, which must have meant it was a minor problem, but I had to leave for Arapgir just in case traffic on the road proved very light. I walked to the office of a bus company running services to Elazig and elsewhere because I had dropped off my large bag to save carrying it around. I thanked the young man for looking after it and walked up the hill to the main road from Keban to Arapgir, noting along the way that many old houses had survived in the town. In fact, Keban had much to commend it, although it appeared to lack a hotel in which to stay.

I stood in the shade of some trees waiting for a lift, but the traffic was light and most drivers indicated that they were going only a short distance, most of them to the dam holding back the vast Keban Reservoir. The dam made quite an impressive sight. It was 1,125 metres long and a maximum of 210 metres high. Below the dam was a fish farm and below the fish farm a bridge carried the road to Arapgir across the river.

The dam, Keban Reservoir.

About half an hour after taking shelter under the trees, a man stopped his car and drove me into the quite wide valley below the dam. I was dropped at the south end of the bridge where a dirt road veered to the left to follow the river. The man was driving along the dirt road to check that everything was going well at a second fish farm. I walked across the bridge and, at the north end, bunting for one of the political parties flapped in the gentle breeze. Beside the river was a lokanta specialising in grilled fish from the nearby fish farm, but it did not look as if any eating would take place on the day I saw it.

The fish farm, near Keban.

I had to wait about only 15 minutes for the next lift and, on this occasion, was taken by a very jovial Alevi man and his son aged five all the way to the junction for the road to Malatya. The man farmed in a nearby village and one of his main crops was grapes. By now the road had ascended quite some height above the river valley and we were some distance onto an undulating plain. Snow-smudged mountains were shadowy presences in the distance. The mountains were the ones I hoped to get through the following day on my way to Divrigi.

I said goodbye to my hosts at the junction for Malatya and the man and his son waved as their motor vehicle turned around. The man had driven me some distance out of his way to ensure I would have a better chance of a lift to Arapgir. Amazing. Such kindness.

Ten minutes later, I was in a large lorry delivering goods to the centre of Arapgir, so all my worries about travelling from Keban had proved unfounded. Along the last section of the journey, we passed some very large flocks of sheep and the first tents set up by semi-nomadic families to care for the animals during the summer months. Some of the tents were bell-shaped. A few donkeys were tethered nearby. To the east, another ridge of mountains was smudged with snow.

We turned off the road leading to Divrigi and began the descent to the centre of Arapgir. We went through the pretty suburb of Asagiulupinar, which had once been a village. I had been to Arapgir once before, but only on a day trip from Malatya. I now intended to stay overnight to see what I had missed on the last occasion, Eskisehir, or old Arapgir. Eskisehir was a few kilometres to the north of the modern town.

Arapgir.

I thanked the driver of the lorry for his kindness, then walked the short distance to the relatively new Arapgir Nazar Hotel, one of two hotels that had opened in the town since my last visit a few years ago. I entered the very clean and attractively decorated lobby and was offered a room with en suite facilities and breakfast for 50TL for the night. The person at reception was a young female aged about 22 who did not wear a headscarf. The owner and his daughter appeared from along a corridor and I was invited into the man’s office where I was offered coffee. The three of us immediately got on well, partly because my companions were liberal Alevis with no time for the constraints of Sunni orthodoxy, and partly because we agreed that it would be wonderful if the forthcoming general election ensured that the AKP did not dominate Turkish politics in the way it had done for over a decade. A picture of Ataturk hung on the wall above the large desk behind which the man sat, confirmation that the family would vote for one of the secular parties when the election took place.

I was asked why I had decided to stay overnight in Arapgir and whether I would travel the following day to Kemaliye, a small town on the Euphrates River about 30 kilometres to the north. I explained that Divrigi was my next destination, although I knew that Kemaliye had much to commend it, and I explained about Eskisehir, which I had not visited when last in Arapgir. My hosts could not understand the appeal of Eskisehir, but, as I found out later, this was because they did not know much about it. But what they did know about was a village called Onar about 15 kilometres from Arapgir where there were 18 rock tombs dating from the Roman era and a 13th century cemevi, or meeting house, for Alevis and Bektashis to engage in ritual practices. They asked if I wanted to visit Onar. When I said that I did, the man said, “Then we will leave in half an hour. Get ready and we will go in our car.” I could not believe my luck.

Arapgir.

To Harput and Elazig.

I got off the minibus when I recognised somewhere near the city centre, returned briefly to the hotel to freshen up, then went for something to eat. Many of the lokantas in the area around the hotel had flashing electric signs informing passersby what they specialised in, and a lot of the advertised food was very tempting. However, I did not want to eat too much just in case it slowed me down that afternoon, so opted for a tavuk doner sandwich stuffed with salad and mayonnaise at a small lokanta with a dining area upstairs with enough room for only five or six tables. I also ordered water and ayran. The young married couple who own the business were from near Antakya, a favourite city of mine in southern Turkey, but a city not visited for many years, so we had a lot to talk about. “Yes, I know Harbiye. Yes, it’s a wonderful place for lunch or dinner. Yes, the old city of Antakya is very beautiful. Yes, the churches, the museum, the mosaics, the local edible specialities…” Chats like this only increased my wanderlust.

Elazig.

I walked to the parking lot from where minibuses departed for Harput and it was not long before the driver took a full load of passengers through the northern suburbs as we ascended to our destination. Along the way, we passed an enormous army camp and a very large military hospital.

It had been a few years since my last visit to Harput. I knew that some of the non-Christian monuments had been restored; old houses had disappeared; a few new houses had been built; new businesses such as cafés, lokantas and shops had opened; parks and playgrounds had been created; and general tidying up had been undertaken, all of which meant that Harput had become a very popular destination for recreational purposes. There was nothing wrong with this, I suppose, although it was now much harder than in the past to connect with the tragic events that unfolded here in 1915 (the tragic events included the murder of hundreds of Ottoman soldiers of Armenian origin stationed in the town and the expulsion on foot of about 3,000 Armenian civilians. Most of the latter were women, children and elderly men. Most of the 3,000 civilians never made it to their destination, the Syrian desert, because of hunger, thirst, murder by Turks and Kurds, local tribespeople kidnapping and enslaving women and children, and women and children dying or being killed after suffering repeated rape). Harput, a place that witnessed terrible crimes against humanity, was being sanitised and all physical reminders of the victims were slowly disappearing.

Harput.

Harput.

The entrance to Harput used to be dignified by a terrace of very old timber-framed houses in a terminal state of decay, so I was not altogether surprised to see that they had disappeared. However, the houses had been replaced by a butik hotel built with modern materials to superficially resemble what had originally been there. But as was often the case with such reconstructions, the replacement engendered a sense of sadness mixed with anger because the original buildings had not been restored. Other recent developments disappointed and/or angered me in a similar manner, so much so that, for the first hour or so, I thought I had made a mistake coming. But then Harput began to cast a spell. The spell began with the grandeur of the surrounding landscapes and the views that were a delight almost everywhere I walked. The spell continued with the fresh air, the wild flowers and the relative quiet (it was Monday and the start of the working week, so not many people were paying a visit), all of which helped me to acquire an altogether deeper appreciation of the surviving monuments. In the end, it was with some reluctance that I returned to the large modern city below, despite Harput being the scene of dreadful crimes against humanity only a hundred years ago.

Harput.

In 1915, Harput was the area’s main centre of population. Elazig on the plain below had not been in existence for long and would only become the dominant population centre after large parts of Harput were destroyed in the first world war and then largely abandoned. What remained of Harput merely hinted at its past grandeur and importance. But a magnificent hilltop castle overlooked Ulu Camii with its crooked minaret, three other mosques, two hamams, and Mansur Baba and Arap Baba turbes, both of which still attracted pilgrims. All these were important and, in some instances, enchanting survivals from the past, although I sided with the people who thought that some of the restoration work had been over-zealous. However, I would rather that over-zealous restoration had assured the long-term future of the monuments than that the monuments should be lost altogether. This was especially the case with the castle, Ulu Camii, one of the hamams and the turbes.

The castle, Harput.

Ulu Camii, Harput.

The castle, Harput.

One of the turbes, Harput.

One of the turbes, Harput.

One of the hamams, Harput.

One of the hamams, Harput.

Despite a lot of labour and financial expense being lavished on the restoration of Muslim, Selcuk and Ottoman monuments, and on the development of facilities for visitors to enjoy recreational and shopping opportunities, Harput’s Christian monuments were in a shameful state. Although in good condition externally, the large Syriac Orthodox church, known locally as Kizil Kilise (“kizil” is Turkish for “red”), could not be entered, which made me think that the interior must be in very poor condition, and the two ruins attributed to the Armenians, one a church and the other a chapel, were in a dire state of preservation, just as they had been for as long as I had known of their existence first-hand.

Just for the record, here is Sinclair’s description of the Syriac Orthodox church:

This is quite possibly a reconstruction of 1179, from which an over-modest repair inscription is known; if not, the church is 10th century and the inscription refers only to a repair.

The forbidding box-like form of the church is pressed against the s. side of a corner low down in the rapidly descending cliff of the citadel rock: the corner is cut into the ne. end of the rock spur projecting from the citadel rock’s e. corner. A platform still exists to the n. of the church, protected from earth slippage by a retaining wall…: at its s. end the wall distances itself gradually from the rock in order to allow for a small chamber accessible from the nave. The wall in fact conceals part of the nave…

The Syriac Orthodox church, Harput.

The interior is ill-lit but spacious: the light, coming lengthways down the church from windows at the e. end only, causes shadows on the deeply pitted floor (much dug by treasure hunters, starting in 1978 or 1979)… The nave is entered by a doorway much narrowed (in the late 19th or early 20th century) by additions from the side and from above: a ramp against the wall, protected by an L-shaped wall and a roof, leads to the doorway.

The wide nave has four wall piers, upholding arcades, on each side. The shallow vaults, although sprung from the top of the walls resting on the arches, rely just as much on the ribs sprung from the arches’ spandrels: the strictly vertical height of these ribs… increases greatly towards the wall as the slant of the rib’s soffit swiftly steepens.

E. end. Since 1979 much of this has become unwalkable owing to deep pits. An internal wall cut through by the chancel arch ends the nave, but two chambers either side of the short chancel can also be reached from the nave through doors in this wall. Off these again are the genuine pastophoria (side rooms for liturgical purposes). The sanctuary is a rectangle with rounded corners: low altar. The semi-dome is of brick. The southern of the two chambers reached from the chancel extends outside the line of the nave wall, and the s. pastophorion is shifted further s. in sympathy… Off the first chamber leads another: this is extremely dark and its floor much lower, mostly because of the digging.

Not far from the Syriac Orthodox church was what was left of an Armenian church, which Sinclair thinks was the Church of the Apostles:

Only the e. wall and parts of the n. and s. walls adjacent to it remain. They stand at the end of a high artificial platform. The church no doubt belongs to the 19th century. It has three apses, the central one wider than the others. From these apses vaults or possibly rows of domes would have led westwards supported on pillars or piers. To n. and s. of the three juxtaposed aisles was a single aisle, narrower than the central three. The ends of these two narrower aisles can be seen to the n. and s. of the three apses.

The Armenian church, Harput.

The Armenian church and the castle, Harput.

The Armenian church, Harput.

From both the churches just described were views into the bottom of a valley where there were the scant remains of a chapel. Sinclair describes the chapel as having a:

Single nave, probably with dome in front of apses. Probably Armenian. Perhaps medieval.

View from the Armenian chapel to the Syriac Orthodox church and the castle, Harput.

The Armenian chapel, Harput.

In “Armenia: the survival of a nation”, Christopher Walker writes that Harput was once “one of the intellectual centres for Ottoman Armenians”, and in the late 19th century, American missionaries established “a distinguished and progressive educational institution, Euphrates College”. Ottoman census figures reveal that Harput had a large Armenian population, but only two ruins confirmed that Armenians once lived in it. Considerable time, energy and expense had been expended to preserve what remained of the Islamic, Selcuk and Ottoman heritage at Harput, and even the Syriac Orthodox church, which once served a far smaller Christian community than did the Armenian church and chapel, was in better condition than anything that definitely met the needs of the Armenians. Were these realities depressing? They were very depressing.

However, I enjoyed looking around the castle, where, unlike my previous visit, I could walk without restriction because restoration had been completed. The views from the castle walls were remarkable and were enhanced because it was mid-May when the grass was green, the wild flowers were many and varied, and the visibility was far superior than during the hottest months of the year. Some parts of the fortifications had been restored to a degree that must fill archaeologists and architects with a mixture of anger and despair, but what impressed me immensely was that excavations were currently taking place in and around an Urartian cistern. No one was working on the site the day of my visit, so I entered two of the fenced-off enclosures through unlocked wooden gates to examine the remains more closely. This relatively recent discovery made me wonder what else will be found at this remarkable place. Moreover, will some future discoveries help us to reconnect with the Armenians who once lived here?

The Urartian cistern in the castle, Harput.

As far as I could tell, the only foreigner at Harput the same time as me was a German national of Turkish origin who was visiting the area where his father and mother had come from before migrating to Germany for work purposes in the 1960s. Quite a lot of high school and university students had come to engage in self-conscious courtship rituals with someone they fancied, and small groups of young males and females walked around hoping someone in the opposite sex might take an interest in them. Most of the young women wore headscarves and, being Turkish and Sunni, were reluctant to engage in conversation with an unknown male such as myself. Conversation with such a male would have been shameful for a female, although if a male had engaged in chat with an unknown female, no shame would attach to him. Hypocrisy? How else can it be described? Also, if pious Sunni women were meant to cover their hair and ears at all times and dress modestly from head to toe, why did exactly the same rules not apply to Sunni males? Hypocrisy? What else?

I caught a minibus to the centre of Elazig to walk around the pazar and the surrounding streets as people bought food to take home for their evening meal and the following morning’s breakfast. For most people, the working day was over. Although many women were dressed in ways that would reassure the conventionally pious, some had the courage to dress just as they wished, even though, in doing so, they no doubt upset or shocked many of the Sunni majority in the city. A few high school students had paired off to test just how far they could go with public expressions of affection in a heterosexual relationship without older people with strong religious convictions berating them. But some things were resistant to change in Turkey, despite trends such as globalisation and most people being financially much better off than ever before. On all the minibus rides so far undertaken, males and females rearranged themselves on the seats so no males sat with unknown females. Also, as nightfall approached, girls and women made their way home. By 7.30pm, males had almost completely taken over the city centre streets. A few women remained in open business premises or begged on the streets, but that was about it. By 9.00pm, there was no one to chat with but men and boys.

Elazig.

In cities such as Elazig where Turks and Sunnis seemed to dominate, segregation of the sexes was often more apparent than in the villages, even though in cities women could move around relatively freely, especially if they were employed, and women in villages could never go too far from home unless they were involved in work such as caring for animals or toiling in the fields.

I have always liked Elazig’s pazar. It did not occupy pretty premises (the covered section was quite rundown and the surrounding streets were largely devoid of interesting architectural features), but the shops and stalls full of food (e.g. fresh fruit, dried fruit, vegetables, honey, jam, olives, cheese, nuts, lokum, baklava, pestil and kome) were excellent. Many shops beyond the covered sections displayed clothes, shoes, hardware, kitchen utensils, fabric, knives and furniture; a large shed stocked flour, dried beans and bars of bittim sabunu; and lots of shops specialised in very expensive clothes for devout Sunni women who wanted to make an impression despite having to cover everything except their face and hands. Moreover, some shops selling clothes for weddings were outrageously over the top, so much so that I thought I had strayed into a documentary about how Gypsy and Traveller families in the UK liked to spend big on matrimonial clothes, especially for women. Supermarkets, shopping malls and out-of-town retail opportunities were taking their toll on pazars in many parts of Turkey, but Elazig’s was surviving better than most. It had been my intention to spend the last night of the trip in Diyarbakir, but I wondered whether it might be better to stay in Elazig instead because in Elazig I could buy most of what I wanted for home more conveniently than in Diyarbakir. I would see how things worked out as the last two days approached. I also fantasised about getting home some large wooden cooking utensils, cooking pots made with metal and an unglazed red clay pot for the oven, to say nothing of seeds to grow vegetables the following year! The only downside to the pazar was where men keep live fish in large tanks. Some fish had died through lack of oxygen and others were close to death.

The pazar, Elazig.

The pazar, Elazig.

Just to the east of the covered section of the pazar was a large square dominated on the far side by a substantial modern mosque. A large hemisphere of steel and glass or Perspex covered an entrance to an underground extension of the pazar and, next to the hemisphere, there were more stalls where most people sold fruit, vegetables and herbs. I peered through the window of a shop selling everything required to ensure that a young male never forgot the day he was circumcised.

The pazar, Elazig.

Elazig.

For my evening meal, I returned to where I had eaten lunch and ordered exactly the same food and drink again. It proved just what my body craved, so much so that I went for a walk to help digest the meal. At one point, I passed one of the slightly suspect modern places pretending to be an antik nargile café, although it looked as if it had been set up only a few weeks earlier. Part of the café was in the open air. It had suffered a fire earlier in the day, perhaps due to faulty electrical wiring running along wooden columns supporting a flat wooden roof of cheap and hasty construction. Staff were trying to salvage things from the wreckage.

Elazig.

To Elazig and Sahinkaya/Hulvenk.

As far as I could tell, only one other person spent the night in the pansiyon, so there was no competition for the facilities in the morning. I packed as many items into my bags as I could, then went downstairs for breakfast. I ordered lentil soup, which came with bread, salad, water and tea. Only two other men sat in the lokanta. One had soup but the other ordered only tea, which he drank with his first three cigarettes of the day. According to the law, smoking was no longer allowed where food was served, but in simple lokantas in south-east Turkey reliant largely on local custom to make a profit, such rules were enforced erratically. The TV news updated us about the latest speeches and gaffes made by leading political figures over the weekend, then someone changed the channel so we could watch a programme about south-east Turkey, or Turkish Kurdistan. While males sang happy and sad songs about love and lust, iconic images of Mount Ararat, Dogubayazit, Isak Pasa Saray, Lake Van, Hasankeyf, Mardin, Midyat, Diyarbakir and the mountains around Hakkari filled the screen (if an Armenian instead of a Kurd had watched the same programme, he or she would have recognised some iconic images of Western Armenia instead of Turkish Kurdistan).

The lokanta of the pansiyon, Ergani.

I paid my bill for the food and the room, collected my things and walked about 100 metres to an office from where minibuses left for Elazig, my destination for the day. I had to wait only 20 minutes before we set off. There was just time to chat briefly with a young woman wearing a headscarf.

My bedroom in the pansiyon, Ergani.

I knew the road from Ergani to Elazig from a number of trips in the past, but, because I was now travelling along it in mid-May when everything looked very green and fertile and the visibility was crystal clear, it felt as if I was doing the journey for the first time. We entered hills and mountains as soon as we left Ergani. As the comfortable minibus sped along the fast road, we passed an old stone bridge over a river, trees with bright green leaves, orchards, wild flowers and an army camp. For many kilometres, the railway meandered in sympathy with the rivers and every so often disappeared into a short tunnel or crossed a stone bridge, some of the latter with elegantly wide arches.

Around Maden (the name means “mine” or “mineral” in Turkish), a small town with many old houses ascending a steep hillside above the river, scars and slag on the slopes confirmed that mining had been popular until very recently. Mining began in Maden in the 16th century when Greeks were brought from Gumushane to exploit the area’s mineral wealth. Today, very little mining continued, if it continued at all, but the railway had a presence in the town with a station, a few sidings and a water crane for the occasional steam locomotive.

Shortly after leaving Maden, the valley widened. The road emerged on the right-hand wall of a wide bowl at the far end of which was the slope holding back the waters of Hazar Golu, a large lake. Because the lake was a very attractive resource surrounded by hills and mountains (some of the latter were smudged with snow), the towns and villages along the north-east and north shores had emerged in recent decades as destinations for people to escape the summer heat on the nearby plains. There were a few hotels and pansiyons, but villas, some of which were now 20 or 30 years old (others were more recent in construction and designed to a higher standard), were much more numerous. However, development remained just short of being overwhelming, although for how much longer was difficult to predict. This meant that at present it was not the built environment that dominated people’s attention, but the lake, the surrounding hills and mountains, the fields, the orchards and the wild flowers. The province of Elazig was lucky to have such a destination within its borders.

From the most westerly extremity of the lake, the road veered north and descended onto a wide undulating plain with ridges of hills and mountains to the south and north. Fields and orchards dominated the run into Elazig, which appeared from the south to be a relatively small city. However, it stretched a considerable distance from east to west and in recent years had grown significantly toward Harput in the north.

The minibus terminated at the garaj to the south-west of the city centre and a servis bus carried passengers for free to destinations around Elazig. I and two other passengers got off where Hurriyet, Istasyon and Gazi caddesis met and I left to find a small hotel for the night. On Horasan Sokak just off Gazi Caddesi, the two-star Mayd had a room with en suite facilities, a balcony and breakfast for 60TL. It was so early in the day that breakfast was still available to late-rising guests. I knew it would be a good breakfast when I saw that a woman was responsible for preparing it.

Elazig.

Elazig was a city with a very large population of conventionally pious Sunnis, both Turkish and Kurdish. I had already noted that a very large number of women wore headscarves, but some liked all-enveloping but loose-fitting black garments and covered their face so that only their eyes and the top of their nose were visible. Large modern mosques were not far from the hotel and a sign in my room indicated the kible, or the direction for prayer. A prayer mat of very recent pedigree was on the floor of the wardrobe. For most of the next 24 hours I was very much on the Sunni side of the street with all that this implied in terms of segregation of the sexes and infrequent chats with women. On the plus side, dozens of lokantas were in the side streets around the hotel (but none served alcohol); the pazar was only seven minutes away on foot; the minibuses to Harput departed from a car park a few blocks to the east; and, by utilising the side streets south of Gazi Caddesi, I could walk to the minibus garaj for Keban and Arapgir in about 15 minutes. Arapgir was my destination for the following day.

But Harput was for later in the day because my first destination was the village of Sahinkaya, about 7 kilometres west and a little north of the city centre. Sahinkaya, until quite recently known as Hulvenk, was not far from the Armenian Monastery of St. George (“venk” or “vank” is Armenian for “monastery”).

I left the hotel, walked to the minibus garaj where I had arrived earlier to confirm that minibuses departed for Keban the following morning (they departed on an hourly basis, but I was told there were no minibuses from Keban to Arapgir), then I strode off in a westerly direction along the main road leading eventually to Malatya. It seemed to take a long time to reach the city’s football stadium and a new but incomplete park with water features, but eventually I arrived at the point where the roads to Malatya and Keban part company. I stood near the beginning of the road to Keban and flagged down the first minibus that came along. I said I was going to Sahinkaya and the driver confirmed that he could take me to within 3 kilometres of the village. We drove past a very large modern dental hospital and many apartment blocks that looked as if they had been built only a year or two earlier, but already some shops, cafés, lokantas and other businesses occupied ground floor premises to meet the needs of the growing population.

When the minibus reached its destination all the passengers got off, but the driver urged me to get aboard again and very kindly drove me about a kilometre further along the road to Sahinkaya. By now I was beyond the clutches of the concrete jungle that was most of modern Elazig and surrounded by fields, pasture, orchards and houses with large gardens. I began walking toward the centre of the village, but a man stopped his tractor to offer me a lift to a tea house, where we sat in the shade as refreshments were summoned. We chatted about the village, the monastery and the local population. To my amazement, the man said he was Armenian. Kurds sitting at the next table said, “Yes. And we are all friends in the village. Kurds, Zaza, Armenians: it does not matter. First we are friends.”

Inevitably, my offer to pay for the refreshments was refused and, after shaking hands with everyone, the owner of the tea house included, I left for the monastery. Sahinkaya was not a particularly pretty village, but there were enough old houses and sights characteristic of the Turkish countryside to make it worth spending some time in. Just about everyone I met, male or female, said good morning and made sure I was going in the right direction, but I took one wrong turn before being put right by a man in protective clothes checking his beehives. When he learned that I was visiting Tunceli in a few days’ time, he said I must try the honey from Ovacik because it was very good.

As I approached a cesme dispensing chilled water that hit the spot perfectly on a warm mid-morning, I came across a new taxi parked in the shade of some trees. The driver had a welcoming smile on his face and gave me a cucumber to eat. He explained that he had dropped off three people who had walked the last 200 metres to the monastery. I was intrigued that I was not the only person visiting remote and largely forgotten Armenian ruins a hundred years after the genocide against the Armenians had begun.

Near the Monastery of St. George, Sahinkaya/Hulvenk.

I passed polled trees arranged in two rows, a stone ruin that had probably been part of the monastic complex and pasture enlivened by many wild flowers. To the west were the last houses of Sahinkaya and to the east the apartment blocks of Elazig most distant from the city centre. The apartment blocks were less than a kilometre away. Sahinkaya will eventually lose its separate identity and become a suburb of Elazig made up of housing far less interesting than that which currently existed.

The three people at the monastery were an Armenian American film-maker from Boston, his cameraman, also from Boston, and a younger man whom I assumed was a Turkish national taken on as a fixer. The film-maker and his cameraman had been visiting Turkey off and on for three years with the intention of making a documentary about the 1915 genocide and its aftermath. This would be their last year in the field, as it were, after which all effort would be directed toward preparing the documentary for viewing by the public. The Armenian American had good reason to visit Sahinkaya because at least one of his grandparents had lived locally. He told a remarkable story about close encounters with local people who had heard of or known his grandparent, tracking down the remains of his relative’s house and the possibility of buying the land on which the house had stood, thereby reclaiming for an Armenian a little bit of Western Armenia with close associations with his family. There was even talk of being able to identify precisely where his relative was buried.

We talked for a while about the events that began in 1915, about the film-maker’s family associations with the area, about the places he and I had visited because of our mutual interest in the genocide, and about the Turkish Republic’s shameful neglect of surviving Armenian monuments other than the few visited by a large number of tourists, whether foreign or indigenous. Because a few Armenian monuments such as the astounding church on the island of Akhdamar in Lake Van were looked after properly, the gullible were lulled into thinking that all Armenian monuments in Turkey were cared for, but the ruined, vandalised and graffiti-smeared monastery church near Sahinkaya typified the dire condition of most such treasures of the past.

The Monastery of St. George, Sahinkaya/Hulvenk.

The Monastery of St. George, Sahinkaya/Hulvenk.

The Monastery of St. George, Sahinkaya/Hulvenk. Note the Aramaic script of the Syriac Orthodox Church.

I left the three in peace because they were about to hang from the damaged dome of the monastery church a makeshift Armenian flag they had attached to a pole that would be lowered into the nave with a rope. I asked permission to witness what promised to be a very moving event and was encouraged to stay, on the understanding I did not get in the way of the cameraman and his desire the film the event devoid of human distraction. I loitered in the background and, as the flag was lowered from the dome to flap gently in the badly vandalised nave, felt much more than a mere lump in my throat. Albeit briefly, an Armenian flag was hanging in an Armenian monastery church in eastern Turkey not far from Harput where some of the most thoroughly documented massacres and deportations, the latter themselves resulting in immense loss of life, took place in 1915.

The Monastery of St. George, Sahinkaya/Hulvenk.

The Monastery of St. George, Sahinkaya/Hulvenk.

The Monastery of St. George, Sahinkaya/Hulvenk.

The Monastery of St. George, Sahinkaya/Hulvenk.

It would not surprise me if what the film-maker did with the flag constituted a criminal act in Turkey, but I regarded it as a small moral victory on behalf of a people who simply wanted the Turkish Republic to admit that what happened in 1915 and immediately thereafter constituted genocide. Geoffrey Robertson’s “An Inconvenient Genocide: who now remembers the Armenians?” provides what I regard as conclusive proof that it was genocide, and even the Turkish Republic now concedes that 600,000 Armenians lost their lives during world war one. However, the Turkish Republic insists that genocide did not take place because not all Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were murdered and because “no authentic evidence exists” for “a pre-meditated plan to kill off Armenians”.

Genocide involves “the extinction of a race or any part of a race”. In other words, total extinction of a people is NOT required for genocide to have occurred. The Turkish Republic significantly underestimates how many Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 by putting the figure at 1.1 million. However, even if “only” 600,000 Armenians were murdered in 1915 and thereafter, this constitutes over 50% of all Armenians said by the Turkish Republic to have been alive in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, which amounts to a very substantial part of the Armenian “race” in the eyes of anyone. It was established a few years ago that genocide took place in Srebrinica in 1995 when just over 8,000 Bosniaks were murdered by Serbs and a few Ukrainians and Russians. If genocide can take place when “only” 8,000 people are murdered, how can it not be the case that genocide takes place when at least 600,000 are murdered?

What of the argument that “no authentic evidence exists” for “a pre-meditated plan to kill off Armenians”? Robertson is unequivocal in his conclusion about the matter. Although it is difficult to pinpoint documentary evidence that extermination of the Armenians was planned:

Criminal law works authentically by inference from all the evidence: quite apart from the confessions by Turkish leaders (who, after world war one, said that the extermination of the Armenians was intended) and the verdicts of the Constantinople trails (of 1919, which led to convictions for “crimes against humanity and civilisation”), the deportations were certainly pre-planned, as were the laws providing for asset and home seizure by the state. Sending Armenians (and only Armenians) on long marches in the knowledge that most would be killed en route, by brigands and local vengeful Muslims, or by disease and starvation, necessarily entails pre-meditation, and government responsibility for the foreseeable consequences.

But what of the monastery church near Sahinkaya? What condition was it in? As I have already indicated, the ruin had been vandalised and graffiti “artists” had added to the damage. Because lots of mortar was crumbling away, further harm will be done to the remaining stonework, especially with the freezing and thawing of water that takes place during winter and spring. Blackened internal walls confirmed that some disrespectful idiots had tried to burn the ruin down, and some of the soot suggested the fires were quite recent. Most of the floor had been dug over by treasure hunters convinced that Armenians had buried gold, silver and other valuables in 1915 just before they were murdered or, if they were women, children and elderly men, just before they were sent elsewhere, ostensibly to be relocated in a settlement less militarily sensitive in the crumbling Ottoman Empire. In other words, the monastery church was a forlorn sight and confirmed that such buildings were subject to intolerable official neglect. However, most of the roof remained intact, despite a hole in the dome, and I had seen Armenian churches, whether once part of a monastic complex or not, in even worse condition than this. In fact, it would not take much money or labour to ensure that the ruin survived, more or less as it currently was, for many generations to come. But would such an investment in money and labour be made? Not if the AKP secures a parliamentary majority in June 2015. Such an investment might be made if, by some miracle, a coalition is formed without either the AKP or the uncompromisingly Turkish nationalist MHP.

Here, for the record, is how Sinclair described the monastery in 1982:

A Syrian monastery was founded here in the early 6th century, but the present buildings are Armenian and the earliest part of the present church belongs to the 15th century, though this work was probably an extensive restoration of a church built in 1300/01. The rest, including the westerly addition to the church, is much later. The church now stands at the s. side of the enclosure, with two single buildings not far to the n.

Church. This is now a rectangle with a dome, now fallen, in front of the apse. The church was extended to the w. in an addition of 1882, and the nave now consists of two rows of four pillars upholding barrel-vaults above the narrow side aisles and a variety of vaults, beside the dome, above the central aisle. Low arches are sprung from the pillars to the n. and s. walls. To the e. the line of the arcades is continued by the walls separating the apse from its side chambers. The church’s earlier part (to the e.) is higher, and the drop in the height of the vaults is reflected outside in the height of the roof… E. end. Deep sanctuary, ending in semi-circle. S. side chamber reflects its shape in its n. wall; n. chamber has been enlarged… E. half of nave. Note polychrome masonry of pendatives, different patterns formed by the blocks in the pendatives. Simple painting (cavalier saint and dragon) on n. wall, second bay…

Monastic buildings, which probably date from 1882. E. wall of enclosure adjoins corner of church’s ne. chamber. The w. wall no doubt joined the church’s nw. corner, but is broken off at a good distance from it. Large room against n. wall… All walls in this enclosure are of mudbrick; the arches of the main room and the jambs of its n. door are stone.    

Sadly, a lot of the fine detail that Sinclair describes in relation to the church had been lost and, perhaps even more alarmingly, none of the structures mentioned from “Monastic buildings” remain. Compare my photos of the monastery with Sinclair’s photo in volume 3 of his monumental study and be shocked by what has disappeared in such a relatively short time. Anyone who values the products of human endeavour from the past that have helped to shape us today, and anyone who values things from the past that reflect humankind’s remarkable capacity for invention and creativity, cannot visit the monastery near Sahinkaya without feeling a profound sense of loss. As a result, I feel compelled to write the following. Such neglect and its consequences are almost as unforgivable as the destruction by the Taliban in 2001 of the great Buddhist statues at Bamiyan in Afghanistan. Such neglect and its consequences are almost as unforgivable as the destruction undertaken by the Islamic State at world heritage sites in Syria and Iraq. The cultural artefacts, religious buildings included, of people who subscribe to other beliefs appear to be more likely to be destroyed when Islam is the dominant world view than when other world views are dominant. Of course, it is possible that this is a problem afflicting Sunnis alone in so far as such Muslims have also engaged in recent years in the destruction of many Shia and Sufi cultural artefacts, religious buildings included, in countries as far apart as Mali and Iraq. Moreover, Ahmaddiya Muslim mosques have been attacked by Sunnis in almost every nation state where they have a statistically significant presence.

The cesme near the Monastery of St. George, Sahinkaya/Hulvenk.

I could tell that more work had to be done before just the right shots were taken for the documentary, so we exchanged contact details before I began the walk back to Sahinkaya, although I chatted briefly with the taxi driver as I passed him. I also filled my bottle at the cesme wondering whether this was a source of water for the monks who once inhabited the monastery. The stonework comprising the cesme looked old enough to have been around at least as early as the late 19th century, despite the fact that a tablet of stone set into it had a date of 1938. However, the tablet of stone could easily have been a later addition.

I arrived at a house where a family sat in the garden enjoying the sunshine. We chatted briefly before one of the women said that, if I was quick, a minibus would leave for Elazig in five minutes from outside the modern mosque. I would have liked to look around the village a little longer (for many years now, my favourite settlements in Turkey have been villages rather than towns or cities), but, if I had missed the minibus, I would have had much less time at Harput. I dashed off and caught the minibus with two minutes to spare. There were only seven other passengers and four of them were female. Only one woman wore a headscarf so the conversation flowed easily with females as well as males.

Sahinkaya/Hulvenk.