From Antakya to Troy with Lord Kinross

Following a long drive across the Anatolian plateau, Kinross greeted his first view of the Mediterranean, near İskenderun, with the same effusiveness as do today’s hordes of sand, sea and sun seekers from harsher northern climes. “Suddenly the Mediterranean lay spread beneath me, shining in welcome, stretching away towards Europe. It promised relief from the eternal (Anatolian) plateau, Asiatic and stern behind the parapets of the Taurus, and the ungrateful plains beneath them. As I drove down over the pass the slopes around me were alive with olives, alight with pines. Windows in the villages winked in the sunlight, rivulets sparked as they danced away to the sea.”

From Antakya to Adana, and on to Anamur

Unimpressed by industrial İskenderun, where the sea was “imprisoned, in sultry stagnation, within the landlocked shelter of the Alexandrine Gulf of Issus” and where “its Turkish inhabitants sat stodgily along an uncompleted sea-front” Kinross soon headed south, to ancient Antioch (today’s Antakya), which he finds equally uninspiring despite its past glories. “A bedraggled provincial town among groves of poplars…it affords little to the antiquarian but the clambering walls of a citadel which housed, in turn, Byzantines, Crusaders and Arabs…Its river, the Orontes [modern Asi] crawls sullenly, muddily through the town.” Praising neither Antakya’s wonderful Arab-influenced cuisine, nor mentioning its association with Peter, Paul and the early Christian church, Kinross travelled north and then east to Adana.

Adana today is a veritable boomtown, grown fat from cotton production on the surrounding Çukurova plain, industry and trade. It was so in Kinross’ time, too, and he calls it a “city of cotton millionaires.” He is even more critical of it, though, than he was of either İskenderun or Antakya, writing scathingly, “Turning its back on the Seyhan, with its fine Byzantine bridge, it is an ill-planned town, lacking in dignity.” Kinross comments, whilst visiting a local Republican People’s Party (CHP) politician, that Adnan Menderes’ Democrat Party (DP) had just won a second term in office (dating the writer’s visit to circa 1954). According to Kinross, the Menderes party “now dominated the country against a parliamentary opposition unhealthily small” -- exactly the kind of language astute political commentators are using today to describe the lack of a credible opposition to the current Justice and Development Party (AKP) government.

Kinross next headed westwards to Mersin, from where he travelled by bus to Kızkalesi. Here, on the rocky shores of ancient Cilicia, he found more to like than in the flatlands of Adana, writing, “Here, commanding a flawless curve of a bay, stood the castle of Corycus [Korykos], its walls and towers white and gold against water so shallow that its ripples were reflected like gold-mesh netting, on the sand.” He was even more thrilled with the Medieval castle of Anamur, further west along the coast, noting, “Alone of the sand, with a soft sea lapping at its bold, serrated ramparts, it has a romantic dignity unmatched by other fortresses on this turbulent pirate coast.” Kinross finished this stage of his journey here, and cut inland through the wild limestone peaks of the Toros to the Anatolian plateau and onto İstanbul.

Kinross’ next stage of Mediterranean meanderings began in Antalya, a town which he would, were he still alive (he passed away in 1976), find unrecognizable today. Cliff-top Karaalioğlu Park, now a delightful mass of greenery and shady tea gardens, was in its first stages of development. “Keeping nature at bay with a pitiless expanse of concrete, it boasts avenues so broad no trees can shade them, pergolas so vast that no creepers can cover them.” Now boasting a relentlessly increasing population of a million, when Kinross visited there were scarcely 20,000 souls in the town, and the park, based according to Kinross, on the grandiose Prater gardens in Vienna, was bereft of all but “a group of women who squat beneath the stunted palm trees, plucking a weed which serves them as a form of spinach.” Kaleiçi, the old walled-quarter, today is jam-packed with cafes, restaurants, bars and clubs, but according to Kinross it was “dark and silent, but for the barking of a dog, the wail of Turkish radio music, the call to prayer.” What’s more, “there was no restaurant, only a murky ‘dive’ where lorry drivers drank rakı.”

By boat to Kaş, Patara and Fethiye

Like many of today’s visitors, Kinross took in the wonderful ancient ruins of Perge, Aspendos and Termessos before heading westward into Lycia, aboard the Elfin, a motor-yacht owned by his good friend, David Balfour, the British consul general in İzmir. Today, journeys along the beautiful southwestern coast of Turkey by boat are known as Blue Cruises and are extremely popular. Kinross was fortunate enough to travel this now busy route in the days long before mass tourism, when the sites he visited (such as ancient Phaselis, Olympos and Myra) from the luxury of his friend’s boat were deserted and totally unspoiled.

Balfour and Kinross reached Kaş by way of Kekova. Bewitched by its location, “a blue silken bay, beneath folds of rose-coloured mountains,” Kinross was less than impressed by the town itself, which he describes as “torpid…a port drained of the life which the Greeks once brought to it.” From Kaş the pair sailed to Meis, the pretty Greek island just a few kilometers offshore, that in late-Ottoman times had been a vibrant trading center, grown rich on the timber trade. At Patara, around the coast, they were briefly arrested by some overzealous Turkish gendarmes, convinced they were spies.

En route to Fethiye, Kinross gives a flavor of the delights of sailing along Turkey’s southwest Mediterranean coast. “As evening fell on the Elfin’s decks, the Seven Capes became an intangible pink silhouette, beneath golden wraiths of cloud. As we chugged up the long Gulf of Fethiye, the scent of pines drifted out to us from the darkening land, to sweeten the tang of the sea, while the moon flung a glittering flarepath across it.” It is hard now to imagine the revolutionary changes brought to the lives of Turkey’s rural inhabitants by the Menderes government in the 1950s, and Kinross writes of Fethiye. “Since my last visit a democratic regime has blessed Fethiye with the benefits of electricity, which now blazed down on the waterfront in all its naked fluorescence…a small boy was driving a tractor along the quay, and the shops reflected the new era of peasant prosperity, displaying radios, electric irons and refridgerators.” Fethiye has been developing ever since, buoyed by the tourism industry, but to Kinross in the 1950s, despite the advent of electricity, it remained “a flyblown little place, lying in a kind of luminous stagnation in the shelter of its waveless gulf.”

Bodrum: Closed at 6:30 p.m.

Today’s tourist-hub of Marmaris, his next port of call, was similarly under threat from the modern world. “The streets were still cobbled, but there were sinister signs of approaching prosperity. Pylons, not lamp posts, awaited the arrival of electric light, while on the main square Atatürk was up to his neck in gravel, part of the litter which arose from the construction of a new pier.” Bodrum, Marmaris’ more sophisticated and exclusive northwestern cousin, was a shadow of the holiday capital it is today, where the famed Halicarnassus clubs pump out the latest dance sounds until the small hours. Kinross writes of the town in the 1950s: “Towards seven o’clock in the evening I went out in search of a meal. But no restaurant was open. They closed, I learned, at 6.30pm. I dined off a biscuit and a bowl of yoghurt in a milk-shop.” Soon Kinross fell into conversation with a bored youngster, who turned out to be from big city İstanbul. According to him, there was never anything to do in Bodrum as everyone was too mean to use the electricity from the recently installed generator, but preferred instead to go to bed as they had always done, shortly after nightfall. “Where does their money go?” inquired an incredulous Kinross, who’d been told the people of the town earned good money sending fresh fruit to İstanbul. “They spend it on necklaces and gold coins, for their wives,” replied the bored teenager, with all the scorn the city-born Turk reserves for his country cousins.

After engine trouble just south of the marvelous, monumental Greek Temple of Apollo at Didyma, Kinross was put ashore at Kovela, from where he walked to ancient Miletus, on the famous Meander River. The surrounding landscape he describes with delight, writing “Here was a soft Ionian landscape, fringing a gentle sea. Arcadian fields of stubble gleamed in the early sunlight, spreading fruit trees, figs and pomegranates relieved them with pools of shade. … Ahead of me mountains bestrode the sky with an easy arrogance.” Kinross, like so many both before and after him, preferred the more intimate, mountain-set ruins of nearby Priene to Miletus, once a port city now sadly landlocked in the alluvial deposits of the Meander.

From İzmir to Troy

The sea-leg of Kinross’ journey ended on the peninsula west of İzmir, and he made his way by car to a city he describes as “sterilised, no longer cosmopolitan, no longer picturesque, but worthily, busily Turkish.” Most foreigners feel the same way about big, bustling İzmir today and, business people aside, they use the city as a base for visiting nearby Ephesus. Kinross, naturally enough, paid homage to one of the ancient world’s greatest cities, before tracking north to Sardis, Ayvalık and Pergamon.

To visit the world famous site of ancient Troy, positioned just south of the strategically crucial Dardanelles straits, in the 1950s was no easy matter, and Kinross writes, “No foreigner, without permission from the Turkish Cabinet, may approach Çanakkale from inland; all must come by sea, moreover armed with permits for the Troad from the naval authorities.” Eventually Kinross received the requisite permit, though it meant approaching Çanakkale from İstanbul, not from the south. He was greeted by the curator of the British war cemeteries at Gallipoli. As they sat drinking wine from Bozcaada, the curate told him of a wise old Turkish saying: “One glass makes a sheep. Two glasses make a lion. Three glasses make a monkey.” Kinross made the site visit in the company of a Turkish policeman, and although he reports that “Troy ‘of the broad streets’ may be smaller in fact than in legend,” he was not disappointed, as “it is set in the very landscape that Homer portrayed.” It would be hard to argue with a Sunday Times reviewer from the 1950s who wrote “Kinross…has all the qualities of the supremely good traveller: humour, determination, curiosity, tolerance and judgement.”