But all of these travellers have gone by araba [horse-drawn cart] or ridden on horseback, and, when possible, have been glad enough to use train, and bicycle, and even motor-car. None of them, I think, has ever attempted to go in the peasant manner, to follow road or track afoot, to sleep in the poorest khans or wherever shelter could be found, and to mix by day and night with the varied and doubtful pedestrian company of an Eastern highway. … To see something of Asia Minor in this more intimate fashion, accompanied only by a Turk, was the purpose of the journey now to be described.” These words, taken from the preface of W.J. Childs’ account of his epic five-month, 1,300-mile tramp across Ottoman Anatolia on the eve of World War I, have a very contemporary ring to them. Here was a man who might have been expected, as so many of his fellow British, Victorian-era predecessors did, to lord over the locals astride some thoroughbred horse, attended to hand and foot by a “faithful” English servant. Instead, Childs was determined to walk and, like a significant number of travelers today, wanted to mingle with the “common people” as much as possible. He also disarmingly confesses to being guided by the then equivalent of Lonely Planet or Rough Guide, a hefty tome titled “Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Asia Minor.” 
Merzifon
Guidebook in hand but still without a Turkish companion, Childs reached the Black Sea port of Samsun from Constantinople (İstanbul) on a blustery late-October day. The sea was so rough his ship was forced to anchor offshore for 24 hours, before finally he and his fellow passengers “were put ashore through the surf.” Despite having neither harbor nor railroad, Samsun was then a booming town “of some 40,000 souls.” According to Childs, its prosperity derived from the tobacco (important to the city even today) grown in the fertile hinterland and its location at the northern end of the Baghdad Road, “the longest and most important metalled road in Turkey.” Samsun’s current inhabitants, used to the roar of trucks and cars and whine of mopeds and scooters, would be amazed if they could see their town as it was when Childs arrived, with “Bullock-carts and waggons, camels, pack-horses, and donkeys … vehicles in hundreds and animals in thousands choke the streets and open spaces.” Samsun locals nowadays are worried about swine flu, but had they been around in 1914, they would have had rather more cause for concern. “During the earlier part of the summer cholera had visited Samsun. It came with great suddenness; with men dropping in the streets in agony as if shot. … The epidemic grew in violence; traffic ceased on the Bagdad Road, being cut-off by a quarantine barrier … there was no getting away, for those inhabitants who fled to mountain villages were driven out by villagers with firearms.”
A historical stone inn
Though undaunted by the plague, Childs was concerned that if he didn’t leave Samsun more or less immediately, the mountain passes would be blocked by snow. Finding “a Turkish servant with a pack-horse to carry the baggage” in the plague-stricken town proved tricky. Childs, despite his initial intentions, was forced to utilize an araba pulled by two “cream-coloured, well-conditioned ponies,” and its driver, who was “middle-aged and brown-bearded, and had an honest face that gave an impression of good-humour and determination. … He was a Moslem, Achmet by name, who knew all the roads.” Typical for the Black Sea, on the morning of departure, the weather was “cold and gloomy and clouds were hanging low.”
En route to Merzifon
En route for Marsovan (modern Merzifon), a three-day walk away, Childs spent his first night in a roadside han. Of his room, apparently the best in the courtyard building as it lay above the entrance arch, he wrote: “Floor, walls, and ceiling were of unpainted boards. For blinds the windows were screened by lengths of dirty white cotton nailed along the top. Dust lay thick on the floor and rickety table, the only article in the room except for a red earthenware pitcher.” It was because Ottoman hans provided nothing in the way of furnishings that travelers, even those of the most modest means, were forced to carry such loads that a pack animal, at the very least, was necessary. Childs noted somewhat despairingly at the end of his first day on the road, “I was accompanied by gear that, when spread out, looked enough for a harem.” What with a folding bed, mattress, blankets, sleeping bag, pillows, cooking equipment and comestibles (fearful of cholera, he was set-on preparing and cooking his own food), it’s hardly surprising that Childs needed the services of the phlegmatic Achmet and his araba.
A mevlevihane Tokat
He reached Merzifon by way of Havza then, as now, a famed thermal-spa town, but one he described as “dirty and insignificant.” He took romantic pleasure, though, in the camel caravans which clogged the road leading to the town and, more pragmatically, in the Turkish coffee he watched being brewed up in a wayside kahvehane (coffeehouse) and wrote approvingly, “You may think the coffee of Paris best of all, or the coffee of Vienna, as some do; but in Turkey you will find better … [and] declare that this is coffee and the others are not.” In Merzifon he stayed at the American mission. Like most modern visitors (of which there are, alas, few), he was underwhelmed by the town, “one of the few towns in Asia Minor without historical interest,” damning it with the faint praise of being “fortunate in its situation.”
Childs could hardly travel through the heartlands of the once mighty Ottoman Empire in such troubled times without commenting on the political situation. According to him “sooner or later Russia will hold the Straits [Bosporus] and the Coveted City [İstanbul] ... and run her trains upon her own soil from the Caucasus to the Bosphorus.” The Ottoman Empire was subject to “hopeless racial differences,” and in Merzifon the Armenian population had “since the massacres at the close of last century … armed in self-defence.” Even in the American mission, which had at its heart a school (transferred, in 1924, to Thessalonica in Greece) where “Greeks and Armenians numbered three-fourths of the whole,” Armenian revolutionary societies had “a footing among Armenian students of the College.”
Tha Çifte Minareli Medrese in Sivas - Kara Mustafa Paşa statue in Merzifon
Before leaving Merzifon, Achmet told his employer that he would travel only as far as Sivas. If he went further, snow would block his return to his family and “he could not leave them uncared-for during several months.” As the pair traveled east, Childs clearly got to know his employee rather better, learning that he was “no Asiatic Turk, but a Bulgarian mohadji [an emigrant for the faith]” who had left Bulgaria when it became independent of the Ottomans in 1909. Childs had heard so much about the beauty of his next destination, Amasia (now Amasya) that he “approached the place now in a spirit of scepticism.” He was, however, soon won over, and entering the dramatic gorge for which the town is famed, he declared, “When better conditions exist in Asia Minor, and railways and good roads make journeying easy, foreign visitors will come to Amasia in numbers and declare that in wonder of situation combined with haunting charm they have never seen anything quite its equal.” Unfortunately, even today Amasya fails to get the amount of foreign travelers it deserves, as it is well off the usual tourist trail between İstanbul and Cappadocia. An enraptured Childs wandered around the spectacularly beautiful town commenting on its “gardens and trees, and mosques and quaint old overhanging buildings” and “the five great rock-hewn Tombs of the Kings,” the “Seljukian mosques, colleges, khans, and monuments.” Most of all, though, he was impressed by the town’s magnificent setting, in a gorge “about a mile in width, enclosed by stark precipices which rise … some 3000 feet on the eastern side” and stretching “for more than a mile along both banks of the Yeshil Irmak.”
Heading to Sivas
As Childs headed out of Amasya towards Sivas, he observed local villagers flowing into town for the weekly market and wrote, “On market-day in any Anatolian town you see a people of such varied origin that no one type can be said to predominate. You could not even generalise and say that on the whole they were a dark people or a fair, or a blend of dark and fair. They are of every sort who ever came here.” Like many both before and after him, Childs was amazed by the bewildering heterogeneity of the population of Anatolia. He was on surer grounds with a fellow wayfarer who “carried himself with a swagger” and had a “big revolver thrust into his many-coloured silk girdle.” The man was a Kurd and, unlike many other European travelers of the time, who saw the nomadic, tribal Kurds as a proud and noble race, Childs noted -- with prejudice -- “take stock of any group of Kurds … you receive a growing impression of cunning and cruelty to be found in no other race.”
Childs’ next destination was Tokat, a “largely Armenian” settlement, which he found “a bright, clean little town of sunlight and cloudless skies; of red roofs and greenery and winding river between bold steep hills” and wrote delightedly of Tokat’s han, “It was the best I ever found.” Enjoying his stay in what remains to this day a very pleasant town, Childs digressed about the subject of yogurt, “It being a national food held in universal liking.” Having earlier confessed to carrying with him “a supply of bacon, Cambridge sausages, beef, soups, jams, butter, milk, and cheese all in tin,” Childs admitted that there was “nothing more palatable, nothing better as a sustaining food. It is by no means to be confounded with the vile acid sold in England as yoghourt.”
After Tokat, Sivas and its environs came as something of a disappointment to Childs “Although water is abundant, no trees except a few poplars and willows are seen; it is bleak, graceless country, with a drab city planted in its midst.” No sooner had Childs arrived than he was itching to be off again. His goal was Kayseri and the then little-known, seldom visited district of Cappadocia.
Benzer Haberler 
