World War, 1914-1918 -- Prisoners and prisons, Turkish
One very marked feature of the Wank was its awful smell. In Turkey there
are drains, but they are perhaps worse than none at all. I shall not
attempt to describe this disgusting feature of all the houses in Asia
Minor I have ever been in, further than to mention that the cesspool is
invariably buried underneath the house itself, preferably beneath the
kitchen floor. It is, as a rule, ill-made of rough stone masonry.
Further comment is unnecessary.
There were several curious relics of antiquity in the courtyard we
frequented: a Greek inscription on one of the stones of the pavement;
the carven tombs of several abbots, with mitres on their heads and
croziers in their hands; and a very large stone head of a man or a god
with thick, curly hair and a beard. It might have been a head of
Jupiter, and probably came from one of the old Roman temples of Angora;
unless, as is not improbable, the Wank itself stood upon the site of
some more ancient religious foundation. The buildings we lived in were
less than a century old, but the church appeared to be very much older.
The men had little to complain of while they were here. Their food was
not particularly good, but it was not inadequate for men who could get
no exercise. The only ill-treatment they had received was being robbed
of their boots while on the peninsula, and they now appeared in every
form of Turkish footgear, from rough army boots to thin slippers. When
they began to travel again those were lucky who had boots.
The Turkish Government fed the men, but the officers were supposed to
cater for themselves. One of the French officers who had already picked
up a few words of Turkish acted as mess secretary, and a chaous, or
Turkish sergeant, used to make purchases in the town for us. We had
orderlies to cook and clean up.
Things were extraordinarily cheap then. The war had not yet affected
country places like Angora, and paper money had not yet come into
circulation. When it did so, gold and silver first, and copper and
nickel next disappeared entirely from the shops and bazaars; and before
I left Turkey a golden pound would purchase six paper pounds, while the
exchange for silver was little lower. But at first things were cheap,
and we managed quite well on our four shillings a day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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