Istanbul (Turkey) -- Description and travel; Istanbul (Turkey) -- Social life and customs
Erenkeuy is a little village at about half an hour ride from
Constantinople and on the Asiatic side. The shores of Anatolia are here
covered with country estates uniting small villages all the way from
Scutari to Maltepe--a distance of about fifteen miles and all except
Cadikeuy and Moda are peopled with Turks. The Turks living here are
mostly conservatives. They are not old fashioned and narrow but they
have kept to the Turkish ways of living more accurately than the Turks
living in other sections or suburbs of Constantinople. It really cannot
be explained but there is here an indefinable something that makes you
feel that you are in Turkey more than you do in any other suburb of
Constantinople. Perhaps it is only due to the fact that you are on the
hospitable soil of Anatolia.
Suburban trains running on the famous Bagdad railroad take you to
Erenkeuy. I again had a jolt on these trains. In the old days the
company belonged to the Germans and was run by the Germans. But it
endeavoured not to arouse the susceptibility of the Turks by flaunting
in their faces that it was a foreign company. All the employees
on the train wore the fez, the national Turkish headgear, and the
greatest majority of them were Turks. Now the Allies have replaced
the Germans and have taken over the railroad as part of Germany's war
indemnity towards them. The result is that their systematic campaign
of humiliating the Turks has been practised even here. The new Allied
administration employs mostly Greeks and Armenians--and all the
employees of the company now wear caps. Really the difference between
caps or fezzes is only one of form, but it has a psychological effect.
For instance, even in my case, although I dislike the fez as a most
unpracticable and unbecoming headgear, and although I have worn hats
the greater part of my life I could not help resenting the change: it
rubbed me the wrong way. It made me most vividly feel as if we were not
the masters in our own homes--at least temporarily in Constantinople
and its environs.
We arrived in Erenkeuy in the afternoon on one of those beautifully
clear days-which make of the fall almost the most pleasant season of
Constantinople. The air was mildly heated by an autumnal sun shining in
a marvellously blue sky. The leaves of the plane trees surrounding the
station had turned golden red and had become scarce on the branches.
Even now some were volplaning to the earth on the wings of a gentle
fall breeze. The square in front of the station, with its clean little
shops--each a diminutive bazaar of its own--opened itself smilingly to
us as we emerged from the train with our baggage. In the background we
could see the little mosque where villagers were entering for their
afternoon prayer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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