Impressions of Turkey

International Journal of Kurdish Studies, Jan, 2008 by William Mitchell Ramsay

Love for Asiatic Turkey and its people, combined with hope for its future and interest in its past history, may justify the publication of these pages, in which I have tried to record frankly the impressions left on my mind during the wanderings of twelve years, and the studies of seventeen years. I cannot hope that they will be generally acceptable to those whose minds are made up on one side of the other, for they steer a middle course and regard no person and no people as wholly in the right. The method followed is for the most part to take the reader into the heart of Turkey and let him look for himself, explaining my own impression about the facts which he sees. I began to travel with a strong belief in the imperial mission of Britain, and I end with a stronger faith in the English-speaking race. But I have learned also to appreciate the high qualities of other great nations.

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1897

MY EARLIER EXPERIENCES of the Kurds were unfavourable. In the Haimane district, the high-lying plains and hills, south of Angora, several tribes of Kurds live a nomadic and more or less independent life. They made on me the impression of being ruder in manners, more niggardly and grasping, and less hospitable, than Turks or Turkmens. I remember in August, 1883, with Prof. Sterrett, visiting the great Bey of the western Haimane Kurds; and he entertained us with what he called sherbert, which was only dirty-looking water sweetened with sugar. Sterrett manfully drank his glass, and kept up our credit for decent manners; but I could not get the stuff down. The same general type of character seemed to rule everywhere we met them; and in 1886 Brown and I, crossing the Eastern Haimane, spent a night at the camp of the other great Bey, and I acquired a positive dislike for Kurds. They were not inhospitable; they sold us all we wanted, and invited us to call on the great man, close to whose tent ours was pitched. But they were to me repellent; and I doubt if I could ever have been able to get on friendly terms with them.

The Kurds of the Haimane had the reputation of being very unruly and dangerous. At one time they were practically independent, and paid no tribute; but now they are more peaceable. It seemed advisable in 1883 to take a zaptieh, in order to have some show of authority, while we were wandering in this district. He told us that the Kurds were now perfectly quiet, and travelling was quite safe; it had been very different formerly, but the present Kaimmakam, a Circassian, had taught them a lesson; he could not, of course, get authority to execute any of them,. but he had a practice of beating severely any one that was arrested, and it chanced that every one after being beaten died, and the Haimane was now at rest.

This was one out of many instances, in various parts of the country, of the immense effect produced by one or two examples of rigour. As soon as it comes to be known in any district that the reins of power are in a firm hand, and that disorder will be punished, the whole country under that governor becomes as peaceable and quiet as any part of Britain; but such governors are very rare, for a governor has usually other fish to fry. The Circassians are the most difficult to keep in order; and they furnish a larger proportion of the thieves than any other class; their principle is the motto of the old Border family," Thou shalt want ere I want."

The Kurds of the Euphrates country impressed me much more favourably than those of the Haimane; but I have seen far less of them. In 1890 Hogarth and I, crossing their country, had the reputation of being engineers prospecting for a railway; and the idea of a railway is almost always highly popular. Every one knows that a railway brings money, and openings for work and earning, and increases the value of land. Many people also, not Christians alone, welcome a railway as the herald of a new form of government a la Franga, in which Europeans shall renovate the country. Every Kurd village welcomed us effusively, and at one village the son of the Bey said to one of our servants: "All our men are thieves, but if you lose anything, come to me, and I will get it back for you." Hospitality and frankness could go no further than that.

Professor Sterrett, however, who crossed the same country in 1884, says: "The whole mountain country between Arga and the Tokluna Su is inhabited solely by Kurds, an inhospitable, murderous set of filthy villains, who still preserve all the ferocious characteristics of their ancestors, the ancient Kardouchoi, of whom Xenophon has little good to report in the Anabasis," and he wrote to me at the time that his whole party had a narrow escape from them." (114-117)

The Armenians

There are specimens of the class of Armenian, who bring the people into general hatred and contempt. I might multiply examples; and so could every one that has ever been in the East. In fact, ordinary travelers or tourists in Asia Minor rarely meet any other class of Armenian, for education has not been spread among the Armenians in western Anatolia, where the American missionary influence has hardly been felt. In Constantinople and even in Smyrna, I have no acquaintance with the resident Armenians, having found the Greeks far more sympathetic and useful in archaeological work. It is that class of Armenians of whom the author of Anadol says: "Using his influence and ascendancy over the great, he protects the poor, to fatten on the forestalled earnings of the plough, boat, wagon, or camel, which he holds in pawn. Despised on one side, hated on the other, he is enriched alike by the Pasha and the peasant; and well he knows the weight and power of that golden lever which he wields." Almost the entire carrying trade between the Black Sea harbours, and all parts of Asia that come into trade relations with those harbours, is in the hands of Armenians; and the poor wagoners, camel-drivers, etc., are their slaves. A vast population of the distributing and retail trade belongs to them, except in those west and south-western parts where the Greeks are all-powerful. They are not popular, and they do not deserve to be, so far as my experience goes. But to speak of that large and powerful class of Armenians as implicated in secret societies, and as engaged at any period of their lives in plots against the government, would be as ridiculous as to accuse Messrs. Glynn, Mills & Co. of taking part in a conspiracy to blow up the Bank of England with dynamite. I even doubt if the Ottoman Government is unpopular among the majority of that class of Armenians, for Turkey is the paradise of the rich unscrupulous man, who does not shrink from using the power of the purse.