No Mean City
By MARY COUGH IT must be something in the air. They do it still. We realised this even before we arrived. As our bus jolted along the dusty Cilician road—a road so uncompromis- ingly direct and straight as immediately to reveal its first builders—a hand from behind suddenly tapped me on the shoulder. "The yoghurt at Tarsus is better than anywhere else in Turkey," said a complete stranger oracularly.
To our left the golden plain shimmered under the heat, and stretched away for twenty miles towards the Mediterranean. It was broken here and there by clusters of mulberry-trees and the little villages that lay in their shade. On our right, some thirty miles off, the great wall of the Taurus mountains rose solid and impenetrable; the eye sought the dark green line of firs on the lower slopes, cool above the sodden, breathless air of the plain. We were no longer left to admire the scene in peace, or—rather—in the mesmerised abstraction of a bus- journey. The ice had been broken, and some social contribu- tion was expected of us. A gentleman in front turned right round in his seat, smiling. .
Were we English or Americans ? And what were we here . for ? Rather hot to be travelling about the Cilician plain, but we could hardly have chosen to come to a better place. Tarsus was known to be much healthier than any of its neigh- bours. It was, of course, famous for its yoghurt. Yes, that forest in front of us was the forest of eucalyptus trees that they had planted only a few years ago to drain the swamps. It was much larger and had grown much more quickly than any other in Cilicia. It was simply full of wild boar.
One by one, as we proceeded, all the charming, unmistakable features of a prosperous Turkish provincial town appeared— the booths of fruit and vegetables; the cabs, open broughams, .still preserving some of their nineteenth-century elegance; the novelty-shops that sold anything from Swedish pressure-lamps and English nylons to bright yellow and pink Islamic rosaries; the smart secondary schoolgirls in their black overalls, white collars and peaked caps; the coffee-shops; a hoshaf-seller, with the drink stored in a complicated brass vessel strapped to his back, who leans over as he fills a cup while the thin, brown stream curves over his shoulder from the elegant spout. At last we reached the centre of the city, an open square with the pink municipal buildings to one side of it. We dismounted, and the sweat poured in streams down the back of our legs. A great .pillow of heat came down on the tops of our heads.
Tarsus is incredibly old—so old that there are practically no antiquities left above ground. Each generation has relent- lessly snatched the buildings of its predecessors. Just as some rooms that are never empty—orderly-rooms, police-stations, railway-terminus ticket-offices—develop an overcharged, over- used atmosphere, so some cities which have teemed with humanity ever since their history began make one feel that the very dust is rotten and exhausted with people. Tarsus is like that.
The narrow streets with the high, secretive walls and over- hanging upper storeys are certainly the same today as they were when the buccaneer archaeologist, Victor Langlois, careered up and down them on horseback with his friend the consul de .France a hundred ' years ago. They are probably un- changed since the Armenians made the city their capital in the Middle Ages, and perhaps their actual course is much the same as it was when St.-Paul had his tent-making business there. In the western -outskirts of the town is a heavy and dilapidated Roman arch -which the guide-books describe as the "Gateway of St. Paul," but it was probably built after his time, and St. Paul himself was, of course, a comparative late-comer in the history of Tarsus. We realised this when we were being shown round the excavations which the Americans have been carrying out for some years at a site just outside the town. Here one could see quite plainly the neat little mud-brick rooms, the hearths and doorways, all a long, long way below the level of St. Paul's city. "This mud- brick is excellent," said our guide; "the winter rains have absolutely no-adverse effect on it." (No doubt because it was made at Tarsus, I thought.) The River Cydnus flows through Tarsus, chalky green from all the surface soils of the Taurus, which the Cilician rivers are tearing off the mountain-sides and depositing methodically in the sea; one can almost watch the process going on. Brown little boys were splashing about in it when we were there; they shared it with some water-buffaloes which had sensibly bedded themselves down in the cool mud with only eyes, horns and nostrils visible. Alexander bathed here, and got a very bad chill, of which he nearly died.
"The summer is hotter here than anywhere else in Turkey," said our guide triumphantly as we fought our way back through the heat to the coffee-garden in the town-centre. We waited there for a bus to take us to the mountains. Like other towns in the Cilician plain, Tarsus has a yayla, or associated Wanner resort. Everybody who can afford it- goes Off from June till September, in the hope of getting above the moist, stiffing blanket of heat that hangs over the plain. The men spend the week in their offices or shops in Tarsus, but at the week-end they take car or bus through the pine-covered gorges and stony mountain pastures to the little wooden town in a high valley of the Taurus.
The coffee-garden was laid out with that ingenious sense of convenience that is so typical of Turkish domestic arrange- ments, so placed as to catch the lightest breath of wind that stirred the heavy atmosphere. Under an awning thatched with branches some rickety wooden tables were grouped round a little fountain. We drank quantities of pale, milkless tea out of little glasses. The kahveci who sold it to us was dis- turbed. "It's very bad for the nerves to drink so much tea," he said.
We sat there for a long time. The fountain plashed; the doves cooed and fluttered against the facade of the mosque— once a Byzantine church; the backgammon-players clicked their pieces on the board, and the white-aproned kahveci bustled about obligingly with fresh tea and coffee. At about half-past five the bus appeared. With the usual helpless mis- givings I watched our bags piled op to the roof. "They never are lost, so why worry about it now particularly ? " said my husband, so crossly that I realised that he was as concerned about them as I.
At last, and—another of the miracles of Turkey—at the advertised time, the bus started up. At the last moment our guide came panting up with a little square cardboard bot. It was a present of baklava, an intensely sweet and sticky local speciality. As the bus pulled out we read the printed legend on the box. "Tarsus Baklava—The Best in the World "
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