Turkish journey: End of the road

BBC News
Nov 22 2004

The BBC’s Istanbul correspondent Jonny Dymond is exploring Turkish
life across the vast country as it lobbies the European Union to open
membership talks.

He sent the last in a series of reports from the town of Kars, near
the Armenian border.

I woke up in my hotel in Kars – an establishment unlikely to make the
Best Hotels in Eastern Turkey guide – to find news from England on
the television.

The town of Kars lies near Turkey’s border with Armenia

A correspondent in London was explaining to a presenter, who appeared
to be doing her best to restrain her incredulity, that the British
government had announced plans to ban smoking in public spaces.

The words of the correspondent, who was on a telephone line, were
illustrated by file footage of people smoking in London.

Many of them were sitting outside, and a disproportionate number were
blonde, gaily enjoying a cigarette whilst sipping mineral water or
having a glass of wine. London life looked suspiciously like a
Mediterranean holiday.

Rarely had I felt so far from home. Kars is very, very cold. No one
is sitting outside. And, this being Turkey, everyone smokes. In case
you are wondering, there are precious few blondes knocking about
either.

Click here to see Jonny Dymond’s route across Turkey
Kars has attracted a little more attention than usual in the past
couple of years because Turkey’s most internationally famous
novelist, Orhan Pamuk, used it as the setting for his latest novel,
Snow.

A question of identity

In the book, Kars – a forgotten city in the country’s north-west
corner on the border with Armenia – plays host to Islamist
terrorists, Kurdish nationalists and secular Republicans.

Over the space of three days, in which the city is cut off from the
outside world by snow, they pronounce, denounce, launch a coup and
generally shed some light on that ridiculously complicated question
of Turkey’s identity.

I freely admit that Snow had drawn me to Kars. I ran into a French
journalist on my final night there. I asked her why she had come.
“The closed Armenian border, of course,” she said. Ah yes. That too.

The money left Kars in the 1960s, drawn west

The city was once part of the Russian empire and, immediately after
World War I, became an independent republic – the South East
Caucasian Republic. It happily gave itself up to the Turkish Republic
when that came along in 1923.

It was also, a while ago now, rich. It was a trading city, and the
houses of Russian and Armenian merchants can still be seen, their
fine construction and exterior decoration incongruous amongst the
drab concrete buildings that now dominate the city.

Many of these houses were pulled down in the 1960s – the government
either not interested in the history of the town, or only too happy
for it to be eradicated.

Glorious past

The current owner of Huryurt (“Free Land”), one of three local
papers, fondly remembers a time when balls and concerts were a
regular event in the city.

In one corner of the newspaper’s office sits a 150-year-old printing
press that until last year had been used to crank out the 400 copies
that the paper prints every day.

Erol Huryurt showed me one of the earliest papers, framed on the
wall. “This evening” went the headline. The short article was a call
to a dance to be held in the city centre.

“All the night will be full of surprises. So we would advise you not
to miss it”.

Newspaper owner Erol Huryurt

But the money left Kars in the 1960s, drawn west. Kars was cut off,
its airport closed, its trade to the east ended by the presence of
the Soviet Union.

And now, with the border to Armenia shut once again, the life of the
city is still draining away.

The shops are shabby, the goods careworn before purchase. Into the
chill air chimneys puff smoke that in the evening hangs in the cold
deserted streets. Groups of men stand idly on the roadside, looking
lost and defeated.

Unemployment is something around 50%.

The mayor is doing his best. When we talked he showed me picture
after picture of the cultural festivals he had arranged.

He has high hopes of a film festival to be held in January – a
curiosity this, a film festival in a city that currently has no
cinema. It’s all good clean fun.

But you have to wonder how many Slovak dance troupes and Circassian
marching bands a town can take until it cries out “No more!”

Facing east

Kars hopes for the best from Europe, but its eyes are still firmly to
the east. In the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed, a wave
of Turkophilia swept Turkey – it was to lead a new Turkic Union of
the east, it would resume its rightful place as the pre-eminent
regional power.

The dream died pretty quickly when it became clear that the old
Turkic states had more in common with Moscow than they did with each
other, but it lives to some degree in Kars.

Today Kars lives in the shadow of its past

Erol’s son Erdil does not go misty-eyed over the balls and dances of
the past. Over lunch in what seemed to be Kars’ only decent
restaurant, he talks of an unlikely future when the city might become
the capital of the Caucasus.

The mayor’s brother, Alican, joined us.

Alican, a businessman, was not so interested in wild talk of leading
the Caucasus. Instead he, and nearly everyone in Kars, just wants the
border with Armenia reopened, so trade can restart, and life can
return to the dying city.

As with so many changes in Turkey, all eyes are on Europe to do
something to sort out the problem.

I drove out to Ani, once a city of 100,000 that was said to have
rivalled Constantinople in its glory, now a place of wonder where you
can stumble for hours amongst the stunning remains of ruined 10th-
and 11th-Century churches and mosques.

>>From inside the first ever mosque to be built in Turkey I peered down
at the river that separates the country from Armenia, and at the
ruined bridge which once carried travellers on the Silk Road on their
way West.

I had reached the end – the end of Turkey, and the end of the long
haul from West to East.

It was a fitting finale to the journey: Turkey’s eastern border,
perhaps to be Europe’s new eastern frontier, ancient churches and
mosques rising like tombstones out of the long wild grass.