Every layer of this city needs preserving
The rich history of Mardin, in south-east Turkey, is being
rediscovered with the help of EU money. But the present is also an
important part of its story
By Sankha Guha, Travelling man
Sunday, 28 March 2010
Independent/uk
The drama of Mardin’s position is best appreciated from the air.
The city clings to the southern flank of the last escarpment of the
Taurus Mountains, facing the vast plains of Mesopotamia. From above, a
neat line is visible marking the last convulsions of the massif –
mushroom and mud tinted – beyond which a sea of green takes possession
of the Earth’s crust. This is the cartoon geography of a semi-mythical
place; Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris,
aka The Cradle of Civilisation. But it wasn’t just myths that were
created here. It was history.
The current official version would like to paint Mardin in the United
Colours of Benetton – as a multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multi-cultural
playground of bright-eyed co-residents, where Kurds, Syriac Catholics,
Mahalemi Arabs, Orthodox Armenians and Turks all rub along happily,
under one flag. But in this layer cake of a city, each layer tells a
story. Some layers are invisible; they are an absence. People who
should be here are not here – their former homes have been put to new
uses, their places of worship neglected and ruined. History happened
here. History scared them into leaving.
In Istanbul, 700 miles away, they were surprised that I was going to
Mardin. An artist I met said no, she had never visited. "There are a
lot of military there, you will see," she said pointedly. Others were
more blunt and suggested the region is dangerous. In a shocking
incident less than a year ago, 44 villagers in Mardin municipality
were murdered at a wedding. The authorities were keen to play it down
as Kurdish intra-clan violence but the details of who did what and why
remain murky.
It looks peaceful enough. There is an army base to one side of the
road from the provincial airport. Behind the base, rocks have been
rolled together to form large words on the hillside. Translated they
say something like "Happy to be Turkish". They do protest too much. As
recently as the Eighties and Nineties the Turkish army was putting
down the Kurdish insurgency in this region with "extreme prejudice".
The Syriac population was caught in the crossfire. Memories are also
long enough to remember the genocide of Armenians and Syriacs
perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks and Kurds back in 1915. It’s
complicated.
The Syriac population of the town is down to a meagre 1 or 2 per cent
– many relocated to Sweden. There are maybe six or seven Armenian
families left, the last Jews upped sticks in the early 1980s. Even the
Kurds, though still the majority, have suffered a diaspora as far
flung as Canada.
There are, however, reasons to be cheerful, according to Mesut Alp, a
local historian. "My parents’ generation thought of themselves as
Kurdish first, Muslim second and human third," he tries to explain.
"But for me it’s different, my generation thinks we are human first."
We’re picking our way through the veg market and through the minefield
of regional politics. Mesut is saying the aspiration for a Kurdish
nation state is no longer so important for him in a world where
national boundaries are being broken down; joining the larger human
family of the EU is the priority.
A cockerel, bred for fighting, struts across the pavement, pausing to
fluff its chest and flap its wings in display. We pass a gun shop with
hunting rifles lined up in the window. They are carved and engraved
with intricate patterns – objects of desire. Next door is a bank with
a hole-in-the-wall cash dispenser, followed by a string of shops
selling mobile phones. A heavily laden donkey, part of the municipal
refuse collection service, clatters past in the narrow, cobbled
street. It is hard to settle on which century these street vignettes
belong to.
Modern Mardin, if that isn’t an oxymoron, is a celebration of
architectural misrule. It tumbles down from a hilltop fortress,
oblivious to planning. For more than six millennia it has bent to the
will of successive masters and they have left their marks in stone
and, more recently, concrete. Churches, mosques, minarets,
monasteries, villas, bazaars, bus stations and flat blocks elbow each
other for space. But the defining features of the city are terraces.
The terrace of the Antik Tatlidede Hotel explains why the architects
of Mardin favoured this feature. The hotel, built in the late 19th
century, was once home to a prosperous Syriac merchant. The view is
enormous, dizzying, Biblical. We are perched on a cliff, and the land
falls away to an ocean. Despite the absence of spray and surf it is
hard to shake off the illusion. Down there the fertile plains rise to
meet a flat horizon over a hundred miles deep inside Syria.
It has been Mardin’s mixed fortune to be on the Silk Route – making it
a magnet for traders and tyrants alike. Marco Polo stopped here on his
way to China in the 13th century – a more benign visitor than
Tamerlane, who laid siege to the city (unsuccessfully) a century
later. The Abdullatif mosque, built just a few years before the Mongol
emperor arrived, is a testament to the city’s ability to absorb and
endure. The outer portal is finely carved and looks in remarkably good
nick – which is perhaps not surprising because it was added less than
10 years ago. The minaret was also an addition (19th century) but the
mosque is greater than the kit of parts assembled over seven
centuries.
More sweeping terraces characterise the Mardin Museum, which was once
the home of the Syriac Catholic patriarch. It is a graceful affair
with four or five levels supported on rounded arches and rows of
faux-classical pillars linked by grand balustraded staircases. It is
another of the town’s many theatrical buildings that cry out for
performance – perhaps grand opera or a sword-and-sandal epic.
This is Mesut’s workplace and he can’t conceal a note of pride when he
shows off some of the exhibits. Pointing to a child’s toy that
resembles a stone tractor, he says he found it in a local villager’s
home. It was still being used as a plaything by the kids who had dug
it up in the family plot. The "tractor" is at least 5,000 years old.
The view from the museum’s grandstand is untidy. The main square below
is presided over, predictably, by a heroic statue of Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk, father of the Turkish Republic. He stands at the top of a
wedding-cake monument exhorting citizens to put "country before
everything". On the far side of the square, the view is interrupted by
multi-storey concrete blocks sprouting satellite dishes and cables.
Mesut talks enthusiastically of an EU-backed project to rid the city
centre of the unsightly concrete and show Mardin in all its
honey-coloured limestone splendour to eagerly awaited hordes of
tourists.
"I’m a bit suspicious about the idea of turning Mardin into a museum
city," says Clemens von Wedermeyer, a Berlin based video-artist who is
in the town for another EU (and British Council) sponsored project.
The idea is to bring established artists from Europe to five cities in
Turkey to create major works of public art. Turkish artists will go
the other way, on residencies. It is an attempt to build cultural
bridges in tandem with the country’s bid to join the EU.
But Clemens is perhaps a bit off-message. "I am an anti-museum,
anti-institutional artist," he says. "I think it’s more interesting to
encounter the dynamics of the city and if you control that from the
top and turn it into a museum – then only tourists will inhabit the
space."
Clemens’ installation won’t be a museum piece. "Addressing the
complexity of this area – the ethnicities, religions, different
cultures – I thought of an empty square, 10 to 12 metres wide, that
looks like a cinema screen, something like the monolith in 2001
(Stanley Kubrick’s film), a screen of desires where you can project
your fantasies. And that reflects for me some of the psychology here,
which has often to do with unfulfilled desires."
Clemens wants his installation, which is due to be unveiled later this
year, to be a device for cultural dialogue within Mardin’s disparate
communities. "It’s like a mirror. Where you can see yourself and where
you can see the others, your neighbours."
Later, I am woken by the muezzin’s call to prayer. It is 4.20am and
the sound is loud enough to pierce sleep. He has an exquisite voice.
He recites the adhan, rising through the register in fractions of
notes, hitting the highest with avian clarity, then retreating down
the scale in resolution. In my dreaming consciousness, it no longer
matters who is doing the singing or why. The voice seems loaded with
the yearning of all peoples, when history is done, for peace.