In Europe

Maltese woman hidden behind her black
faletta
, a Jewess in the ancient costume of her nation, a Negress wrapped in a multi-coloured Cairo shawl, an Armenian woman from Trebizond, all veiled in black …’
    Almost half of that same Istanbul in which young Irfan Orga grew up consisted of non-Muslims. According to the 1893 census, almost five million Jews and Christians lived among the seventeen million Ottomans. Like the Habsburg Empire, it was a multinational. And in some ways,particularly when it became modernised, it was perhaps more European than present-day Turkey.
    The question, therefore, is: where lies the greatest barrier between Turkey and the rest of Europe? Is it actually the country's traditional Muslim character? Is it not, rather, Atatürk's staunchly nationalist and dictatorial modernisation that blocks a lasting rapprochement with modern-day Europe? Or, to put it differently: does the problem really have to do with Muhammad? Does it not have just as much to do with Atatürk?
    It was nineteenth-century nationalism that put an end to the tolerance of the Ottoman Empire, and by the start of the twentieth century the tension had risen to breaking point in Anatolia. But it was only under Atatürk that ethnic cleansing was adopted as government policy. His modern Turkey was to form a strong national and ethnic unit, he considered the Ottomans’ multinationalism sentimental and obsolete, religious and ethnic diversity only undermined the country's identity and security. In the 1920s, after Greece had vainly tried to establish control over large parts of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, Atatürk imposed a forced exchange between Greece and Turkey, an ethnic cleansing of unheard-of proportions: more than a million Greek Orthodox inhabitants of Anatolia were sent to Greece, almost 400,000 Greek Muslims were transported to Turkey.
    Their fate was mild compared to that of the Armenians. In the course of conflicts and deportations in 1915, even before Atatürk came to power, an estimated 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians were killed, a case of genocide vehemently denied to this day by the Turkish government. Merely mentioning this genocide, the first of the twentieth century, still leads to indictments and trials. The veiling of the past, the fatal forgetting of which Primo Levi wrote, is here the duty of every patriotic citizen.
    All this had – and still has – an effect on Istanbul. It is a city which, despite the overwhelming beauty of the Bosphorus, despite the tenfold growth of its population in the last half of the twentieth century, despite the influx of tens of thousands of immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe, despite the Hagia Sophia and all the other evidence of 1,500 years of culture, is losing its cosmopolitan character and is in the process of becoming, in spirit, a provincial city. The Jews have left for Israel, theGreeks for Greece, the country's political power has moved to Ankara, the merchants have been scattered across the face of the earth.
    All cities tell a story, and the story of Istanbul is above all one of shifting emphases and of vulnerability, no matter how international the metropolis might seem. In 1200, this was Europe's absolute centre of power. Today it is a remote corner, a poor, rapidly expanding Third World city, a symbol of glory past, ties forgotten, tolerance lost.

Chapter THIRTY-NINE
Kefallonia
    IN THE CRETAN VILLAGE OF ANOGIA, THE DAY BEGINS WITH THE crowing of roosters. A man comes by with a megaphone, trying, even at this early hour, to sell his potatoes, a whole wagonful. Then comes the clanging and bleating of a herd of goats, the shouting of a Gypsy woman with a cart full of clothing, then a car loaded with plastic buckets and basins, and then the day has truly arrived.
    The old men move slowly from their houses. They carry sticks, they wear beards, black caps, stiff, heavy coats, blue jeans, every season and every age is tucked away in their appearance. The communists sit in front of their own café, where Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara and Stalin have their regular places on the wall. A busload of German tourists pulls in, they disappear into the restaurant which bears the sign ‘ ICH SPRECHE DEUTSCH ’, and everyone on the village square nods to them and greets them in a most amiable fashion. A skinned sheep is slung from the back of a truck, its head rolls over the ground. The old women are doing their errands. You can still see which one was the prettiest fifty