Having completed my Greek shadow journey, I'm now very much immersed in its Turkish successor, and this gem of a book was the first item on my list.

Written by Irfan Orga, and published in 1950, when he was 42, it brilliantly evokes the transition from the twilight of the Ottoman Empire to the dawn of the Turkish Republic, as experienced by his own family.

We always read through the lens of our own times, and I guess this book is particularly resonant at the moment as we face social earthquakes that are certainly unprecedented in our lifetime, and peer into an uncertain future.

But what truly cataclysmic changes these people faced... The book opens with three generations living in comfort and opulence in a gracious house by the Bosphorus, waited on by a range of servants. All the author has to worry about as a child is the experience of his grandfather's death, and the pain of circumcision.

But then blow after blow falls. The boy's father and uncle are drafted to serve in the First World War. Neither comes back. His aunt dies of consumption. His stubborn, fearsome grandmother remarries, allying herself to a rich but curmudgeonly man in his eighties. The remaining family members (the delicate, artistic, but oh so courageous mother, Sefkiye; plus the three children) lose their house and valuables to fire, and relocate, sans servants, to a lively but much less salubrious neighbourhood, where grandmother, again widowed and cut out of her husband's will, eventually comes to join them. Wartime privations worsen by the day, and with money rapidly dwindling, Sefkiye starts to take in sewing, and eventually moves to a government-run garment factory. Even when there's money, goods are hard to find.

Education, as we're experiencing in our own times, is a domain that all too easily falls victim to social dislocation. The two boys can access only a very ad hoc kind of schooling, and often go hungry.


Modern Istanbul, 2016


Materially, things eventually take a turn for the better. The war ends; order is restored; Sefkiye starts to make money from creative design and embroidery rather than functional sewing. Irfan graduates from his military school, and is eligible to train as an army officer.

But something in this family is irrevocably broken. It is frequently signalled throughout the book that Sefkiye's mental health is on a knife-edge, and she does indeed end up in a mental hospital.

Poor woman. Married at 13. A mother by 15. A war widow by 25 at latest (we don't know exactly when her husband dies). Forced, with no preparation whatsoever, to take on a house-keeping and bread-winning role. Obliged, by force of circumstance, to deal year-in year-out with a mother-in-law she finds difficult. Who could withstand all that?

But all the family relationships have suffered. The narrator seems isolated from everyone; the various members of the family have little to do with each other; they seem to have little affection for each other.


"I wish," says Orga, "I had the words to paint the strange enchantment of Izmir." The rest of this post's photos are from our visit there last year.


There's a very interesting afterword by Orga's son, Ates, from which two things stand out:

The first solves the mystery of how Orga, with little knowledge of English until he was posted to England in his mid-thirties, managed to write, so beautifully, in that language:

"In writing his books father’s method, so far as I can remember, was to prepare a sketch in Ottoman Arabic, which he would then translate and expand into new Turkish Latin, followed by a basic draft in English. This he would hand over to mother who would absorb, interpret and discuss before fashioning a literary, poeticised metamorphosis suitable for publication. His story, her English."

It's very elegantly written, masterfully evoking both the beauty of Istanbul and its harsh reality. Margarete obviously had much talent in her own right. (She was Irish, and as Turkish officers were supposed to shun foreign women, the liaison landed him in considerable hot water with the authorities back home -- so much so that he ends up an exile.)



The second element of interest in the afterword is that Irfan also struggled with depression in his later years. He apparently believed himself cursed, pursued by bad luck. By the end of his life he felt he no longer had anything to live for.

None of this, of course, is surprising, given the extent of the separation, privation, and dislocation he had to endure in his youth. Reading Portrait, I had wondered if he was suffering from some sort of unacknowledged post-traumatic stress disorder. He may just be practising discretion, but he certainly comes across as preternaturally isolated and aloof. The early scar of enforced separation from his mother, when he was sent to the charity school, never totally healed. He observes that when his mother packed for her husband when he went to war, "I think she sewed her heart into that bag too for after my father had gone we who were left saw nothing of her heart". But he seems to have suffered a similar affliction himself. His son depicts him as very loving, but he comes across in the book as cold and emotionally isolated.

I loved this book just for its own sake. I'm a huge fan of family sagas, and this was a very atmospheric one. But it also -- as good books do -- sent me scurrying off to find out more about some of the events it mentions.





Firstly, the sad fate of his family during and after World War I was far from atypical, it seems.

The Ottoman army consisted of just under three million conscripts like Orga's father and uncle: "Overall, the total number of combatant casualties in the Ottoman forces amounts to just under half of all those mobilised to fight. Of these, more than 800,000 were killed. However, four out of every five Ottoman citizens who died were non-combatants. Many succumbed to famine and disease, but others died as a result of population transfers and massacres."

WWI as a whole was also experienced very differently by the denizens of the Ottoman Empire, as compared with almost all the conflict's other protagonists. It was the third conflict in just four years, coming hard on the heels of the Italian war and the Balkan war. The latter ended with the loss of practically all of European Turkey in the space of a month. Understandably, there was little war enthusiasm among the populace.

The Ottoman Empire was "an agricultural society involved in an industrial war". The means with which to fight such a war had to be imported from Germany, and for this purpose the Ottoman railway system was grossly inadequate. "The result was that material coming from Germany had to be loaded and unloaded a total of eight times before it reached the Palestine front and that divisions on average spent 6 weeks on the road (4 of them marching) before they reached the front. Lack of transport also meant that it was very difficult to feed the troops and the population in general." All this is reflected in Portrait, which often recalls periods of acute hunger, and forced marches of different kinds.

And, of course, for the Turks, war didn't end in 1918. Galled by the perceived unfairness of the peace treaties, which took large territories away, and assigned what remained to a sort of semi-colonial status, the nationalist Turkish resistance fought on for another four years. (Fuat Dundar even argues that the Turks' war didn't finish until 1939.)

Orga does not discuss the occupation of Istanbul in great detail, but British and other troops were present until August 1923. This, and the subsequent occupation of other regions, had consequences, according to Erdag Goknar, that reverberate until today: "[The occupying forces] ignored the cosmopolitan space of the city, focusing instead on nationalities... This was the same logic that led to the greater partition of Ottoman territory... Clearly the Middle East has never recovered from this particular partition and we live with its effects today."

Levantine Heritage has a fascinating collection of photos from the occupation period, covering both Istanbul (the Galata Bridge, often mentioned by Orga, is frequently depicted) and Izmir.


Our only photo from the Kulturpark in Izmir, not far from where we were staying. It was established in 1936 on a 360,000-square-metre area that had been devastated by the Great Fire of 1922. (I was fascinated by the discussions of this event here and here.)

The other historical issue I found very interesting in Portrait concerns demographics. Orga refers to several "black" servants who lived in the house during his childhood, and a bit of research into "Afro-Turks" reveals that they were very likely descendants of the roughly 1.3 million people who were brought as slaves from Africa to various parts of the Ottoman Empire's far-flung territories.

Required to convert to Islam, change their names, and put Africa behind them, they initially worked as domestic servants, cooks, and nannies, or in the tobacco and cotton fields. In 1857 the trade in slaves became illegal, but it was the beginning of the 20th century before these practices were stamped out, and the erstwhile slaves freed. Even before this time, though, Islamic law stipulated that children of slaves were born free, and intermarriage was legal, and encouraged the freeing of slaves after seven or ten years.

In a "second trauma", Afro-Turks made up a large number of the half-million Muslims from Greece who were exchanged for a million Christians from Turkey after the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. And the "Turkification" movement of the early Ataturk years affected the Afro-Turks as much as everyone else.

All these circumstances meant that many in the largely working-class Afro-Turkish community (estimated to number approximately 100,000) had little idea of their heritage until recently (and research findings of a heritage of slavery have not necessarily come as welcome news). The communities are quintessentially Aegean, and very little remains in terms of African culture. As one woman puts it: "I am proud of my African origins [but] I only know the village where I grew up."

Turkish law mandates equal rights, and in the areas where Afro-Turks have lived alongside ethnic Turkish families for generations, instances of prejudice are rare. But not all regions are free of racism. Afro-Turks have to contend with responses "ranging from benign curiosity to finger-pointing and name-calling", and -- which is in some ways more irksome -- with constant expressions of disbelief that they could be Turkish: "I'm fed up having to explain where I come from," says one young man.


The Izmir area is home to many Afro-Turk communities, and Bradley Secker's picture essay is definitely worth a visit.

"Other people's lives are always interesting," wrote John Betjeman in his review of Portrait in 1950. I couldn't agree more.