THE LAST TURBANS

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1066, 2 September 1930, Page 14

THE LAST TURBANS

WHERE TURKISH CUSTOM STILL RULES AN ISLAND OF HISTORY It is a strange turn of fortune ■which has brought the last defenders of orthodox conservatism in Turkey—a diminished band of 18 fathers of families—to seek refuge from the newfangled ways of Anatolia on an island of th© Danube, deep amid the Christian States which owe their existence to successful rebellions against the yoke of earlier Sultans (says a special correspondent of the London “Observer”). Strange, yet not quite so unprecedented in the topsy-turvy history of Eastern Europe. Some of the fiercest champions of the faith have been found in the past among the Islainised nations of the Balkans, Albanians, Bosnians, and Pomaks. It was, perhaps, natural that they should cherish their faith and the emblems of it more obstinately for the surrounding sea of unbelief ever threatening to engulf them, but it seems really curious that the Christian States should have become the last patrons of the old forms now outlawed in Turkey itself. Bulgar, Serb, Albanian, Greek, execrate and massacre one another on the slightest provocation, but they regard the Turks still living among them with a tolerant and halfhumorous indulgence. The fact is that the Christian nations have no least interest in rejuvenating the Turkish race. The old forms which for Mustapha Kemal symbolise sloth and decadence are for them guarantees of harmlessness. Thus the Turk of the Balkans sports his red cummerbund and green turban, and veils his womenfolk in good impenetrable black cloth in an atmosphere of general approval. To find the picturesque forms which tradition associates with Turkish life, one must go today to the Balkans or to Russia in Asia.

ADA KALEH Of all the sanctuaries of this old life, Ada Kaleh is by far the most interesting. It is a little island, measuring some half-mile at its greatest length and breadth, and lying in the mid-stream of the Danube. From its northern extremity, looking upstream, one can see the town of Orsova, and beyond It, the mouth of the towering gorge of Kazan, where the Balkans meet the Carpathians, and the Danube between them runs swift, deep, and narrow under sheer cliffs of aweinspiring heights. A mile below the southern end is the beginning of the ferocious shallows known as the Iron Gates. Here the stream is broad, but terrifyingly swift, and so shallow that in summer a man can pick his way clean across the bed from rock to jagged rock rising out of the tormented waters. From time immemorial the place has been a meeting point of civilisation. On the right bank of Kazan the traces of the great road built by Trojan are still visible; along the left bank runs the great Hungarian road built I.SOO years later. Until 1918 the frontier between Hungary and Rumania nan below Orsova, almost exactly opposite Ada Kaleh. The right bank of the river was Turkish for many centuries, afterw T ard Serb.

A Forgotten Island Thus, before 1918, three countries met here, and the island lay between them; and the makers of the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, in confirming the frontier lines along the banks, forgot to mention the island. Thus Ada Kaleh remained Turkish, and supplied a fourth member to the local Concert of Powers. It has long been inhabited exclusively by Turks, for. a seventeenth-century Sultan, perceiving its strategic importance, had turned the whole island into one fortress. Its shores are banked with brickwork; casements of enormous thickness, in which even the artillery of the world war made few- breaches, run round and across it; the way to the mosque and single street in the centre leads through tunnels, under massive gates' and across greening moats, the delight of frogs. As a fortress, however, the place had long had its day. Its four hundred inhabitants, who owned a nominal allegiance to Constantinople but in practice obeyed only their own white-bearded Hojja, lived instead in a prosperity which was the envy of their neighbours exclusively and admittedly by smuggling. It was a gigantic family business, winked at by easy-going Customs officers of the old regime. Cargoes of Turkish tobacco were brought up the international waterway of the Danube, landed on the island, and conveyed thence into one of the riparian States. There is a tradition that from some point in the casemates tunnels ran clean under the Danube bed to each of the banks; and it may be more than legend, for a Rumanian wine merchant of the neighbourhood claims that in his own cellars there is a tunnel, now choked with rubble, which has never been explored. But the secret of them has been lost to the islanders; it was easier to have the stuff ferried across in small instalments by half-naked, wholly unidentifiable little boys. A Rumanian Coup

Today, alaS! this ancient and honourable trade has largely gone. The old Hungarian territory, including Orsova, the only considerable place in the neighbourhood, is now Rumanian, and so is the island itself; for at the close of the World War Rumania quietly annexed it. In the turmoil of crashing empires the temporal power of the Hojja of Ada Kaleh went down unnoticed. The little community is now noticeably poorer and complains of hard times. Nevertheless, they achieve a certain prosperity. They have planted gardens over the crumbling fortifications and make roseleaf that tastes like honey, loukoum, and other exotic sweets. Some of them own oriental cafes in the neighbouring wateringplaces. Others are fishermen; for the sturgeon come up the Danube as far as the Iron Gates, on the reefs of which they are said to enjoy scratching their backs. Further, there is a small but not inconsiderable tourist traffic to the island itself. It is a peaceful, if not a very dignified finale to the power which once made Europe shake when the horsetails waved north, south, east, and west of this little island; when its casemates bristled with guns and the Christian peasantry of the mountains saluted its very name. But the Turk is a curious mixture. The most ferocious of conquerors, he can bow to changed fortune with unequalled philosophy. It may well be that in this remote reminder of the vanished greatness of their race the little band of refugees from modernity will find peace and contentment at last.