E-text prepared by Jonathan Ingram, L. Barber, and Project Gutenberg
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What is Turkey? It is a name which explains nothing, for no formula canembrace the variety of the countries marked "Ottoman" on the map: theHigh Yemen, with its monsoons and tropical cultivation; the tilted rimof the Hedjaz, one desert in a desert zone that stretches from theSahara to Mongolia; the Mesopotamian rivers, breaking the desert with astrip of green; the pine-covered mountain terraces of Kurdistan, whichgird in Mesopotamia as the hills of the North-West Frontier of Indiagird the Plains; the Armenian highlands, bleak as the Pamirs, which feedMesopotamia with their snows and send it the soil they cannot keepthemselves; the Anatolian peninsula—an offshoot of Central Europe withits rocks and fine timber and mountain streams, but nursing a steppe inits heart more intractable than the Puszta of Hungary; thecoast-lands—Trebizond and Ismid and Smyrna clinging to the Anatolianmainland and Syria interposing itself between the desert and the sea,but all, with their vines and olives and sharp contours, keeping true tothe Mediterranean; and then the waterway of narrows and land-locked seaand narrows again which links the Mediterranean with the Black Sea andthe Russian hinterland, and which has not its like in the world.
The cities of Turkey are as various as the climes, with the addedimpress of many generations of men: Adrianople, set at a junction ofrivers within the circle of the Thracian downs, a fortress since itsfoundation, well chosen for the tombs of the Ottoman conquerors;Constantinople, capital of empires where races meet but never mix,mistress of trade routes vital to the existence of vast regions beyondher horizon—Central Europe trafficking south-eastward overland andRussia south-westward by sea; Smyrna, the port by which men go up anddown between Anatolia and the Aegean, the foothold on the Asiaticmainland which the Greeks have never lost; Konia, between the mountaingirdle and the central steppe, where native Anatolia has always stood atbay, guarding her race and religion against the influences of thecoasts; Aleppo, where, if Turkey were a unity, the centre of Turkeywould be found, the city where, if anywhere, the races of the Near Easthave mingled—building their courses into her fortress walls from thepolygonal work of the Hittite founders to the battlements that kept outthe Crusaders—and now the half-way point of a railway surveyed along animmemorially ancient route, but unfinished like the history of Aleppoherself; Van by its upland lake, overhanging the Mesopotamian lowlandsand with the writing of their culture graven on its cliffs, yet living alife apart like some Swiss canton and half belonging to the infinitenorth; Bagdad, the incarnation for the last millennium of an eternalcity that shifts its site as its rivers shift their beds—from Seleuciato Bagdad, from Babylon to Seleucia, from Kish to Babylon—but whichalways springs up again, like Delhi, within a few parasangs of its lastruins, in an area that is an irresistible focus of population; Basraamid its palm-groves, so far down stream that it belongs to the IndianOcean—the port from which Sinbad set sail for fairyland, and from whichless mythical Arab seamen spread their religion and civilisation farover African coasts and Malayan Indies; these, and be