Read Online From The Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple - Free Book Online Page B

toothbrush moustache and no teeth. Unbuttoned flies. Cigarette hangs from the side of his mouth.
    Shady-looking character in tight ‘T-shirt. Stubble chin. He clacks worry beads from the palm to the back of his hand, and darts furtive looks around him. Fare dodger?
    Shaven-headed sailor in war-movie sailor's suit. Thickset and swarthy. His cap is on his knee. Drags deeply on a cigarette, then loses interest and throws it overboard.
    Moving from bench to bench: a blind violinist, led by his son who bangs a small wooden hand-drum. Both wear flat caps.
    Various salesmen selling Coke, biros, potato peelers, Rolex watches (fake), Lacoste socks (fake), Ray-Ban sunglasses (also fake) and Bic cigarette lighters (apparently genuine, but of the poorest quality). I buy a Coke and it turns out to be a fake too: tastes of warm deodorant.
    Halfway through the voyage another fearsome-looking head-scarf-and-raincoat lady appears at the top of the stairwell and begins to harangue us all. I assume she is telling us to vote Refah, or ticking off those few middle-aged women who are not wearing a veil. But I'm quite wrong. Her daughter is in hospital and she needs money for medicine. The passengers give generously, especially the old labourer with the open flies, who extinguishes his cigarette to dig deep in his pockets.

    The Byzantines used Prinkipo as a prison, and exiled a succession of crooked chancellors and plotting princes to its monasteries. The Ottomans turned it into a summer resort, and so it remains: a thin line of lovely slatted wooden houses, with carved balustrades and lattices, prettily painted in cream and light blue. But the site of one of the old monasteries is still an active shrine, and it was there that I was heading. Fr. Dimitrios had told me about it. The Shrine of St George was an example, he said, of something which was once common, but is now rare: a holy place sacred to both faiths, where Greeks and Turks still pray side by side.
    Because of a local by-law cars are banned from the island, so at the jetty I hailed an old horse-drawn phaeton. We trotted along the cobbles, up the hill, with gardens and orchards on either side. Apples and apricots hung heavily on the trees; bougainvillaea and jasmine blossomed over orchard walls.
    A century ago Prinkipo was exclusively Greek, and today one or two old Hellenes still cling on to their houses: large, ostentatious wooden buildings with pediments and pillars. Occasionally, as we passed the manicured lawns, we caught glimpses of old Greek women sitting in the shade of magnolia trees with shiny green leaves and thick creamy flowers; some were sewing, others sipping glasses of sherbet.
    We drove out of the town and up the mountain; pine forests replaced orchards and thick carpets of pine needles rotted in the wheel-ruts. Other than the clip-clop of the horse and the rattle of other phaetons taking farmers and pilgrims back into town, it was completely silent.
    After twenty minutes, the driver dropped me beside a graveyard at the bottom of the dusty path leading up to the shrine. Before climbing the hill, I looked inside. It was the last Greek graveyard in Turkey still in use. I wandered through the unkempt memorials, overgrown and unswept, carpeted now, like the road outside, by a thick muffling of pine needles. Many of the headstones were decorated with photographs. Paradoxically, I found that it was these photographs of dead people from a deserted graveyard which, more than anything else, brought to life the world of the Greek Istanbul which had been ended by the 1955 riots.
    Fr. Dimitrios had described those who had left - the Greeks who formed such an influential minority in the Istanbul of the nineteenth century - as cosmopolitan, artistic and well educated; but the photographs, less nostalgic, revealed a prosperous petit-bourgeois society of shopkeepers and spinsters: moustaches and double chins, waistcoats and fob watches, bald spots and pinces-nez; line upon line of