Tenedos (Bozcaada), August, 2007

A day after we returned from the Aegean Sea, Ayşe marked our copy of Constantine Cavafy's poems, so that I would read Ithaka. I did read, then turned back a page to find Ionic. It seemed to fit our recent travels:

That we've broken their statues,
that we've driven them out of their temples,
doesn't mean at all that the gods are dead.
O land of Ionia, they're still in love with you,
their souls still keep your memory.
When an August dawn wakes over you,
your atmosphere is potent with their life,
and sometimes a young ethereal figure,
indistinct, in rapid flight,
wings across your hills.

(C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992)

Under the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), Turkey took possession of the two Aegean islands, Tenedos and Imbros, that are nearest the Dardanelles. Ayşe and I visited the smaller of these, Tenedos; it is also called Bozcaada in Turkish, though there happens to be a cafe in Ankara called Tenedos. We took a taxi to the Ankara bus station on Tuesday evening, August 21. Had we known what the station would be like, we would have made other plans. Young Turkish men were heading off that night to do their military service. The station was full of family and friends celebrating this event. We thought we might never reach our bus to Çanakkale. When we did finally manage to shoulder our way through the crowds, with the help of one of the bus crew, our vehicle turned out to be full of well-wishers seeing off their boys. They yelled for the driver to open the rear door, so they could leave, but the driver wouldn't do it: presumably this would just allow more people to crowd onto the bus—or just to hang from the door like apes, as they were already doing with the front door. So the visitors had to squeeze past us as we made our way towards our seats.

A young woman already seated tapped me as I plowed past and said apologetically in English, We are not always like this! She was one of the few women on the bus. Presently she had a quarrel with the young man seated in front of her; it went something like this:

This is our military service!
I'm ashamed of your military service!
I'm ashamed of defending you!

As we waited in our seats, the crowds outside pounded on the bus. They started to push it side to side. Somehow the driver managed to back up the bus and leave the station with all of the other busses. As we headed onto the highway, Ayşe and I imagined that the suspension was dodgy.

But we reached Çanakkale next morning without incident. Then we took a minibus to the village of Geyikli and waited on the beach for the ferry to take us to Bozcaada.

The ferry became full of people. I worried that we were going to be surrounded by crowds on the island as well as on the ferry. Reassuringly, most of our fellow passengers did not seem to be carrying baggage like us; perhaps they were just making a day-trip. On the other hand, they might be travelling with their cars. There was a pair of backpacking women speaking Spanish; another group of people were speaking Greek.

We landed, crossed the town square, and found the pension where we had a reservation. (The first three that Ayşe tried had been full.) There is only one settlement in Tenedos, on the eastern coast of the island, and we were there.

Then we went and sat under vines for a lunch of mezedes and the wine of the island. There was no telling whether we were in Turkey or Greece.

There are supposedly some two thousand people living in Tenedos. In 1923, half of them were Greek; now, I read somewhere, there are seven Greek people left. A display in the Bozcaada Museum suggests that many Greeks fled to Athens after a telegram from Venizelos informed them regretfully that he had not been able to win Greek sovereignty over the island in the Lausanne negotiations. Yet, when the refugees learned that the remaining Greeks in Tenedos were not being molested, they came back.

After the Events of September 6–7, Greeks left the island; more left after the invasion of Cyprus in 1974. Some of this information can be gathered from The Bozcaada Book by Haluk Şahin (translated by Ayşe A. Şahin; Bodrum: Troya Publishing, 2005).

On the island, it appears that Greeks and Turks lived together harmoniously. Many Greeks who left went to Australia or Canada, not Greece. Life on the small island was a dead end. The main industry, viniculture, was controlled by a few families. Greek Tenediots were not welcome on the mainland of Asia Minor, but they couldn't feel a part of Greece either; so they broadened their horizons.

Some of them come back to visit, or their children do. One can imagine that something of their spirit remained. Turks sent over from the mainland did not send their goats out to consume the grapevines; rather, they learned how to make wine themselves. There was one exception: a rich sheikh was exiled to the island, and he tried to buy up the vineyards in order to take them out of production. But now it seems you can buy wine everywhere you look in Tenedos town.

In The Bozcaada Book, Haluk Şahin quotes just about every classical reference to Tenedos he can find: this means Homer, Virgil, Aristotle, Herodotus, Pausanias, Apollodorus, and Procopius. During the seige of Troy, Achilles sacked the island, and Nestor had a slave woman named Hecamede from that event. When the Greeks slipped away from Troy, leaving some men behind in the horse, they hid out on Tenedos and watched for the smoke that showed that their men had successfully raided the city. Perhaps the beach they used was the one we visited on Thursday.

Around town

Castle

Probably the castle is Byzantine, but it seems to have been used also by the Venetians before the Turks took control. There are some Greek and Turkish gravestones arranged inside.

Beach

A dolmuş serves the main beaches. We went to Ayazma Beach: it was the best we had seen so far on the Aegean. The sand was fine, and the water crystalline. We had been warned that the water would be cold, but we did not find it especially so; it was refreshing, rather. There were a few restaurants around, but no big hotels.

Back in town

Around the harbor

Sunset

There is only one dolmuş route on the island, except for the one evening run to the western point in time for the sunset. The route passes through a pine forest before coming out onto dunes. These dunes are now dominated by seventeen wind turbines. One of these wouold satisfy the island, supposedly; the rest of the electricity is sent to the mainland. They were the first wind turbines I had seen up close. I had no aesthetic objection: visually, they were attractive, and I might prefer their sound to the sound of automobile traffic. I cannot assess the damage that their construction did to the delicate ecology of the dunes. Near the shore there was a lot of trash, thrown up by the sea probably. Offshore was an old shipwreck, tied to the land by a long cable.

A last morning in town

After two nights on the island, we were to leave. It appeared that our room was probably taken for Friday night, and we didn't like it much anyway, nor our hostess. In fact we ate our breakfast elsewhere when we couldn't find her on Friday morning; it turned out she had gone to stay with her mother, confident that nobody would want breakfast as early as eight, although that is when we had eaten the previous day. She was practically a native Tenediot, having lived on the island since the age of seven. Perhaps one has a more pleasant (though less authentic, and more expensive) experience if one stays at a pension run by a refugee from Istanbul city life.