Anyhow I warned my wife that she would see

Of course there might be several wives in the same household but not the wives of the same man. For instance, when we were visiting my father in Prinkipo, there were four “wives” living together: my father’s, my uncle’s, my cousin’s and my own wife. Anyhow I warned my wife that she would see in Erenkoy a “harem” in the Turkish sense of the word and not the kind of private cabaret which exists only in the fertile imagination of scenario writers, and in the ludicrous pages of sensational newspapers or dime novels.

Erenkoy is a little village at about half an hour ride from Constantinople and on the Asiatic side. The shores of Anatolia are here covered with country estates uniting small villages all the way from Scutari to Maltepe a distance of about fifteen miles. And all except Cadikeuy and Moda are peopled with Turks. The Turks living here are mostly conservatives.

They are not old fashioned and narrow but they have kept to the Turkish ways of living more accurately than the Turks living in other sections or suburbs of Constantinople. It really cannot be explained but there is here an indefinable something that makes you feel that you are in Turkey more than you do in any other suburb of Constantinople. Perhaps it is only due to the fact that you are on the hospitable soil of Anatolia.

Suburban trains running on the famous Bagdad railroad take you to Erenkoy. I again had a jolt on these trains. In the old days the company belonged to the Germans and was run by the Germans. But it endeavored not to arouse the susceptibility of the Turks by flaunting in their faces that it was a foreign company. All the employees on the train wore the fez, the national Turkish headgear, and the greatest majority of them were Turks.

Humiliating the Turks

Now the Allies have replaced the Germans and have taken over the railroad as part of Germany’s war indemnity towards them. The result is that their systematic campaign of humiliating the Turks has been practiced even here. The new Allied administration employs mostly Greeks and Armenians and all the employees of the company now wear caps. Really the difference between caps or fezzes is only one of form, but it has a psychological effect.

For instance, even in my case, although I dislike the fez as a most unpracticed cable and unbecoming headgear, and although I have worn hats the greater part of my life I could not help resenting the change: it rubbed me the wrong way. It made me most vividly feel as if we were not the masters in our own homes at least temporarily in Constantinople and its environs.