Book Review: Birds without Wings

I've traveled to enough places by now to find one important aspect most places have in common: at one time, they had a Golden Age. I have been to many sites in many places, and in each place I heard, "we were the center of things," or something to that extent.

Last summer, driving through North Dakota, west of Fargo, one of the remotest places I've ever been, I found that I was near the geographic center of North America. A map on a roadside marker showed how trade goods had criss-crossed the contenent in aboriginal times, with "The Peace Garden State" right in the middle.

I have been in the Republic of Georgia, viewing an amazing castle complex, and I have heard of that country's "Golden Age" of building and proselytizing orthodox Christianity. Everywhere was the center of somewhere.

I have read enough, too, to have learned one other important thing. Most places have had at least one epic story written about them, too. Georgia was the place where I read Ali & Nino, one of the most amazing stories of the Caucus region.

A golden age and an epic story. That's what makes a good place a great place!

Of course, Turkey has been the center of not one but multiple empires. The Lydians were based in Sardis and reached their acme under the splendor of Croesus. The Byzantine Empire split off from Rome and endured another 1,000 years. And of course, the Ottoman Empire followed right after.

And Turkey already has its epic, The Iliad, written in the 8th Century BCE about a war that took place about 2 hours drive north of me near modern-day Chanakkale. Heck, The Iliad is the template for the very word, epic, isn't it?

This summer I learned that there are two amazing epics that are set here. During one of my interviews for the job here in Izmir, a school administrator had recommended that I read Louis de Bernieres's Birds Without Wings (2005). I found it to be an endearing epic with deep insights into the people of Aegean Turkey and a key era of it's past.

Bernieres populates the village of Ehbahçe with a dozen interesting character. The village, like many in western Turkey in 1905, is a mix of Greek, Turkish, and Armenian families. There is little division. Everyone speaks Turkish. Those who can write, write out the words with Greek letters. The town has a priest and am imam, but the Muslims are perfectly willing to ask Christians to make a special plea to the icon of the virgin Mary on their behalf. Everyone is poor, save for Rüstem Bey, the aga or landlord.

The first half of the book contains deep insights into the culture of Eskibahçe. İ was fascinated by the caravan trip to Smyrna, where the merchants swapped stories as they traveled to the big city to trade. Burial rites. An honor killing. An affair is exposed. 

A man named "Dog" shows up in the village, unable to speak, dressed in rags. He makes his home in the ancient graveyard, where there are still marble tombs of Phrygians from thousands of years ago. None of the residents can read the inscriptions on the tombs anymore, but they remain, silent testaments of the timelessness that informs life in the village. One sarcophagus has a hole drilled in the top and in the bottom, and the people, who believe it contains the bones of a saint, drop olive oil into the sarcophagus and collect it as it drains out, hoping the oil now has healing properties. These are deep insights into culture, and it makes me wonder how long Bernieres must have spent in Turkey to uncover traditions like these and use them to season this remarkable work.

Two connecting strands of the narrative are the story of Mustafa Kemal, the man destined to found the Turkish Republic and take for himself the surname "Atatürk," and the romance of İbrahim and Philothei, a Muslim and a Christian facing the thrills and perils of destiny.

In the second half of the book, history catches the residents of Eskibahçe. World War İ begins, and two friends sign up to fight: Karatavuk, a Muslim, is sent to the Gallipoli front, while his friend, Mehtmecik, a Greek is sent to a labor battalion (Greeks were not allowed to fight in the army, as the Ottoman government feared they would turn traitor as several Armenian regiments had done early in the war). The town's Armenian inhabitants are rounded up one night by a group of Kurdish irregulars and marched into the interior, never to be seen or heard from again. Later, as the end of World War İ segues into an invasion by Greece, poor, doomed İbrahim will serve in the forces that liberate then ravage then burn Smyrna.

The proverb from which Bernieres takes his title states, "Men are birds without wings, and birds are men without sorrows." There are sorrows aplenty as the book closes in on its conclusion with the historic population exchange that expelled all Christians from Turkey, whether they spoke any Greek or not, and which accepted Muslims from Greece in return. But there are such great joys in reading this book, too: the richness of the characters, the warmth with which insights on Turkish culture are revealed, and the vivid setting of Eskibahçe and its near environs.

Why, just today my train from Izmir to Seljuk passed by a forest, and i noticed tombs scattered among the trees, just as in the book!

During the Greco-Turk War (1919-22) the town is spared from the worst of the atrocities by an occupation of Italian soldiers. This is an echo of Bernieres's most famous book, Corelli's Mandolin, but I haven't read that work--about a romance between an Italian soldier and a Greek islander--so I'm not sure if any characters are recurring.

The only bad people in the book are the few who cannot accept a multi ethnic village--those who feel that it must only be Greek or Turkish. Over everything, as in epics like The Iliad, is Fate, the shaper of History, which has these wonderful characters firmly in its grasp.