Trabzon, past and present

I had longed to visit Trabzon and Turkey’s eastern Black Sea region since reading Neal Ascherson’s marvellous “Black Sea: the Birthplace of Civilisation and Barbarism”. The historical significance of the Black Sea had barely registered in my education. That crucial trading hub, and the great civilisations that grew up around it. The Greek communities that thrived around the Black Sea for nearly three millennia until the onset of the nation state in the 19th and 20th centuries made their presence an anomaly and finally an impossibility. Medieval Trabzon, renowned for its wealth and splendour, derived from its position on the Silk Road, seemed impossibly enticing.

Today, the city and its surroundings are mainly remarkable for monuments from better days. Most notably, the cliff-hugging Sumela monastery, in the hills about an hour’s drive away from the town. Hastily abandoned by the monks following Greece’s defeat at the hands of the emerging Turkish republic after the First World War, the monastery, which had been left to decay for decades, is now being carefully restored as a museum. Seen from across the valley, it is a magnificent sight, nestled into the verdant cliff face. Inside the grotto where, in the fourth century AD, a Greek monk is said to have found an icon allegedly painted by St. Luke, following a revelation by the mother of God, the frescoes, many in good condition, appear to float on the cave walls and ceiling.

Sumela Monastery

When I was there, almost all the other visitors were Muslim Turks, most of the women wrapped in head scarves. I wondered what they made of this magnificent example of the Greek, Christian heritage of the region? Like me, they marvelled at the frescoes. They took their photos. Perhaps for them, visiting the remains of a vanished civilisation in their country is akin to us admiring Roman remains in Western Europe; too far removed by time to be worrying today. While I was in Trabzon, there was a visiting party of Greek clergymen and nuns. Their visit must have been heavily tinged by regret for their loss. But their presence seemed uncontroversial, as Turkish waiters smilingly served them tea at a cafe next to Aya Sofia, a medieval Greek church in the outskirts of Trabzon.

Aya Sofia, Trabzon

Close to the sea, Aya Sofia has survived intact, thanks to having been for centuries a mosque, and despite having been for a while an ammunition depot. Now a museum, its frescoes uncovered, many of them still in good condition, Aya Sofia is a very beautiful example of a medieval Byzantine church. Less inspiring is the former cathedral in the centre of the old town, where Trebizond emperors were once crowned. Squat and unimpressive from the outside, the addition of a minaret did nothing for its harmony. Inside, its transformation into a mosque was hardly accompanied by any serious attempt at conversion, and it lacks the cool serenity one so often finds in Islamic art and architecture. Of greater interest is the Yeni Cuma Mosque, formerly the Church of St. Eugene, where Mehmet the Conqueror, who went on to capture Constantinople, offered his first Friday prayers after taking Trabzon.

Trabzon today is rather a sorry, dilapidated place. Its crumbling medieval city walls are surrounded by poor neighbourhoods of broken houses and rubble. Perhaps the mess will be cleared away. Indeed, a start appears to have been made, with pleasant gardens planted by one section of wall. Trabzon long ago lost its place as a key Black Sea port, and with the rise of Samsun, along the coast, it looks unlikely to regain it. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the city was flooded by traders from Russia, Ukraine and Moldova, and became known for its “Russian Market”, as well as for the profusion of ex-Soviet prostitutes, known locally as “Natashas”. Both appear to be on the wane now, perhaps due to the dire economic climate, which has affected Turkey too.

Trabzon has never made anything much of its position on the coast, except for its utilitarian value as a port. The old walled city is set back from the sea, on a plateau, with deep gullies around it. Nowadays, like other towns on Turkey’s eastern Black Sea coast, the coastal highway passes along the seashore, cutting it off from the city. Next to the highway, by the dolmuş station, is a grimy stretch of seedy hotels (some of them certainly used by the Natashas). There is no attempt at a seaside promenade (even allowing for the relative lack of interest in beaches in a conservatively Muslim town), no seaside cafes or restaurants. Rather, the life of the city is up the hill, away from the sea, notably at the large square, or “Meydan”, where, throughout the day men, and some women, sit and sip tea, and count their prayer beads.

Impressions of Istanbul

So many Western visitors have recorded their impressions of Istanbul over the past couple of centuries, of its breathtaking views, its monumental buildings, its exotic sights and smells, its mysteries, that it has all become rather clichéd, even if much of it is true. It is an impressive city. The sheer scale of the place, not just its grandeur, but the teeming masses of its people, the hustle and bustle, can be overwhelming.

For two hundred years, under reformist sultans and since Atatürk’s cultural revolution, the question of Turkey’s identity, whether Western or Oriental, has vexed Turks and foreigners alike. The monuments of the glorious Oriental past dominate the Istanbul skyline. The splendid mosques, and Topkapı palace. But, on the Bosporus, there is also the ostentatious 19th century Dolmabahҫe Palace, a consciously Western substitution for Topkapı (although its women were still confined in the harem).

While visiting Istanbul, I was reading Orhan Pamuk’s “Istanbul: Memories and the City” (a wonderful book that went a long way to restoring my faith in Pamuk after reading his horribly tedious novel, “Snow”, which, as I wrote in my first entry on this blog, I hated). Pamuk, himself a child of the Westernising elite, wrote of the melancholy of a city in decline, which had lost an empire, and had disappointed in its attempts to reinvent itself through emulation of the West, destroying much of its own heritage in the process. Writing of the fires that ravaged the city in the 1950s and ’60s (and which had, in fact, ravaged it for centuries), Pamuk described the “loss and jealousy we feel at the sudden destruction of the last traces of a great culture and a great civilisation that we were unfit or unprepared to inherit in our frenzy to turn Istanbul into a pale, poor, second-class imitation of a Western city.”

Wooden houses in Istanbul

But Turkey and Istanbul have moved on. Pamuk’s regret at the loss of so many of the fine old buildings along the Bosporus, and of the city’s old, picturesque (if shabby) poor districts of wooden houses is understandable. With them the soul of the city as it once was fades away. But the city is reinventing itself. Its inheritors are not just the Westernised, secular elite. The waves of more conservative Muslims from Anatolia who have poured into the city in recent decades, swelling its population and changing its character, have discomforted many. Their numbers, the wealth of some of them, and their political clout, expressed through the mildly Islamist ruling Justice and Development Party (AK), have raised the concerns of some pro-Western secularists in Turkey and Western governments abroad, that the country may be turning its back on the West, and returning to its Oriental, Eastern roots. Such fears have been highlighted by recent foreign-policy moves focused on Turkey’s eastern neighbourhood, and the country’s impatience with the EU integration process.

Wandering through Istanbul for a few days, it did not feel like any other European city I know. In Beyoǧlu, where I stayed, yes, the atmosphere was clearly European. But walking down towards Galata, or struggling through the crush in the underpass from Eminönu, or in the narrow streets, crowded with tiny shops and stalls, with swarms of people thronging on all sides, it is a different world. It was not about Islam, although the preponderance of women wearing veils in much of the city was striking. It was rather, for example, the very different approach to personal space. The crush, the pushing, the constant hustling by traders; the exclusively male tea shops, with huddles of men sitting around on little stools, chatting, playing backgammon, slurping tea through sugar lumps placed behind their teeth.

But that is not to say that Istanbul and Turkey should not be considered part of Europe, or that they should be excluded from the EU. Europe has always been a diverse place, and Turkey has for centuries been a part of Europe’s history. South-east and much of central Europe were at one time Ottoman, their landscapes dotted with minarets. But looking forwards, the point is not the history, but what Turkey can offer to Europe, and what Europe can offer Turkey today. Many of the reasons why the EU should open itself to Turkey are well-worn: its strategic importance between Europe, Russia, the Caucasus and the Middle East; the valuable example of a predominantly Muslim democracy, integrated with the West. But there is also the vibrancy of the place, with its young, thrusting population.

I think the melancholic depiction of the Istanbul of Pamuk’s childhood is not the dominant picture of the city today. The headscarf wearing, conservative Anatolians who have elbowed their way into Istanbul in recent decades may not be what the Western elite hoped for. But many of them are successful. They have been building a new city. Neither looking backwards to the Ottomans nor exclusively westwards to Europe, they are energetically remaking their city on their own terms. They are not turning their backs on Europe. Rather it is the EU that has not played straight with Turkey, moving the goal posts and slowing down integration since Cyprus joined the union, and since sceptical governments were elected in Paris and Berlin.

The energy of modern Turkey, with its young and growing population, and its increasingly vibrant and powerful economy, would bring a lot to Europe. So too would Turkey’s increasing authority in its neighbourhood, which it has lately mostly applied constructively. One is tempted to wonder whether old Europe, with its ageing population, rigid employment practices, and barely growing economies is not in fact afraid of Turkey’s energy. Turkey needs Europe too, as an impulse for needed reforms, for greater respect of human rights. If Europe accepts Turkey, Turkey will become more European, though always distinct.

A visit to Sofia

Visiting Sofia, one is struck by the evidence of the overlaying cultures and civilisations, one upon the other, that have replaced, but not fully eradicated those that came before. First there are the ancient remains, the Roman sites that are being revealed as the foundations of new buildings are dug, and by the current work on the metro in the city centre.

The Sveti Sedmochislenitsi Church

Then there are the Ottoman buildings. Ottoman rule ended only in 1878. More survived than, for example, in Belgrade, where very little remains to show it was once a predominantly Muslim city. As the Ottoman Empire gradually retreated and was ejected from central and eastern Europe, from the end of the 17th, and through to the 19th century, the usual pattern was to wipe out all trace of its having been there. Muslims were expelled or fled, and the mosques were mainly destroyed. But Bulgaria was a late-comer to national liberation.

A small town of a little over 10,000 when it was chosen as the capital of the newly independent state, Sofia had been a provincial centre in Ottoman times. Of course, the new nation constructed buildings appropriate for a European capital of a mainly Christian country, notably the enormous Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, named in gratitude to Bulgaria’s Russian liberators. Some Ottoman buildings were converted to new uses, notably the 16th century Black Mosque, the Orthodox Sveti Sedmochislenitsi Church for the past century or so, now unrecognisable as the Muslim edifice it once was. The mosque itself had been built on the site of an earlier convent. Earlier still had been a 4th or 5th century Christian basilica, and before that a pagan temple.

But some of the Ottoman heritage remains. The hamam next to the one surviving mosque is no longer in use, but looks splendid from the outside. Also from the 16th century, and recently reopened after falling into disuse in communist times, the Banya Bashi Mosque is named after the baths. My companion on an evening stroll through the city told me that, as a boy in the 50s and 60s, he and his father went there regularly, as they did not have a bath in their home. And the building in which the archaeological museum is now housed was formerly Sofia’s largest mosque, the Grand Mosque.

A reminder of the pre-Islamic, Christian Balkans is the restored basilica of Hagia Sophia, close to the Cathedral. It was built in the 6th century, before the arrival of the Bulgars, during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, who commissioned the great basilica of the same name in Constantinople.

Sofia was perhaps not the most obvious choice of capital for the new state. Nowadays, entering or leaving the city through its soulless, dilapidated suburbs, a wasteland of concrete monstrosities from the communist era, is a depressing experience. But it is a city with roots, with a long heritage. Its city centre, steadily being renovated, is increasingly matching its ambitions.

Stalin's statue

It was difficult to know what to make of the huge Stalin statue in the main square in Gori, birthplace of the late Soviet dictator, in Georgia. I first visited Gori in the summer of 2004, and again in May this year, just a few weeks before the statue was removed. It seemed like an oddity, an anachronism, almost an eccentricity that, in a world in which Stalin is so thoroughly discredited, such a monument could continue to exist.

The man was a monster. So surely he did not deserve to be memorialised with such a grand, heroic statue? Yet the world is full of monuments to horrendous men who nevertheless left a considerable, if often terrifying mark. Genghis Khan is lionised in Mongolia, and Tamerlane in Uzbekistan. When we mark the events of the past, and the people who moved them, are we necessarily expressing approval? Is it right, or even realistic to try to expunge parts of our history that are painful or shameful? But of course, it is all about the way in which we remember. We do not commemorate Hitler with a statue in Berlin, or even in Braunau. Rather we commemorate his victims in holocaust museums and former concentration camps preserved as lasting memorials to the evil he perpetrated and the sufferings he caused.

The Stalin statue was removed furtively, in the dead of night, lest the ire of the many citizens of Gori who are still proud of their city’s most famous son be aroused. As statues of Stalin and Lenin were torn down around Georgia following independence almost two decades ago, hundreds of people turned out in Gori to defend their statue. And Stalin still has his followers. On 9 May, World War II veterans turned out in front of the statue with Soviet flags and large pictures of their hero, to mark the victory over Nazi Germany.

My visit to Gori in 2004 was a kind of pilgrimage, of the sort historians make to places of special significance, to get close to the scenes of great events and those who shaped them. In similar spirit, I have also visited Tito’s birthplace in Kumrovec, and his island retreat on Brioni, as well as Hoxha’s villa in Tirana, Churchill’s wartime bunker in London and the palace at Versailles. In Gori you can visit the tiny house where Stalin was born, now encased in a larger pavilion built around it. And there is also his official train in which he travelled to the Yalta and Tehran conferences.

And then there is the museum. I did the full tour, with an English-speaking guide. The whole experience was of being caught in a time warp. I was led through the various galleries dedicated to the achievements of the great man, as my guide proudly explained to me the significance of the exhibits. It was as if all the historical revisionism of half a century since Stalin’s death had not happened. Here we learned of the tremendous strides in economic performance and industrial and agricultural output. The only small negative note, the one hint that all was not entirely well in Stalin’s realm, was the acknowledgement by my guide that “some mistakes were made during collectivisation”. Well yes, millions dead from starvation and deportation. At the end of the tour, as we stood outside the little house of Stalin’s birth, I cautiously mentioned that Stalin was not remembered so rosily in much of the world. My guide smiled sweetly, and said that, yes, she knew that. But here in Gori, many people were still proud of him.

Now, we hear, plans are afoot to reorganise the Stalin museum in Gori into a museum to the Russian aggression in 2008, during which Gori was severely damaged. Or the museum should be rearranged so as properly to reflect the horrors of Stalin’s regime and the huge suffering he caused. The value of both such museums is not in dispute. But I think they should be housed in new buildings, leaving the original Stalin museum as it is. It is actually a rather good museum. Not only does it house some of Stalin’s possessions, his office furniture etc., but the collection of newspapers, posters and photographs, together with the inscriptions that describe them, effectively illustrates how the Stalinist dictatorship saw itself, how it presented itself. The whole museum is in fact one big and highly valuable museum exhibit to the propaganda machine of the Stalinist dictatorship. It should be preserved as it is, so that all of us who did not experience Stalinism can get some inkling of its nature. Gori should indeed have a museum that reflects the horrible truths of Stalinism. But the 1950s museum should rather be a part of that larger museum, preserved as a historical documentary on a time that is no more. No one today or in the future could display as effectively as the creators of the museum in the 1950s how the dictatorship saw itself. It is timeless and priceless.

And the statue? We hear it is to be moved down the road to the museum. That is surely the place for it. Not dominating the town’s main square, a lasting embarrassment and token of infamy. But consigned to a museum, where the sins of our past as well as the achievements are properly remembered.

Bureaucrats

One of the most aggravating features of the world of international organisations is the poor breed of people that are all too often drawn to their corridors. Pasty, lily-livered, cynical specimens who would not know a principle if it fell on them, and yet are the ones who are supposed to defend human rights and democracy in the world. Such individuals are to be found even in field missions of the UN, the OSCE, the EU etc. etc., albeit usually in the headquarters in the capital cities, where they plot and scheme and tread over their colleagues in their ambition to land a plum job in New York, Vienna, Brussels or Geneva.

In field missions there are, thankfully, large numbers of admirable, committed people, working hard for the betterment of the communities they are living in. Feisty human rights lawyers, young idealists not long out of college, hard-bitten old timers who keep on trying to make a difference, despite any number of disappointments.

But their efforts are constantly undermined by the armies of career bureaucrats, with their petty regulations and mealy-mouthed language. Human resources departments which in the past ten years have steadily imposed their vision of mediocrity wherever their putrid tentacles have been able to reach. Human decency out the window. Plane-spoken standing up for principles shunned in favour of "diplomatic" fudge.

And why is it that diplomats, those masters of evasion and equivocation, have come to be seen in recent years as the natural heads of international missions, the standard bearers for human rights? Honourable exceptions aside, why were they ever considered to be qualified to promote the interests of the weak and powerless, the victims of unjust states and conflicts? Diplomats whose whole training and ethos is to deal with states, quietly, behind closed doors? That's not to devalue the importance sometimes of quiet approaches behind the scenes. But when the need arises to speak out loud and clear, with a strong voice, to shout to the skies for justice, why would anyone expect a diplomat to be the one to do that?

Today I am feeling angry. I had a confrontation yesterday evening with one of those horrible career international bureaucrats. A despicable individual who drew amusement from the trampling of a field mission that tried to stand up for the right thing in Georgia, and came up against the weight of organised international shame and ignominy. I wanted to smash the sarcastic grin off his face. I didn't, but I really wanted to.

Folklore

Yesterday I went to a performance by the famous Erisioni dance company. It was a tremendous spectacle of traditional dance, songs and costumes from around Georgia. The colour, the energy, the athleticism, the sheer aggressiveness of it all is truly impressive. A great evening out. The mainly Georgian audience lapped it up with pride, a celebration of their country's rich culture and heritage, which makes such an impression on most foreign visitors. It was, it must be said, all highly choreographed. The moves all perfectly rehearsed. Traces of Riverdance. No doubt the costumes and the moves are, in their essentials, genuine. But this is a show. It is circus. A marvelous display of traditions that are slipping into the past.

Folklore turned to theatre, performed in a modern, cosmopolitan capital city. A nostalgic spectacle. When traditions become circus, they are no longer a living thing, any more than the pageantry of the changing of the guard in London. Georgians, aspiring to be a modern, prosperous, western country, like most of the world gladly yield to the homogenising influences of hamburgers and cappuccinos. And even shopping malls are on the way. And who could begrudge them the fruits of globilisation?

Yet I admit to a twinge of regret for a passing world. Six years ago I had a walking holiday in the Georgian mountains, in Khevsureti and Svaneti. Remote areas, lacking decent roads or hotels, where I was the only foreigner anywhere to be found, apart from a few international observers close to the border with Chechnya. With my Georgian guides, I had the privilege of meeting and talking with local people, sharing their food, khinkali in Shatili, and cheese and yogurt, seasoned with herbs, in the high pastures of Svaneti. Now I hear that the roads are better, that hotels are being built, that tourism is starting to take off. All well and good for the local population, of course. But I cannot help being dismayed by reports that Mestia, the biggest village in Svaneti, may go the way of Sighnaghi, in Kakheti, a Potemkin town, a Georgian Disney world of fancy facades, any charm scrubbed away.

Yet for now Georgian traditions are still alive. I remember a summer evening two years ago, beneath the trees at Pasanauri, north of Tbilisi, eating the best kinkhali I have tasted. And then some of the Georgians started to sing, and some of them started to dance. The energy that evening was spontaneous, in no way contrived, none of it choreographed. And there were those afternoons, walking down from the mountains in Svaneti, visiting grandmothers in their summer huts, where they spent a few months with their cows, making cheese and yogurt, which they shared with us, washed down with vodka. For all the march of modernity, Georgia remains a country that values and holds on to its traditions. It is one of the reasons foreigners find it so irresistible.

Khinkali and other Georgian pleasures

It is so nice to be back in Georgia. Tbilisi seems a bit like a building site. So much construction work. Well of course, elections are coming. But I take much pleasure in the things that are just the same. The little restaurants near my flat. Prospero's bookshop has expanded, and is still a very nice place to sit in the shade on a warm Sunday afternoon. I only wish they would learn how to make decent coffee. Strolling through Tbilisi, down to the Old Town, and inevitably running into friends along the way. I am thinking of buying a carpet for my new flat in London, so today I went to my favourite carpet shop, where I bought two carpets six years ago. To my amazement, the lady said she recognized me. I will certainly buy one.

And then there is the food. Ah, to be eating khinkali again. An early visit to the excellent restaurant on Leselidze with the completely unpronounceable name. Khinkali are often described as Georgian dumplings, but I don't think that is quite right. A better comparison is to describe them as big ravioli. A thin layer of pastry, filled with minced meat, usually a mixture of beef and pork, well seasoned with herbs, and then boiled. Cooked inside the surrounding pastry, the juices of the meat make a delicious broth. They are eaten with the hands, gently biting into the soft pastry and then slurping out the broth before it spills all over you, and then gobbling them down. It is quite an art. After two years, I was out of practice, and I approached my first one gingerly. But after five of them, I was back on form. Before cooking, the pastry is closed by folding and twisting it at one end, making a kind of knob of pastry. This is usually left uneaten on the plate, serving as the proof of how many one has eaten. Khinkali eating can be a serious competitive sport as well as a great pleasure. A local driver tells us his record is 100 in 40 minutes. He is a big fellow, but this seems so improbable that he will have to be made to prove it. I have visions of something like the scene with Paul Newman and the hard-boiled eggs in "Cool-Hand Luke".

So many pleasures. I especially love the aubergine-wrapped walnut paste. And the spinach with walnut paste. And the Khachapuri, sometimes described as Georgian pizza. It comes in different forms, named after different regions of the country. I particularly like Khachapuri Megeruli, from the Megrelia region in western Georgia, which has sulguni cheese on top, as well as inside. Also Khachapuri Adjaruli, from Adjara, on the Black Sea coast, with an egg in the middle. Shashlik, of course, served with tkemali (plum) sauce. And the tomato and cucumber salads, covered in parsley. The tomatoes here, like all the fresh produce, are just so delicious. And a particular favourite, chicken pieces roasted in a pot with garlic sauce - yum yum.

Living in Georgia seems to be one long feast. The only antidote to the inevitable weight gain is the occasional bouts of food poisoning. A drastic, but perhaps necessary solution.

The EU failing in Bosnia

Here is a comment I wrote in response to an article by Daniel Korski for the European Council on Foreign Relations on the EU and Bosnia. Below is a link to Daniel's article and the comments it prompted. Below that is my comment.

http://ecfr.eu/content/entry/commentary_korskibosniathirdoption/

The EU should be the international actor best placed to help Bosnia out of its by now habitual crisis. It has the most important and worthwhile carrots to offer. Beyond visa-free travel, an immediate reward of great relevance to most Bosnians, the benefits of EU integration, economic, political and social, are well-tested throughout Mediterranean and Central Europe. Most Bosnian leaders, of all ethnic stripes, as well as ordinary Bosnians, appreciate that. Also, the reality is that there is no one other than the EU that can help Bosnia. For the past decade American administrations have, understandably, been keen to shift responsibility for the Balkans on to their European allies. This is unlikely to change. The EU cannot pass the buck. No one else wants it.

But the dysfunctional mess of Bosnia’s constitutional set-up, its inability to meet the requirements of EU integration, means that Bosnia is indeed not at a point where it can be treated as a normal pre-accession country. The EU needs to adopt a more muscular approach to Bosnia if it is to have any chance of tackling the country’s chronic problems.

And that is where the EU has been failing. For years now the intention has been for the OHR to hand over to a beefed up EU Special Representative’s office. Yet after all this time they are still not ready. Where is the beef? What mechanisms will the EUSR need? This has been much discussed, but the question of how the EU would take over responsibility has just been allowed to drift.

One issue had been the relationship between the EUSR and the European Commission, which holds the crucial purse strings. This should have been resolved now that the newly established EU High Representative for foreign affairs also sits in the Commission. It might have been encouraging that Lady Ashton chose to visit Bosnia and the Balkans so early in her tenure, as a signal of the importance that the EU attaches to the region.

Yet the lesson is probably rather less encouraging. Ashton’s visit to the Balkans probably signals that, like Solana before her, she has realised that the Balkans is the only part of the world sufficiently uninteresting to the larger member states that she will be able to take the lead for the EU there. Her visit was also distressingly reminiscent of Solana in the string of meaningless platitudes she mouthed about the road to the EU etc. etc. All from the same dull lexicon of Brussels spokesperson’s drivel. Don’t expect Paris, London and Berlin to let her take the lead in the Middle East, for example. In foreign policy terms, Bosnia and the Balkans represent the crumbs that have been left to the Brussels foreign policy establishment.

And that, unfortunately, is why the EU is so ineffectual in Bosnia. Because it just does not care enough to devote the attention and energy that is needed. Let’s hope Ashton may emerge from her current difficulties in Brussels strengthened and with the determination to give Bosnia the attention it needs.

EU opts for feebleness

European leaders have decided, with their choice of two nonentities as the EU’s figureheads, that they do not want the union to be a serious player on the world stage. To those who had hoped for more ambition, this was disappointing. It had been said that the relative importance of the two posts would be determined by the personalities who first held them. The choices that were finally made seem to reflect a determination by EU leaders to keep the EU, as such, subordinate to the national vanities of members states. Eurosceptics who want EU institutions to have as little content as possible have reason to be pleased.

In one crucial respect the new set-up will be a relief. Among all the media comments about how low-profile the two new top figures are, at least everyone seems to agree that they are competent. That will make a welcome change from the embarrassment of having the oaf Javier Solana as the face of the Common European foreign and security policy. Having been NATO Secretary General, he actually did have an international profile of sorts. It just goes to show that an impressive-looking CV can mean very little. It is quite possible to have done a string of responsible jobs, giving the appearance of great experience, but to have done them all badly.

Behind the EU’s latest choices is the reality that the union’s big countries still want to conduct foreign policy themselves on all the issues that count. Paris, London and Berlin never allowed Solana to take a significant role on any important issue, such as Middle East policy, for example, or Turkey. Solana was left to pick up the crumbs that national governments did not care much about, notably ex-Yugoslavia. Perhaps Solana will be best remembered for his doomed efforts to stave of Montenegrin independence, pressurising Podgorica to join a re-formed, very loose, unworkable union with Serbia dubbed “Solania” by Balkan wags.

But the shame is that a Europe that is no more than the sum of its member-state parts has persistently failed to count in the international big league as it could. It is not only in the Balkans that the EU continues to be ineffective, its significant resources not matched by political clout. During the growing crisis that preceded the Russian invasion of Georgia we had the spectacle of the Foreign Minister of Slovenia, supported by the Baltic states, attempting a diplomatic intervention, to the hardly disguised irritation of the bigger European states. That the EU appeared to do better a little later, when the invasion came, was because by then a big EU country, France, headed by an energetic president, led the European efforts. The episode actually demonstrated again that in foreign policy it is not the EU that counts, but that if Europe has any role at all, it is down to its larger members. Even when the EU big beasts, France, Germany and the UK, act jointly, as over Iran’s nuclear programme, their efforts seem to be no more than tolerated by the US for as long as it cannot think of anything more effective.

So most likely the EU will continue to have no effective voice collectively, and the European presence in international affairs will continue to be the small voices of the three largest members, occasionally trying to adopt common positions, and on such occasions annoying all the smaller EU members. And we will have to wait for another big new institutional re-jigging to see whether EU leaders can finally turn the aspiration of EU influence into reality. For the time-being, if there are any more crises in Europe’s backyard, effective action from the EU remains unlikely.

Ottoman Istanbul brought to life

Among the novels I have most enjoyed have been those that evoked a culture, a way of life that has passed into history, a world that is alien to us in the modern West. One outstanding example is Kurban Said’s Ali and Nino, set in the Caucasus before and during the Russian revolution. Like Ali and Nino, Jason Goodwin’s The Janissary Tree is set at a time of turmoil when older, oriental traditions and values are being challenged by new, modern, western ways. Set in Istanbul in the 1830s, it marvellously and convincingly depicts the sights, sounds and smells of the imperial city, from the secret world of the Sultan’s harem to the markets, coffee houses, baths and teeming, bustling streets. From the perfumed maze of the harem, to the foul-smelling tanneries, from the formidable Sultan’s mother, to the transvestite dancers-come-prostitutes of the seedy underbelly of the city, this is an expertly drawn picture of a bygone era.

Goodwin portrays the clash of civilisations, between the old world of the janissaries, the once feared shock troops of the Ottomans, and the new world of western, uniformed soldiers, drilling with booted feet, marching in line. The rich oriental world, with its fabulous colour, its exotic smells, its once glorious triumphs, doomed to failure by the march of modernity against which it can no longer compete.

The novel is more than anything a vehicle for Goodwin, an accomplished historian of the Ottoman Empire and travel writer, to portray the history of the Empire in a different form. The book is an illustration of how fiction can be a particularly powerful means of presenting history, of which Ivo Andrićs masterly The Bridge on the Drina is such a fine example. As a portrayal of Ottoman Istanbul, and of a difficult period in its history, this is a wonderful book.

As a novel, it is not entirely satisfying. The idea of a murder mystery in 1830s Istanbul is wonderful, and the choice of the well-connected, well-informed and well-educated eunuch, Yashim, as the main character, the investigator who unravels the plot, was inspired. However, as a character Yashim is never fully developed, beyond a suppressed anger at his neutered state. A more skilled novelist would have done better, which is why this book does not approach the heights of The Bridge on the Drina. And the denouement is rather rushed, the different strands of the plot not fully drawn together.

But despite those reservations, it is a wonderful, rich and delicious evocation of a world that is no more, a world entirely alien, almost as much, I suspect, to the inhabitants of today’s Istanbul as to a reader in Western Europe. In the West, in Britain or France say, one has a sense of continuity, that the world we live in is the direct descendent of the worlds of our forebears in the nineteenth, eighteenth of seventeenth centuries; that we came from them. But in Turkey, there was a break, or at least a succession of breaks, as modernising Sultans, and finally Ataturk, determinedly tore up the traditions of the past, stamped them out and replaced them with something different, imported. It is hard from our modern perspective even to imagine, let alone grasp that vanished world. The monuments to that age, above all the Topkapı Palace, give us at best a glimpse. Wandering through the gilded rooms of the harem, one can marvel, but not know the world that once existed there. It is so foreign to us as to be incomprehensible. Yet I think Goodwin has done as good a job as is possible of reawakening, in the pages of his novel, the bygone world of the Ottomans.