When Izmır’s new airport opened in 1987, it bore the name of one of the Turkish port city’s most famous sons, though many preferred less publishable names for Adnan Menderes, who had led the country from 1950 to 1960.  Chief among these were military officers who had hoped the airport might be named 9 September, the day in 1922 when Turkish forces recaptured the city from the invading Greeks, rather than after the man an army clique had deposed, humiliated and then hanged in 1961.  The airport name not only served to rebuke the army, whose officers traditionally considered themselves above civil censure, but also confirmed the posthumous rehabilitation of Turkey’s first democratically elected prime minister – the national traitor, as the army liked to insist, recast as the young country’s original democrat.   This remaking of Menderes has especially gathered pace in recent years, with President Erdoğan publicly citing Menderes as his political inspiration.

With even today one side despising, and the other revering, the memory of the man, it is clear that the Menderes story goes to the heart of an ideological feud that may not quite define Turkey but certainly preoccupies it.  Putting aside the personal hostility and contempt, however, there was another reason why many queried Izmır’s choice of name: what possible sense, they wondered, was there in naming an airport after a man who famously suffered a fatal air crash – from which he himself barely escaped with his life?

It turns out, remarkably, that plenty of other airports have bought into what we might describe as the Sam ‘N Ella’s Chicken Restaurant approach to brand-naming.  Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport is named after a man who crashed into the Andaman Sea in 1935 while Bucharest’s Aurel Vlaicu Airport honours a Romanian inventor-aviator lost over the Carpathians in 1913.  Then there’s Roland Garros (Reunion), who plummeted into the Ardennes in 1918, Antoine de St Exupery (Lille), whose aircraft famously disappeared over the Mediterranean in 1944, and Portuguese Prime Minister Francisco de Sa Carneiro whose name was given to Porto’s airport after he crashed on his way there in 1980.

But back to the crash which Menderes survived, and which took place near Gatwick, England on 17 February 1959.  It’s with this crash, some fifteen months before the army intervention which overthrew him, that I chose to begin A Coup in Turkey and for good reason: Menderes’s very survival among the death of so many colleagues may be said to have spurred his downfall.

In his decade in power Menderes did much to transform Turkey with an ambitious and often hectic programme of aid-funded rural development including surfaced roads, piped water supply, hydro-electric dams, factories and port facilities.  He also adopted an actively pro-western foreign policy, which saw Turkey join NATO, commit troops in Korea and engage in attempts to settle the Cyprus question – the Gatwick crash occurred as Menderes’s delegation was flying to London to sign an agreement on the island’s independence.

But Menderes was also a cynical populist who from the outset sealed his pact with ordinary Turks by courting their traditional, even reactionary, instincts, not least in terms of their religious and social piety.  He began the process, then, of reversing the transformative radical secularism which since the fall of the Ottomans in 1922 and under the leadership of national founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had characterised Turkey.  This change of direction, which many secularists considered inexcusable, was increasingly noticeable by 1959 when, with the economy in a tailspin, Menderes made desperate attempts to bolster his popularity by identifying ever more overtly with Islam.   It was unsurprising, then, that Menderes’s supporters should have hailed his survival at Gatwick, where he walked from the wreckage with no more than bruised ribs, as miraculous – as the consequence, in fact, of nothing less than divine intervention. On their leader’s return they gathered in vast numbers to greet him at Ankara’s railway station, sacrificing sheep, goats, bullocks, even camels in his honour; the gore is said to have been spectacular.  Posters celebrated his escape with the caption – ‘Allah Has Spared You For a Grateful Nation’.

Allah Has Preserved You for a Grateful Nation

Was this the moment, I wondered, when Menderes’s enemies in the army resolved that the time was nigh to prove that Adnan Bey, as his adoring supporters knew him, was no more immortal than the rest of them?

A Coup in Turkey:  A Tale of Democracy, Despotism and Vengeance in a Divided Land by Jeremy Seal.  Published by Chatto & Windus, 4 February 2021.

Just as 2020 saw the 60^th anniversary of Turkey’s first coup on 27^th May 1960, so 2021 will see the 60^th anniversary of the subsequent execution of the deposed prime minister, Adnan Menderes, whom the military hanged on 17^th September 1961.  2021 also sees the publication on 4^th February of my A Coup in Turkey, a dramatic account of extraordinary events little known outside Turkey but which strike me as key to a deeper appreciation of the ideological divisions which blight this often troubled country.

This is a book that has preoccupied me since my encounter in a Turkish village some eight years ago with Mehmet, an old man in threadbare socks who over glasses of tea professed a passionate devotion to Menderes, a figure I barely recognised back then – along with an indifference to the national founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, that at the time struck me as akin to blasphemy.

It was then I thought I might tell the story of the country’s first democratically elected prime minister, the charismatic but doomed Menderes, who after coming to power in 1950 did much to transform Turkey over his decade his office.  Even today Menderes’s enemies brand him as a national traitor, a shameless populist who courted Islamic reaction and undermined the great Atatürk’s radical westernising programme, while his supporters see him as Turkey’s original democrat and champion of righteous conservatism.

Chief among those supporters is President Erdoğan himself who may be said to take Menderes as his political example, even inspiration; the two men share uncanny similarities not only in their sure-footed populist appeal to conservative constituencies and their contempt for what each has characterized as the godless establishment, but also in their hypersensitivity to criticism.  Just as both made their names as champions of democracy, so they duly proved autocrats whose instincts were to suppress dissent, dispense with a free press, subvert the independence of the judiciary and maintain popularity by combining apparent piety with the provision of a great many jobs, mainly in construction; just as Menderes transformed the countryside by building dams, and running piped water and surfaced roads to the villages, so Erdoğan presides over huge infrastructure projects such as airports and bridges.  In so doing, both have racked up ruinous national deficits, with an especially large figure in the column marked ‘repair and construction of mosques’.

Indeed, in the devotional photograph which Mehmet showed me, Menderes is seen in a pose that would have outraged the reforming Atatürk (a man whose own iconography insistently presents him, even now, in western tails and topper, in suit and tie) but thrilled his devout followers: admiring a mosque – or the architect’s model of one – with ministerial colleagues.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be blogging about other aspects of Adnan Menderes’s remarkable and resonant story – starting, as does A Coup in Turkey, with the air crash at Gatwick in 1959 which miraculously spared Menderes even as it set him on the road to disaster.

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In 1785 John Howard – he of the Howard League for Penal Reform – made a journey to Turkey to establish, among other things, the quarantine arrangements that those returning to Europe were required to undergo.  A man for our own extraordinary times, then, even if Howard’s views of the Turks were less sympathetic than our own; dismissing them as ‘little enlightened by the modern improvements in arts and science’, he nevertheless hoped to discover practices and to glean information ‘not unworthy the notice of more polished nations’ – Britain, evidently – and their public health administrators.

In those days of typhus, small-pox and legion other contagious diseases the quarantine system prioritized the spread above all of plague.  For though the means of transmission was poorly understood – another century would pass before the pathogen Yersinia pestis, carried by lice and fleas but also transmitted by respiratory droplets from infected humans, was identified – plague was feared above all diseases for its extreme contagion and high mortality rates.

In Smyrna (modern Izmır) Howard consulted a wide range of medical men on the prevention and treatment of plague.  One physician envisioned plague as a latent condition, the contagion lying ‘dormant in the body for some time without doing the least harm, till set in motion by sudden fear, or the excessive heat of a bath.’  Another described the Christian treatment for plague – to eat caviar, garlic and pork and to drink brandy and vinegar before applying the likes of greasy wool, attar of roses and dried figs to the suppurating buboes.  Constantinople sailors swore by the remedy of throwing themselves into the sea (something sailors traditionally do only when their sinking craft leaves them with no choice) while some infected Turks were known to ‘take handfuls of snow and apply it over their bodies.’

In other respects, however, the advice uncannily echoed that on offer at today’s Covid-19 briefings, with one Giovanelli telling Howard that the best way of avoiding infection was by keeping a distance of ‘five geometrical paces’ from others.  Others stressed the importance of staying to windward of anybody who might be infected while a Jewish physician observed, perhaps without understanding the full implications of his comment, that ‘the air about poor patients is more infectious than about the rich’.  Howard himself claimed the ‘distemper’ was most probably contracted ‘by taking in with the breath in respiration the putrid effluvia which hover round the infected object’, rather as ‘the smell of tobacco is carried from one place to another’, though he assumed such objects to be goods and commodities, especially wool, cottons and animal hides, rather than exhaling humans.

To test the efficacy of the system, Howard sailed on a ship with a ‘foul bill’ – the authorities rarely granted clean bills of health to ships bound for Europe from Ottoman ports, even if no instances of plague had been reported there – to Venice.  The foul bill required the crew to stay onboard during quarantine – the statutory forty days varied depending upon local circumstances – while passengers and cargo were off-loaded straight to the port of arrival’s lazaretto; the word, from Lazarus, originally denoted a leper colony but had come to describe general quarantine facilities.   Howard was placed in a gondola ‘with my baggage, in a boat fastened by a cord ten feet long to another boat in which were six rowers’.  He was quartered in the lazaretto on one of Venice’s lagoon islands, in a cell without bed or furniture, foul smelling and full of standing water.  The indefatigable Howard went to work, mopping the floors and limewashing the walls, rendering the room ‘so sweet and fresh, that I was able to drink tea in it in the afternoon, and lie in it the following night’.

Howard’s remarkable researches – his two-volume Account of the Principal Lazarettos in Europe was published in 1791 – took him on an extensive tour of the European ports.  At Livorno, with its brand-new lazaretto, suspect ships were now received rather than being ‘chased away or burnt, as is the practise in too many places’.  At Malta he witnessed the complex process whereby a letter from Turkey was received (paper was considered especially likely to carry contagion); the document was taken with a pair of iron tongs, dipped in vinegar and then put into a case and laid for a quarter of an hour on wire grates under which straw and perfumes had been burnt.  Howard saw how goods including ‘carpets, blankets, bed covers, quilts, and other manufactures of wool and silk, flax, books, vellum, and all kinds of paper… are continually exposed to the air, moved and turned two or three times a day’.  ‘Animals with wool or long hair,’ he reported ‘are liable to the whole quarantine; but those with short straight hair are purged by causing them to swim ashore’.  Chickens and other fowl were dealt with ‘by repeated sprinkling with vinegar till well wet’.  At Marseilles he learned of arrangements for the provision of wine to those in quarantine and of the ‘parloir’, where those in confinement were able to communicate with visitors, perhaps to issue wine orders, across a ten-foot gap enforced by an arrangement of ‘wooden balustrades and wire lattice’.

The UK government’s recent decision to exempt visitors to Turkey from quarantining on their return should help to bring back visitors.  Especially to those sectors where the risk of infection from Covid-19 is at its lowest, like gulets, which have been in demand this summer as Turkish guests recognize how much safer stays on these small-group boats are than in hotels or other land-based accommodation.  For more on visiting Turkey and the various precautions in place to keep visitors safe, please visit my tours page.

When in 1716 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu left England for Constantinople, she had every reason to expect adventure; she was headed, after all, for the forbidding and exotic lands of the Grand Signior.  But as the mission was all about her husband, the newly appointed Ambassador to Turkey, who had been charged with brokering a peace deal between the Ottomans and the Austrians, Lady Mary had no reason to assume that the episode would prove central to her life – that posterity would in fact remember Edward Wortley Montagu’s embassy to Turkey for the achievements of his observant, inquisitive and socially minded wife.

For when treaty terms were finally reached between the powers contesting control of the Balkans, at the Serbian town of Passarowitz in 1718, Edward was nowhere to be seen.  To his lasting credit, he had proved himself rather too transparently turkophile to make an effective negotiator.  That left the brilliant and formidable Lady Mary to make the name for herself, both for her Turkish Embassy Letters, published posthumously, but especially for her pioneering advocacy of inoculation against smallpox; where we tend to lug home backgammon boxes, kilim rugs or sack of dried mulberries, along with a few observations we might like to consider original, what Mary Wortley Montagu brought back from Turkey was nothing less than the principle of protection against smallpox, a principle which would be duly prove applicable to all contagious diseases.

In those lazzaretto days distempers, fevers and other contagious diseases were an ever-present threat, not least to travellers.  There was the plague, of course, which the Wortley Montagu’s second cook – the ‘second’, typical of the detailing in Lady Mary’s letters, provides a delightful sense of scale – contracted after the party passed through several ‘most violently infected’ towns.   But the fact that the cook promptly recovered, and after what the party mistook for ‘only a great cold’, convinced Lady Mary that the condition caused less ‘mischief’ than was generally supposed.

Not so smallpox, which was to Lady Mary’s age everything that Covid may be to ours.  Lady Mary had personal experience of the dreadful affliction, which had carried off her favourite brother.  She herself contracted the ‘speckled monster’ in 1715, escaping with her life if not with her much admired looks; the disease permanently scarred her face and deprived her of her eyelashes.  No surprise, then, that this remarkable woman, so alive to all that she saw and learned in the East, was especially interested to discover that an effective protection against smallpox had been developed there.  ‘The small-pox,’ she wrote a friend in the spring of 1717, ‘so fatal, and so general among us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of engrafting (which is the term they give it).’

Smallpox perhaps originated in India or Egypt – or China, where we find the earliest references to the practise of ‘engrafting’, latterly inoculation, or introducing minute doses of disease pathogen to confer immunity.   We may take it that these treatments, like the diseases which preceded them, travelled the trade routes – the Silk Road – much as goods, technologies and ideas did; suffice to say that while the contagion had long since reached western Europe, the cure was barely known there when Lady Mary first encountered it in Adrianople, the Turkish border town of Edirne.

She described how old women of the region, each armed with ‘a nutshell full’ of smallpox scab or dried pustule, performed mass inoculations.   The woman incised the recipients before injecting ‘into the vein as much venom as can lie upon the head of her needle’.  Lady Mary reported that the procedure caused comparatively mild symptoms, left no permanent scarring and that she knew of nobody dying from it.  She professed herself ‘patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England’ where it was unknown, she supposed, because of the threat it represented to vested medical interests; where the doctors, that is, insufficiently virtuous to ‘destroy such a considerable branch of their revenue for the good of mankind’, sought to protect their sales of quack potions and unguents by dismissing inoculation as an untested folk remedy of the barbaric Turk.  Lady Mary was so convinced by the procedure’s efficacy that she even resolved ‘to try it on my dear little son’, which she successfully did the following spring.

In 1721, some years after the Wortley Montagus’ return home, England found itself in the grip of an especially acute smallpox epidemic.  Lady Mary now opted to have her young daughter inoculated; several of the doctors who witnessed the procedure were so impressed by the girl’s rapid recovery that they duly had it performed upon their own children.   Later that year Caroline, Princess of Wales, began to take an interest in inoculation.  She arranged for the procedure to be performed upon six criminals sentenced to death at Newgate whose reward, were they to survive, was to be their freedom.  The high-profile experiment attracted the interest of physicians, surgeons, doctors and apothecaries; the six prisoners duly recovered and, no doubt with a particular appreciation for the benefits of medical research, walked free from Newgate.

In 1722, after Princess Caroline’s two daughters were successfully inoculated, Lady Mary championed the procedure in an account, published under the pseudonym ‘a Turkey Merchant’, in a prominent London newspaper.  Within years, inoculation was established; later in the century Edward Jenner would popularise the use of the milder cowpox to vaccinate – from the Latin vacca, for cow – against smallpox.  But Lady Mary, lauded by the like of Voltaire in France, was not to be forgotten for her inestimable part in introducing ‘the great and noble blessing, Inoculation’, to Europe.

As we acquaint ourselves with our newly vulnerable state, aware that bugs can mean so much more than a night or two tucked up with a hot water bottle, we wait on the discovery of a vaccination for Covid 19.  When that day comes, while thanking our lab-coated saviours, whoever they turn out to be, we should also remember all that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu did two centuries ago – and the debt we all owe her.

There has been a sorry lack of good news coming out of Turkey in recent years, so it’s good to be able to report on one positive initiative by the government – which allows citizens to do something about embarrassing, idiotic or otherwise unflattering surnames.

The Turkish government had good reason to impose surnames in 1934, not least because the sheer number of Turks called, for example, Mehmet the Son of Mehmet, rather complicated attempts at administration and may have even militated against a personal sense of identity; those Turkish memorials to wars which predated the new law, such as the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign, often bear long runs of identical names which can leave visitors with a distressing sense of victims whose enduring loss, for all their sacrifice, was to be indistinguishable from their fellows in perpetuity.

In keeping with the example of the national leader, Mustafa Kemal, who adopted the surname Atatürk (Father Turk), many of his subjects went down either the patriotic or the proud route, with Öztürk (Pure Turk), Özdemir (Pure Iron), Özalp (True Hero), Korkmaz (No Fear) and even Ölmez (Immortal) all proving popular.  One of my favourites, and the one I’d definitely have chosen for myself, is Dağdevıren (Overthrower of Mountains)

Clearly, however, some didn’t take such a route.  Some went for Aptal (Stupid), Donsuz (No Pants), Ördek (Duck), Deli (Crazy) and even Taşak (Testicle).  These are among the names more than 100,000 people have opted to change under a temporary amnesty whereby they may circumvent lengthy and expensive court procedures by applying direct to local civil registry offices.

In these cases family lore tends to point the finger at 1930s bureaucrats whose impatience with those who had failed to come up with surnames of their own evidently impelled them to mischief; I know a Şalvarli (Trousers) family whose members assume their forebear must have been wearing a striking pair of strides when he turned up without a plan to file his surname.

In other cases, however, I detect the native cussedness of people frustrated by yet another western imposition; in barely a decade, starting in 1923, Turks had been required to adopt a new alphabet, calendar and dress code, not to mention accepting a President rather than Sultan as head of state and a great deal besides.  Unlike our own surnames, often abraded by long usage and the circumstances of their adoption long since lost, Turkish surnames still seem freshly coined.  They act, then, as a reminder of the sweeping changes that took place in Turkey not yet a century ago and of the distance that Turks have travelled.  They also tell of the resistance that many felt about being remade in a western form not of their choosing – which bears on the tensions so evident in Turkey today.

They are also, of course, an enduring source of delight, which is why a part of me feels uneasy about this particular initiative.  While I get why the Testicles and the Ducks might have had enough of their surnames, I fear for some of those other glories that I’ve picked up on my travels.  I never got Mr Mavituna to explain the origins of his surname, but it would certainly sadden me if the Blue Danube family decided it was time they were called something else.

Heaven knows there have always been reasons to Defer the Turkey Visit, as any tour operator will confirm with a sigh, but lately I’ve been coming across a new one.

Back in the 1980s it was Midnight Express, the film which turned off whole generations of visitors by portraying Turks as sodomites and sadists.  Since then, of course, we’ve all learned that Turks are by and large a brilliant people – courteous, helpful, engaging, great hosts and quite brilliant cooks.  That meant finding another excuse, which Kurdish separatism supplied during the 1990s.   Then there were the earthquakes, which always sent tremors through the bookings; and the migrant crisis, with many potential visitors expressing concerns that they might have to contend with boatloads of Syrians on their gulet holiday.   There was a catastrophic fall-off in 2015 and 2016, with visitors worrying, understandably enough, about bomb blasts and other terrorist outrages as well as being caught up in political unrest or even a coup.

Now that the security situation has dramatically improved – it was London, not Turkey, which suffered a wave of terror attacks last summer – would-be visitors appear to have shifted in their reasoning by developing a reluctance to support an administration they increasingly view with distaste.  Staying away from Turkey, as from Burma/Myanmar in former decades, has come to express an ethical position.

‘We are,’ says one, ‘uncomfortable with supporting Erdoğan’s regime’.  ‘Turkey has turned into a brutal dictatorship,’ says another who goes on to suggest that it is time I end my love affair with the country.

Turkey’s President, acting under emergency powers granted after the attempted coup of 2016, has certainly hammered all opposition to his rule.  He has targeted human rights’ workers, peace campaigners, academics, writers and journalists, branding them as terrorist sympathisers.  Many thousands of innocent people are under arrest or investigation; many thousands more have been convicted, some on life sentences, been sacked or had their passports removed.

It’s a society where blind obedience to the top man has come to count for everything – forget ability, experience or talent – and the effect has been catastrophic.   The clearing out of officials from key posts in the judiciary, the security services, higher education and elsewhere, perhaps because their support for the President has been unacceptably lukewarm, has left a cadre of inept cronies in charge.  No surprise, for example, that the lira should have been in free-fall given that the Minister of Finance’s only qualification for the role seems to be that he is the President’s son in law.

But any notion that a tourism boycott might pressurize Erdoğan into a rethink is misguided.  All it would do is hit those guides, hoteliers, gulet owners, restauranteurs, minibus drivers and the rest who depend on visitors for their livelihoods.  Most of these people think no more of Erdoğan and his policies than we do; but they will not thank us for our high-minded principles if taking a stand means staying away – to the immediate harm of people whose main concern remains the care of their families.

None of this need be the immediate concern of guests whose own interest, understandably, is merely to get the holiday of their dreams.

And that’s why we hope you can be persuaded to join us in Turkey in 2019.

I recently had occasion to dust down some travel articles I wrote on Turkey a few years ago – back before the bombings and shootings, the coup attempt, the opposition purges and all the other horrors sent the country spiralling – when my main concern appears to have been inventing strategies to help visitors side-step the crowds in Turkey’s tourism hotspots.  How to time one’s visit to avoid the cruise-ship hordes which habitually descended on the Covered Bazaar in Istanbul, then one of the world’s top visitor cities?  How to minimise the interminable queueing time for Haghia Sophia, the great church of eastern Christendom, or to avoid the tiresome crush at the Open Air Museum’s rock-carved chapels in Cappadocia?

But over the last two years there has been no demand for articles on a country the travel media currently seems disinclined to touch – and, given their wholesale evaporation, no need whatsoever for strategies to avoid the crowds.  All that may change this spring, with predictions that the country is set for a dramatic recovery in visitor numbers, which is one reason why we ran a midwinter tour to Istanbul and hinterland Cappadocia, our first, earlier this month.

January may not sound like any kind of time to visit Turkey, but after several winter visits I had convinced myself it was the perfect season and not only in terms of beating the crowds – the sights all but our own, comparative space on the usually busy streets and in the restaurants, and cheap flights and discounted hotel rooms.  But also for the stoves and log fires, lentil soup, warming hamams (Turkish baths) at day’s end and, we hoped, fresh snow beneath bright blue skies.

Did midwinter Turkey deliver?  Here are seven photographs, one for each day of our stay, to help you decide.  Let me know if you’re tempted to join us next year, when we plan to return.

Day 1: Touring an empty Topkapı Palace, Istanbul

Day 2: Warming cups of sahlep (a milk drink made from orchid root and cinnamon) and a nargilye pipe near Istanbul’s Covered Bazaar.

Day 3: Admiring exquisite Byzantine mosaics in Istanbul’s empty Chora Church (Kariye Cami)

Day 4: A fine lunch by an open fire in Ayvalı village, Cappadocia, with the promise of snow at the window.

Day 5: The snow promise kept

Day 6: Dervishes whirling just for us, and no doubt for themselves, at Saruhan, a 14th-century Cappadocian caravansaray

Day 7: The dawn as we checked out of our Cappadocian hotel

www.somewherewonderful.com/tours/

‘Tis the season of St Nicholas, whose saint’s day is celebrated on December 6^th but whose red-robed alter ego will be with us, trading tat and childhood wonder out of countless ply and tinsel grottoes, until Christmas Eve.

In fact, the third-century Bishop of Myra has been attracting interest since Turkish archaeologists announced in October that they had found what they took to be the bishop saint’s undefiled grave beneath the mosaic floor of his basilica in Demre, as his hometown of Myra is now known.  Nicholas was back in the news with the further development that a piece of pelvic bone, said to have passed from the saint’s Myra tomb to a church in Illinois via Italy and France, had been carbon dated to around 340AD, when the saint is supposed to have died.

These announcements caused plenty of stir in the press, not least because the discovery of the tomb was the work of experienced archaeologists while the analysis of the pelvic bone was conducted by an august institution called the Oxford Relics Cluster based at Keble College.

But while each story initially intrigued, they also flatly contradicted each other; for how could the saint’s bones be in circulation – and tradition has relic bits of St Nicholas not just in Illinois but New York, St Petersburg, Venice, Antalya and especially in Bari, Puglia – if it were indeed the case that his remains lay intact and until now undisturbed beneath a Demre mosaic floor?  In the established narrative, at least in parts historically attested, the saint’s tomb at Myra/Demre has always been above ground and accessible – his sarcophagus a locus of devotion and ritual for almost 1700 years.  Accessibility to the saint’s remains is crucial in specific ways, not least in the central belief, which persists even today in places like Bari, that St Nicholas is a myroblyte, which is to say that his encased bones exude a miraculous balm or ‘myrrh’ which the Myra faithful were said to be in the habit of collecting from his sarcophagus via a specially adapted leak hole – and which the Demre guides like to point out even today.  What further contradicts the subterranean tomb claims are historical accounts which assert that Norman freebooters lifted his relics from Myra in 1087 and carted them off to Bari, to the cathedral built in the saint’s honour, where his relic remains are said to rest.

As to the pelvic bone, I merely cite calculations that the sheer volume of splinters said to have come from the Holy Cross would amount not merely to a cross but a small forest; the medieval trade in relics must appear to us as a preposterous scam, its practitioners prepared to stoop to eye-popping levels of charlatanry in assigning false provenance to personal possessions, body parts, funeral shrouds, nails, sponges, crowns of thorns and anything else that the gullible might swallow.   .

I mention all this because it seems to me that a trick has been missed here; for the resting place of the real Santa Claus – the name is an Americanised corruption of the Dutch Sint Heer Klass, or Lord St Nicholas – lies in plain sight some twenty miles east of Myra at a little-visited classical site called Rhodiapolis.

To appreciate the significance of Rhodiapolis, an otherwise unremarkable place, it is necessary to appreciate that of all the deeds attributed to St Nicholas, and there are many, the one which underpins his modern and secular manifestation is to be found in a story called ‘Three Daughters’.  This story, a staple of medieval devotional iconography, endlessly the subject of painted triptychs like the Fra Angelico one below, of church carvings and windows and the rest, tells of how the saint came to the aid of a local citizen who proposed to prostitute his three daughters to relieve the family’s impoverishment.   So the saint delivers to the house three bags of gold, the dowries by which the girls’ honours are saved; and in doing so – bearing gifts, in secret and at night – he embarks on his own long posthumous journey to Santa Claus.

Fra Angelico’s ‘Three Daughters’ (from the Perugia Triptych)

The question is whether this charitable deed can factually be attributed to St Nicholas.  Very little is known about the saint’s actual life, and the sheer volume of stories associated with him persuades that our saint is in fact a composite – of the virtues, actions and examples in fact performed by others and which proved influential and exemplary, and so gained traction, in the early-medieval Christian world.

Which is what brings us to Rhodiapolis, the home town and burial place of a wealthy benefactor by the name of Opramoas who lived perhaps a century before St Nicholas.   I made a recent visit to Rhodiapolis – the site stands above the poly-tunnel town of Kumluca – to discover that Opramoas’ much admired tomb is currently being restored and off-limits.   I’ll have to return if I am to view for myself the long inscriptions which detail Opramoas’ extensive good works; these include funding civic buildings and festivals, paying for schooling of the children at Xanthus, the regional capital, and funding burials for the indigent.

The inscription also mentions that Opramoas was renowned for paying the dowries of poor families’ daughters.

What we are looking at, then, is a classic case of false attribution; it’s time, it seems to me, that we credit Opramoas and not St Nicholas with the exemplary deed that would lead, finally, to Santa Claus.  For of all the stories credited to St Nicholas ‘Three Daughters’ was to prove the most resonant if also the most amenably adaptable to the commercial expediencies of our venal age; the story which gives us the man who bears gifts, secretly and at night – but who gets the parents to foot the bill.

So I was pleased to visit the home town of Opramoas though I’ll have to return to view the tomb of the man who reminds us what giving should really be about at this time of year.

My book on the posthumous life of St Nicholas – Santa: A Life in the UK edition, Nicholas: The Epic Journey from Saint to Santa Claus – is out of print but available second-hand through Amazon or as an e-book by visiting https://www.ebooks.com/2082884/santa/seal-jeremy/

As I reflect on this year’s tours to Turkey – we managed two, an achievement given the fraught political situation, both entirely without mishap and to rave reviews – I’m struck more than ever by an aspect of the country’s magnificent archaeology; that what tells us more than anything about the native Anatolians and their civilisations, exceptionally, are the tombs.

Few of us are free from the need to be remembered; it’s just that these days we tend to make do with modest headstones or even wooden crosses.  Foregoing the sarcophagus, mausoleum or even mega-scale pyramid means we spend very much less on our memorials, no doubt, than our forebears, be they the Victorians or the ancient Egyptians.  But it’s my guess that even these funerary first-divisioners can’t compete with the Anatolians, especially the Carians and Lycians of coastal southwest Turkey, when it comes to investing in the posthumous future.

Really, it amazes me there was any dough left to live on.  Local dynastic leader Mausolos may be said to have kicked it all off, of course, with his monumental tomb – the fourth-century Wonder of the Ancient World at Halicarnassus, modern Bodrum – which spawned the word mausoleum.  This tomb lay beneath a podium set with 36 columns and topped with a pyramidal roof to a height approaching 200 feet.  The best of this mausoleum’s friezes now grace the British Museum – as does the great lion which once topped the similarly impressive mausoleum at nearby Knidos.  These funerary monuments appear to have inspired a spate of copies, no less impressive for their comparatively modest scale, to judge by the one which survives in perfect condition on a remote hillside above the coastal village of Turgut.

It’s a little further east in Lycia, however, that the sheer abundance of funerary architecture becomes truly giddying.  Everywhere there are beautiful sarcophagae on high plinths, sometimes movingly fronted by exedrae (rounded seats) for relatives to commune with their loved ones.  At Pinara and elsewhere there are tombs cut into the rock face, their facades like those of houses, thereby preserving in stone, even down to the projecting roof beams, the form of timber dwellings otherwise entirely lost.   At Sidyma there are later tombs, from the Roman imperial era, with exquisitely coffered ceilings carved with what I take to be drama masks.   And at Xanthos there are the sixth-century pillar tombs whose replica friezes – in place of the ones also removed to the British Museum – represent the Sirens (not, as was thought, Harpies) who bear the souls of the dead to Hades.

I’ve lately been reading about Cappadocia, early centre of Christian monasticism, in preparation for the superb midwinter trip we have planned to this remarkable region in January 2018.   I have always been struck by the extraordinary abundance of rupestral (rock-cut) chapels – thousands, it is estimated – and wondered how there could ever have been enough hermits to fill them.   Experts increasingly seem agreed, however, that many of them were as much tenth-century AD tombs as places of worship.  It’s a persuasive idea, this yearning for the church (or its simulacrum) rather than the churchyard as place of entombment, not least when we recall the dead interred beneath slabs in so many of our own churches.  Remember, moreover, that the ancient Lycians’ own tombs, constructed some 1500 years before the Cappadocians, are often fronted by colonnaded facades in unmistakable temple form.

We may hope that all the effort and expense proved worthwhile, and that the afterlife has been long and happy for these Carians, Lycians and Cappadocians alike.  Many of us will agree, however, that we’re better off spending what we have not on the next life but on this one.

Perhaps on that overdue holiday among the ancient sites of Turkey – either on its beautiful Mediterranean shores or in the haunting painted cavescapes of Cappadocia.

www.somewherewonderful.com/tours