The Turkish homes

Marmora ideal for yachting

Our stay in Prinkipo turned out to be one of the most pleasant summer vacations I ever had. I would go to town to attend business regularly, but would take long weekends off; that is, I would do as most business men do in summer and would stay home Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. We would then go bathing in the mornings, and play tennis or go out sailing in the afternoons. The Sea of Marmora is ideal for yachting, and numerous are the sailing yachts which use Prinkipo as their port. Of course the fact that we usually used Turkish yachts would somewhat hamper our movements, as boats flying the Turkish flags were not allowed to go anywhere near the Anatolian shores, the Internalized authorities enforcing at that time a strict blockade of the Nationalists.

Often there would be tea parties or informal after dinner gatherings in the Turkish homes. And while these were small, unpretentious affairs the Turks cannot afford to entertain elaborately on account of their precarious means  they were a most pleasant manner of passing away the time. There was always someone interesting at these gatherings. A man or a woman of prominence who would give to us a new point of view or some insight into the general situation.

Once an Egyptian princess told us of the difference in the progress accomplished by the Turks and by their cousins of Egypt in the last years. How, despite the fact that the Turks had been hampered by political circumstances while the Egyptians had had the supposed benefit of British help, Turkish women now enjoyed a much larger political and social freedom than Egyptian women, and public education had spread more generally in Turkey than in Egypt.

Sultan Abdul Hamid

Another time the director of the Turkish Naval Academy in Halki told us how he had taken advantage of the temporarily complete independence of Turkey during the war to make of his school one of the most progressive and up-to-date naval academies in the world how since the armistice he was meeting seemingly insurmountable difficulties in protecting his school from the process of disintegration systematically applied by the Allies to everything Turkish in Constantinople.

Another time Zia Pasha, former Turkish Ambassador in Washington, told us how for years Sultan Abdul Hamid succeeded in keeping his Empire intact by playing the greedy ambitions of one western nation against that of the other. Once again Reshid Pasha, the Turkish diplomat who negotiated all the peace treaties made by Turkey in recent years up to but excluding the Treaty of Sevres told us of his experiences at the London Peace Conference following the Balkan War.