Author Archives: Blue Guides

Ottoman submarines

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Sultan Abdülhamid II (the last sultan with absolute powers), who reigned from 1876 until 1909, when he was deposed, was very much aware of the shortcomings of technological development in the Ottoman Empire at a time when foreign powers were progressing in this field in leaps and bounds. He could see this from the foreign press which which was submitted to his attention in translation and from his ambassadors’ reports.

Sending promising young students abroad for further training did not appeal to him: the young people would learn ‘bad ways’ in the decadent West; would either come back arrogant and disrespectful or would not come back at all. His idea was therefore to kickstart the Ottoman technical revolution at home, under the leadership of an inspirational model figure who could be enticed to come and work in the Empire. 

According to his biographer Recep Hikmet Kırımlı, his first pick was Thomas Edison, the man who had tamed electricity and given light to the world. An official invitation was duly sent out, with an undertaking to make available funds that were twenty times as much as Edison was able to command in the US. But answer came there none. 

Shortly afterwards the sultan was informed, possibly by his Navy Minister Admiral Bozcaadalı Hasan Hüsnü Paşa, that in around 1885 the Greek government had bought a submarine, a stealthy craft that could patrol the seas undetected—and in the sultan’s mind, deter any hostile undertaking by the Russians keen to find an opening into the Mediterranean. Submarines were quite a novelty at the time and still very much in the experimental phase. The one mentioned above had been built in Sweden to the design of an Englishman, the Rev. George Garrett, curate of Moss Side in Manchester. And it is diretly to him that the sultan applied. As a man of the cloth possibly through the pressure of family tradition, Garrett clearly preferred engineering to the care of his flock. He had been dabbling in submarines since the late 1870s and had made trials in the Liverpool area with mixed success. His contraptions (there were three of them, nicknamed ‘the curate’s egg’ because of their shape) were steam-powered. The last one did not live up to its given name, Resurgam (‘I will rise again’), because it foundered off Birkenhead while it was being towed to Portsmouth to impress the Royal Navy. It is still there and a replica can be seen on dry land nearby.  

Replica of the Resurgam, Woodside, Birkenhead. Photo by El Pollock, licensed under CC by 2.0.

The repeated mishaps did not put the reverend off. He was able to team up with a Swedish business, which is how the Greek submarine had come about and how the sultan came to hear about the Rev. Garrett. The parts for two submarines commissioned by the Ottomans were constructed in Barrow shipyards and then reassembled in the Taşkızak naval shipyard on the Golden Horn. Trials of the two craft, named after the sultan and after his father Abdülmecid, were carried out in front of an extensive display of officialdom. One of submarines got as far as Seraglio Point (roughly where the Topkapı is) and successfully fired a torpedo at an old target-vessel which promptly sank. The Rev. Garrett joined the Ottoman Navy with the rank of Paşa. The design was still experimental, however, and full of problems with stability, autonomy when submerged, not to mention the safety of the crew. Later, when Van der Goltz Paşa, the German general who took on the task of modernising the Ottoman army, had a look at the rusting hulls of the two submarines, he declared them useless and had them scrapped. 

As for the Rev. Garrett, things went from bad to worse. There proved to be no opening for him in Istanbul, the Church would not have him back as a curate and he eventually emigrated to America, where he died penniless after a string of ill-advised ventures.

By Paola Pugsley. Her latest book, Blue Guide Mediterranean Turkey, is now available in digital and print-on-demand format.

     

An update on Dante

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Domenicho di Michelino’s famous likeness of Dante in the Duomo of Florence.

Work is underway to plan next year’s celebrations for the seven-hundredth anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri (see previous article posted here on 22 March this year “Dante Day”). In fact Sergio Mattarella, the Italian President, went to Ravenna on 6th September to open the events (albeit behind a mask) at the recently restored tomb of the great poet, who died in Ravenna in 1321.

There is talk of a reconciliation between Florence, Dante’s birthplace, and the town of Ravenna in Romagna across the Apennines where he died in sorrowful exile. Although the Tuscan city has numerous memorials to Dante—inside and outside the church of Santa Croce, on street plaques throughout the city, a copy of his death mask in Palazzo Vecchio—there has always been a feeling that the poet’s rightful resting place should also be in Florence (the Medici pope Leo X almost succeeded in having his remains moved there). Ravenna, however, points out that it was thanks to Franciscan friars in their city that the poet’s bones were preserved at all. His tomb, right beside their convent, is a disappointment at first glance: a gloomy mausoleum erected at the end of the 18th century with further ‘embellishments’ added in the first decades of the 20th century (during celebrations for the sixth centenary of his death), but it does preserve a relief of 1483 by the great Venetian sculptor Pietro Lombardo, which shows the poet in profile surrounded by his books. Florence in fact failed to commemorate her famous son until the 19thcentury, when a cumbersome statue was set up in the centre of Piazza Santa Croce (moved to a less conspicuous position a few years later) and a rhetorical monument was erected inside the basilica. The museum known as the Casa di Dante has no original works. It is perhaps the Baptistery of Florence which stands as the most moving testimony to Dante’s presence in the city he loved and where he once acted as a Prior. He was baptised here and recalls his ‘bel San Giovanni’ in the Commedia. In 1302 he was sentenced to death in his native city, and in order to save his life he never returned there, seeking refuge instead in other places in Italy, ending up in Ravenna where he was given a home and so was able to finish the Divina Commedia.

As part of the celebrations in Florence (even today seen by some as an opportunity to ‘reconcile’ Dante with his native city) there are plans to give the Dante Museum a much-needed face-lift, and also to put on permanent display the wonderful series of frescoes of famous men (which includes Dante by Andrea del Castagno) which for many years has been hidden away in an area of the Uffizi not normally open to the public. The delightful painting in the Duomo, of Dante ‘protecting’ Florence, has been chosen as the logo of the 2021 events. There will also be all sorts of theatrical events, readings and concerts.

Dantedì (‘Dante Day’), on 25th March, is to become an annual event. One of the most interesting events scheduled for next year is the inauguration of the Museo della Lingua Italiana, a museum of the Italian language, in part of the convent of Santa Maria Novella. There will be exhibitions at the Uffizi and at the Bargello, which will include editions of his works and the most famous of the commentaries. The Accademia della Crusca in the Medici villa of Castello will publish a Dante dictionary in recognition of the fact that it was Dante who established Tuscan as the literary vernacular of Italy. In Ravenna there will also be many important exhibitions, concerts and performances. Projects are going ahead despite fears about Covid-19—of course ‘virtual’ exhibitions and events are also a possibility. One of these has already begun here, where a a panel of a hundred artists, literary figures, journalists and people from all different walks of life, have each been asked to provide a commentary on one Canto of Dante’s opus. 

So the ‘bel paese’ (Dante, Inferno, canto XXXIII) is at least planning better days ahead, even linking concepts such as ‘unity’ and ‘Europe’ to its greatest poet.

by Alta Macadam

New Blue Guide Rome reviewed

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“Gripping” and “delicious”: Harry Mount reviews The Blue Guide’s latest offering for Chapter House in the Catholic Herald.

Ever since 1918, Blue Guides have been the best guides to European cities.

No other guide has the sheer quantity of facts. For people who want to know why a building is where it is, who built it, when and in what style, they’re the only option.

Alta Macadam, a Florence expat, has been writing Blue Guides since 1970. Annabel Barber, Editorial Director of the Blue Guides, has, like Macadam, tramped every cobble (or black, basalt sanpietrino) of Rome’s roads, and the roads leading to Rome – the entry on the Via Appia is peerless.

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The legend of Şahmeran

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If you happen to be in Tarsus, driving east along the central Adana Blv, you will find to your left, at the large roundabout 100m north of the Ulu Cami and the so-called Church of St Paul, a fountain with an intriguing statue in the middle of a small basin. It shows a triton standing on its coiled scaly tail with back and sides covered with large erect snakes, twelve of them: they hold the water pipes. More smaller snakes appear to be arranged as a sort of crown on the head of the figure. This is Şahmeran, and the connection seems to be with Persia, since Şahmeran translates as ‘king of snakes’ in Farsi. However, there is also talk of Egyptian origins, but in any case the legend of Şahmeran appears widespread all over the East, normally with a reference to medicine and healing. In fact, the coupling of healing with snakes is still with us, as the staff of Aesculapius (a roughly-hewn branch with one coiled snake, illustrated here) well testifies.

A 50cm by 50cm relief of Şahmeran (now in Kars museum) was recently unearthed at Ani near the cathedral. The plaque shows a creature with a snake’s body, a dragon’s head protruding from its back and a human face that looks decidedly female. The Tarsus Şahmeran is definitely a man, at least according to local lore (you can find a number of images of him on the Internet, for example on this TripAdvisor page here). In Tarsus Şahmeran is linked to the nearby bath, the Şahmeran hamam. It is open for business today though its origins are very old. The building is c. 15th–century, with 19thcentury restorations , but it is said to rest on top of a Roman bath, as yet unexplored. It is here that Şahmeran is said to have met his end, when he was discovered peeping at his beloved from an opening in the cupola. He was swiftly dispatched on the marble massage table by having his head cut off. Stains of his blood are apparently still visible and the local people have been dreading the snakes’ revenge ever since.

Meanwhile, Şahmeran left his body to science so to speak, with momentous consequences. Both the local ruler and his deputy had fallen seriously ill and Şahmeran instructed a young man by the name of Lokman in the art of medicine. He told him to take his (Şahmeran’s) body, cut it into three parts and boil it. The meat was served to the ruler, who was healed, and the stock to his ‘vizir’, who died—and rightly so, since he was devious and untrustworthy. Justice was done. From these promising beginnings, Lokman proceeded to learn about herbs, potions and infusions. Indeed, he acquired the skill of understanding the speech of plants. He would go for walks in the countryside, listen to what they said, and then he knew what to do: his career was assured.

by Paola Pugsley. Her Blue Guide Mediterranean Turkey, which includes Tarsus, will be published this summer. For other books by Paola on Turkey, see here.

The ‘Moors’ of Venice

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The place of ‘Moors’ in the history of the Venetian Republic is a fascinating subject and one that deserves more attention. Venice had a lasting and intricate relationship with Islam: the visitor cannot fail to be struck by the impact of Eastern architecture on so many of its buildings and by the incredibly large number of very beautiful Islamic works of art to be seen here.

One of the most charming spots in the city, in the sestiere of Cannaregio at the northern limits of the city, is the peaceful little Campo dei Mori—‘of the “Moors” ’—, where you can see three quaint statues, popularly supposed to represent the Levantine merchants of the Mastelli family, whose palace is close by (it still bears a relief of a merchant leading a heavily-laden camel with spices from the East). A few steps away is a fourth statue of a Moor (known, for some reason to Venetians as ‘Alfani’), almost overwhelmed by his huge turban and attached to the house where Tintoretto lived for the last two decades of his life. The term ‘Moors’ seems to have been used to denote Muslims from the Middle East, from North Africa, or from the Levant and Turkey.

Gentile Bellini, appointed by the Republic to paint the official portrait of all the doges from the 1460s to 1501, was also bidden to the Ottoman court to paint Sultan Mehmet II, in 1480 (that portrait now hangs in the National Gallery in London). Bellini stayed in Istanbul for three years, and the little bronze medal he designed at the same time, with an effigy of the sultan, can be seen in Venice in the Ca’ d’Oro.

‘Moors’ could of course also refer to black Africans, whom we know were first seized in West Africa and shipped by the Portuguese to Europe as slaves in 1440, and they soon arrived in Venice. White slavery in some form seems to have been an accepted institution in Europe before then, but legislation varied from city to city, and is a subject which needs more study. Very little is known about the presence in Venice of black Africans since the documents often only listed their first names and described them as ‘black’, ‘Moor’ or ‘Saracen’ with no record of their full identity or place of origin. What little knowledge we do have includes the fact that some sub-Saharan slaves, freed in the early 16th century, joined the associations which ran the gondola ferries across the Grand Canal. 

In the famous True Cross cycle begun in the last years of the 15th century (now in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, which reopened to the public on 26th May), Gentile Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio both included ‘Moors’ (presumably black Africans) in their depictions of the history of that relic. When, as it is being processed across a bridge it falls into a canal, Gentile includes a black African about to take a dive to rescue it (the Venetians themselves were notoriously bad swimmers). In another scene, Carpaccio shows a black maid in a turban watching the events from a roof terrace amidst a thicket of chimney pots. A much lesser-known work in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, the Incredulity of St Thomas by the great painter Cima da Conegliano, a contemporary of the Bellini brothers, includes, far in the background, a lone horseman from the East in a turban and with a scimitar at his side. An intriguing detail. Later, in 1749, Gian Domenico Tiepolo, in his delightful series of small paintings of the Stations of the Cross in the oratory attached to the church of San Polo, included splendidly-dressed Arabs in turbans, who stand out memorably as protagonists in the crowds, and which one cannot help but feel were portraits from life.

Gentile Bellini: detail from the Miracle of the True Cross cycle. At the far right, a maidservant steadies a man about to take a dive into the canal to help retrieve the relic.

Even though at certain periods Venice was seen as a champion of the Christians against the Muslims, the Serenissima always maintained a close relationship with the East. In 1621, the Republic granted the Turkish merchants their own trading centre (to serve as a warehouse and lodgings) in the city and a grand palace on the Grand Canal was chosen for the purpose (from then on known as the ‘Fondaco dei Turchi’). A room was turned into a mosque and another area was adapted as a ritual bath house. Goods unloaded here from Turkish boats moored on the Grand Canal outside would include wax, oil, wood and raw hides (and later in the 18th century, tobacco).

The subject can be followed in other parts of Italy, too. The servants and peasants in the Medici household were sometimes included in paintings: in 1634 the court painter Suttermans was commissioned to paint two elderly peasant women, one holding a duck and one a basket of eggs, accompanied by ‘Piero Moro’ wearing a pearl earring, and around 1684 Anton Domenico Gabbiani produced a portrait of four Medici servants which features a ‘Moor’ gorgeously dressed in silk embroidered with yellow flowers.

The exquisite collections made by the Medici in Florence included the bust of a black woman made in onyx, pearl, gilded silver and gilded metal which is known to have been exhibited in the Tribuna of the Uffizi by 1589 (and is still in the Uffizi collection). There is also a portrait head of a young black girl dating from the 2nd century BC, owned by Francesco I, who had it made into a statuette by adding a black-and-white marble cloak (now in the collection of the Archaeological Museum in Florence).

In Rome there is an early 13th-century mosaic tondo on the Caelian hill showing Christ between two fettered captives, one white and the other black, at the entrance to a former Trinitarian hospice for the redemption of slaves. Present scholarship on the subject suggests that the black Africans who arrived in Venice as slaves were set free after a period of time and assimilated into society. But the definition of ‘slave’ and the history of slavery in Europe remains a very complex subject.

Alta Macadam

I am indebted to Professor Kate Lowe, whom I heard lecture some years ago on the subject of black Africans in Venice and slavery.

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