Free The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

with a swimming-pool, its embassies and consulates, its great restaurants, its Atatürk museum, its Atatürk model farm, its new Atatürk mausoleum, where the founding Father is to lie, its houses of business, its noble streets of shops, its multitudinous Americans, its racecourse, its Genelik Park, its colleges and schools and institutes, its railway station, its boulevards, its illuminated signs, its hotels. Ankara, in short, was the New Turkey, born of the Great Revolution that had so stirred their parents thirty years ago, and it seemed odd that they had not turned against it. In Britain, the revolution which had stirred the parents would have been definitely out, reaction would have set in, and the statues of Atatürk on his horse would have been mocked. Young Turks seemed to have more piety.
    They went on telling us about Ankara, but the only thing I wanted to see there was the Seljuk citadel in which the old town lies, and the Roman Temple of Augustus, and the view from the acropolis, and perhaps the Hittite things in the museum, though I do not care for Hittites. Modern Ankara was obviously a bore.
    Turks, like Russians and Israelites, seem to want you to see the things that show how they have got on since Atatürk, or since the Bolshevik revolution, or since they took over Palestine. But how people have got on is actually only interesting to the country which has got on. What foreign visitors care about are the things that were there before they began to get on. I dare say foreigners in England really only want to see Stonehenge, and Roman walls and villas, and the field under which Silchester lies buried, and Norman castles and churches, and the ruins of medieval abbeys, and don't care a bit about Sheffield and Birmingham, or our model farms and new towns and universities and schools and dams and aerodromes and things. For that matter, we don't care a bit about them ourselves. But foreigners in their own countries (Russians are the worst, but Turks are bad too) like to show off these dreadful objects, and it is hard not to let them see how very vile and common we think them, compared with what was in the country before they got there. We did not like to tell the Turkish students, whom we liked very much, that the most interesting things in Turkey were put there before it was Turkey at all, when Turks were roaming about mountains and plains in the East (which perhaps they should not really have left, but this was another thing we did not like to tell the students, who did not know where they truly belonged, and perhaps actually few of us do).
    So we voyaged on, and Father Chantry-Pigg looked up the places on the coast in the Anabasis by Xenophon; he had spotted which was Heraclea, and next day we passed, between Zonguldak and Inebolu, the beach where Jason moored the Argo, and we saw the mouths of the Parthenius, the Halys, the Iris, and the Thermodon, and passed the country of the Paphlagonians, who had feasted and danced with Xenophon's soldiers, and then we came to Sinope, where Diogenos had lived, and Father Chantry-Pigg knew about it all, which made the Van Damms and the Turkish students admire him very much, and we thought it did the Church of England a great deal of good with them, though none of them knew who these people were that he kept mentioning, or when they had done these things or why, for it was all a long time pre-Turkey, and even longer pre-America, and it was not Hittite; still, they saw he was a very learned man. I liked myself to think about Jason and the other Argonauts sailing along this coast, anchoring here and there, tossed about by the high waves, on the way to Colchis and the Golden Fleece.

Chapter 7
    We were due to reach Trebizond on the afternoon of Whit Sunday. That morning Father Chantry-Pigg celebrated Mass as usual at eight o'clock in a quiet corner of the top deck, and aunt Dot and Dr. Halide and the Americans and I attended it, and the Greek priest and several Turks looked on. The