Free Hav by Jan Morris

more lasting than the hopes of New Hav, less aloof than the Chinese ambience, more subtle than the Turkish . . .
    Besides, though the massive structures of the Serai may seem dominant when you first arrive in Pendeh Square, gradually you come to realize that it was the Arabs who really created this city. They gave it its great days, its glory days. Although for more than a century they were supplanted by the Crusaders, in effect they dominated Hav for four hundred years, and they made it rich. Through Hav half the spices, skins, carpets, works of art and learning of the Muslim East found their way into Europe — and not only the Muslim East, for this sophisticated and well-equipped mart between the sea and the land, between Asia and Europe, became the chief staging-post of the Silk Route from the further Orient. Ibn Batuta, in the fourteenth century, called it one of the six greatest ports of the world, the others being Alexandria in Egypt, Quilon and Calicut in India, Sudaq in the Crimea and Zaitun in China. Here the Venetians established their Fondaco di Cina, their China Warehouse, and here later the very first Chinese colony of the West settled itself in the peninsula known to the Arabs as Yuan Wen Kuo, Land of the Distant Warmth. Great was the fame of Arab Hav, attested by many an old traveller, and its last splendours were extinguished only when in 1460 the Ottoman Turks, deposing the last of the Hav Amirs and expelling the Venetians, incorporated the peninsula into their own domains and so plunged it, for nearly four centuries, into the dispirited gloom of their despotism.
    When the troops of the Seljuks first arrived in Hav in 1079 they must have thought it a sorry sort of conquest. It had never come to much before — had never remotely rivalled the powerful city-states of the Asia Minor shore, Seleucia, Smyrna, Trebizond. Alexander had passed it by, both the Romans and the Persians had ignored it. By the time the Arabs got there the remaining Greek inhabitants were living in miserable squalor beside the harbour, their acropolis long since a ruin above them. The salt-flats were undrained then. Malaria was endemic. There was no road up the escarpment and the Kretevs were unapproachable. Yet here the Arabs built the northernmost of their great trading cities, and most of it is still to be seen.
    To the north of the castle hill they established quarters for their slaves — obdurate infidels and prisoners-of-war — and these were to develop into the wan suburbs of the Balad. To the west they built their own walled headquarters, and this is now the Old City, or Medina. The huge public place they laid out was the progenitor of today’s Pendeh Square, and the second of their great mosques, erected by Saladin after his liberation of Hav from the Crusaders, now does service as the Greek Orthodox cathedral, behind the railway station. The Staircase up the escarpment was first cut by Arab engineers, and it was they who drained the salt-marshes.
    It is all there still, and above all the Medina remains, even now, overwhelmingly an Arab medieval city. It is crudely intersected by the Boulevard de Cetinje, but is still a glorious jumble of alleys and sudden squares, alive with the sights and sounds of Araby — you know, the dark and the sunshine of it, the shuffle and the beat, the sour hoof-smell from the smithy, the towering simplicity of the mosque in the heart of it all — you know, you know!
    For some Muslims, if only a lingering few, that mosque is one of the holiest on earth, because a small and dwindling sect claims it to be the shrine of the Caliphate. You will remember that the Ottoman sultans, whose temporal, powers were abolished in 1924, claimed also to be the legitimate caliphs of Islam, the spiritual leaders of the faith. They were recognized as such by many Muslims of the Sunni persuasion, and even after the extinction of their sultanate, proclaimed themselves caliphs still. The deposed