This photograph is the quintessence of Trabzon.
Ruins and a lawn, antiquity and municipal landscaping, all of it at once and inside a single frame. Stone a thousand years old, and a sign reading Our love, Trabzon against a bed of newly planted marigolds. Somebody has had a go at reproducing the Hollywood sign—Trabzon-style, which is to say cheap and cheerful, so that from a distance you cannot quite make out what it says.
Everything is wrapped in green. The greenery here is not decorative but invasive: it climbs the walls, the roof, in at the windows. Over the mountains hangs the usual dome of cloud—not a celestial metaphor but an actual greenhouse. The sun is as rare a visitor here as in Petersburg, and then only for half a day; but even through the cloud you will burn. Tropically humid. As though the Caucasus had decided to try on the climate of Sumatra.
And now let us add, to these layers of landscape, a few layers of history.
Trebizond
Trebizond: a Greek colony, a major port of the Silk Road, and the capital of the most obstinate splinter of Byzantium—it outlived Constantinople itself by eight years. The city where Don Quixote dreamed of becoming emperor, and I mean that literally: it is in the first chapter, among the honours he expects his knight-errantry to bring him. The birthplace of Suleiman the Magnificent. One of Atatürk’s strongpoints in the war for the republic. A place where Greeks, Armenians, Laz, Turks and heaven knows who else all lived at the same time. And the traces of every one of them are still here.
To this day, they say, somebody in these hills still speaks Pontic Greek, and somebody else speaks Laz—a Kartvelian language, cousin to Georgian rather than a dialect of it. The ferry from Sochi has started calling here again. The bazaar is as loud and various as ever, and among the pomegranates and the olives you will suddenly find a Georgian saperavi rosé.
Here they stew scorpionfish and bake Adjarian pide, the boat-shaped kind with the egg broken into it. Magnolias and oleanders flower in the street. And none of it is a museum, a resort or a stage set—it is simply a city that never chose what to be. It seems, in fact, to have declined to decide at all.
Where am I, exactly?
And you stop being able to place yourself. Georgia? Greece? Late Byzantium? The young Turkish Republic? Or possibly a Saudi Arabia that has been left out in the rain and gone green?
A time-machine of a city. A patchwork quilt of a city. A city whose reality is assembled out of mutually incompatible epochs and cultures—and which, all the same, lives, breathes, shouts and blooms.
