The Standard-Issue Nostalgia Kit

Every culture issues its exiles a small standard kit of things to be homesick about, and the contents are never negotiable.

An Englishman abroad gets a church clock and honey for tea—Rupert Brooke assembled that particular hamper in a Berlin café, which is the correct place to assemble such things. Housman supplies the blue remembered hills, “the land of lost content.” Blake provides the green and pleasant land. None of it is chosen; it is simply what comes in the box.

The Russian box contains, before anything else, two trees: the birch and the rowan. There was a song about them in the Soviet school music syllabus, and between them they constitute the entire visual apparatus of melancholy—pure nostalgens, guaranteed to produce, on contact, what Pushkin called the love of one’s native ashes and one’s fathers’ graves.

Thrace, where the kit does not work

In Thrace, where I live now, none of it applies. Instead of birches there are pomegranates, figs and acacias. And above all sunflowers—epic ones, shoulder-high. Whole oceans of sunflowers, dense and heavy, laid on like Van Gogh’s brushstrokes.

They do not induce nostalgia. They boil it off.

Erzurum, where it works alarmingly well

And then there is Erzurum, which has the lot. Birches. Rowans. The full kit.

My first thought was that this must be a residue of the Russian occupations—the imperial army held the city twice, and perhaps somebody brought saplings. But in that case Thrace should have sprouted something too, having been taken rather more often. No; the cause must lie deeper.

Pushkin. He really was here, in 1829, and he compared the place—not at all kindly—to Chișinău, where he had spent part of his southern exile and which he had not enjoyed either. Evidently the city is still trying to prove that it is not Chișinău. And so it grows rowans and birches, as though to spite the poet.

The colours, incidentally, are magnificent on a good day: ochre, cinnabar, smoky green, blue shadows. Something between the Armenian painter Martiros Saryan and a very good afternoon in Provence.

So if you are ever in Türkiye and the homesickness starts, go to Erzurum instead.

It will not, admittedly, do much for you if your box is the English one. There are no church clocks here stopped at ten to three, and the honey is excellent but comes with tea of an entirely different persuasion. But if your kit happens to be the same as mine, this is where it is stocked: rowans, birches, and even snow in winter. Exactly like home—only with minarets.

And if it is not, there is still something worth seeing in watching a stranger’s homesickness being cured by a tree you have no feelings about whatsoever.