A Travelling Medievalist's Blog

4 middle-sized zucchini, peeled
3 smallish onions

Grate the zucchini and the onion together. Then add two eggs and enough flour to make a stiff batter, along with 2 tsp of baking powder. I think he put in about a cup or so of flour, but since Mustafa (predictably) measures nothing but does it all by feel, it was hard to tell. Add 2 tsp of dried mint and about the same of red pepper and salt.

Shape this into patties and fry (deep frying isn’t necessary) in some fairly light oil (not olive oil—the taste would be too heavy) until they are golden.

I have had the chance to try this since getting back to France. Mine were not up to Mustafa’s standards, but they were pretty damn good. I served them to my nephew Tim and his girlfriend, and not a one was left over. I’ll work on perfecting my technique.

More and more, this is becoming a blog about food. Ah, well, worse things have happened.

On the last day of our Far Horizons trip, we visited the Church of St. Saviour in Chora, which is one of the most exquisite of all Byzantine churches. It is decorated with mosaics and frescoes from the century before the fall of Constantinople, depicting the Life of the Virgin and the Life of Christ. Scholars tend to see Italian influences in these lovely images; they aren’t stiff and stylized like so much Byzantine art, but instead are moving and personal, almost sentimental. My favourite is, perhaps, the mosaic showing the first steps of the Virgin Mary: she’s a tiny little girl (only six months old, according to tradition) but already very dignified and confident, walking all by herself away from her mother’s hands. It’s perfectly familiar—I have three friends with toddler babies at the moment—and yet wonderfully strange, set against a backdrop of the Holy Land as imagined by a 14th century Byzantine artist, all strange perspectives and garden walls.

Ottoman food turns out to be wonderfully strange as well. The Ottoman empire, at its apogee, encompassed Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Syria and the Balkans as well as present day Turkey. The master chefs who catered to the whims of the rulers of this empire could thus draw on a wide range of ingredients and techniques. They were famous for their inventiveness and skill, and also for keeping their recipes secret, so that no lesser person might eat what the Sultan ate. Almost next door to St Saviour, in a beautiful green garden with high walls and trellises, there is a restaurant that specializes in rediscovering the lost recipes of the Ottoman chefs. They have re-invented dishes based upon cookbooks from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries discovered in remote archives, all listed in the menu with the century next to the name of the dish.

There we ate lamb cooked in an earthenware pot with dried apricots and coriander; grape leaves stuffed with minced meat and rice and sour cherries; chicken cooked in honey; squid stuffed with a filling of couscous and cinnamon; and we had tiny glasses of tamarind sherbet to drink (an Ottoman favourite, not like ice-cream at all but rather like very cold sweet fruit juice), along with glasses of cold white wine from Cappadocia. Everything was exotic and subtle and delicious, nothing like any cuisine I’ve ever tasted. I thought about those later Ottoman sultans, prisoners of their own viziers in the great palace of Topkapi, with their stables of gorgeous Arab horses, their harem full of beautiful women, their painted walls and their stunning jewels, their pleasure gardens and their chefs… decadent, perhaps, but not such a bad life.

Our boat is a ninety-foot gület, two-masted and fairly broad beamed, designed for coastal sailing. There are eight cabins for guests, six forward and two aft, in addition to a bunk room right up in the prow of the ship for the crew and the captain’s cabin across from the galley. Inside, the ship is entirely wood paneled and has made to order Turkish carpets that announce its name: Arif Kaptan C, for the father of the present owner, Hussein. The present Captain is inscrutably friendly. Utgur, who is 21, is graceful, at least half-cat and apparently capable of teleportation, is the person you shout for whenever you need something (a kayak; a drink; to have the sails hoisted); and for twenty years, Mustafa has been the cook on this ship.

We are on board for nine days, and for almost every one of those days, Mustafa produces three meals, plus tea. Breakfast is cucumber and tomato and Turkish cheese and some kind of egg (scrambled or fried) and sublime peaches, skinned before they come to the table. Lunch is various; today, we had köfte, little Turkish meatballs beautifully spiced, roasted zucchini and eggplant, a huge green salad with tomatoes and lettuce and shreds of purple cabbage and lots of dill, and beautiful pasta, just lightly sauced with tomato and olive oil. Dinners are even more elaborate. We start with the mezes: esme, spicy tomato smoodge that you eat on bread, patliçan salat, which is garlicky smoky eggplant mash, cacik, like Greek tzatziki but with a mysterious green leafy thing in it instead of cucumber, and if we’re very lucky, also sigarete börek, long tubes of pastry filled with soft cheese, or the divine zucchini fritters. The challenge is not to go into food coma before the main course comes to the table. It’s usually quite simple, after all those varied entrées. One night, each one of us got a whole sea bream, caught fresh that day and then grilled over a tiny hibachi at the front of the ship. Or it might be roast chicken, or lamb chops and grilled vegetables. Dessert comes last: fresh fruit usually (cherries and apricots and melon) but sometimes also halvah, which I personally don’t care for, but which sends others into raptures.

In the photo, you can see how beautiful Mustafa’s meals are, and this is all the more remarkable as he has no formal training. What you can’t see is the size of his kitchen; it can’t possibly be more than 6 feet by 6 feet, and it’s often a day’s sail away from anything resembling a village shop let alone a supermarket, and yet out of it comes some of the most extraordinary food I’ve ever eaten.

Maybe I’ll miss Mustafa most of all; no one else has ever peeled my peaches for me.

This morning at 6am, while the rest of us were asleep, the crew discovered that the winch that raises the anchor was broken. Somehow the captain and Utgur and Mustafa hauled up the chain by hand and wrestled the big anchor into its keeping place; but it was clear that our itinerary would have to change. Instead of sailing on to Simi, we turned back to Turkey. The idea was that Hussein, who owns the boat, would send someone down by road to meet us and fix the winch. Instead of visiting Simi in the morning and spending the afternoon swimming, we would spend the morning swimming and the afternoon visiting Simi.

Except that when the mechanic arrived after the three hour drive south from Bodrum, accompanied by Hussein himself, and spent an hour mucking with the engine, it turned out that the part  needed machining, so they hopped back in the car to drive South another three hours to Marmaris to do that.

So we were condemned to spend a day swimming from the boat, paddling about in the two kayaks, reading our books and nursing our sunburns. The bay we are anchored in is turquoise; rocks run right down into the sea, and small multicoloured fish flick around them. Looking away from the shore is a distant island, purple in the haze, lending its colour to the water which really is, as Homer would have it, wine-dark. As our friend Kim put it, it’s a hard life when the biggest decision you have to make is whether you want to sit in the sun, the shade, or half and half.

Modern Bodrum was ancient Halicarnassus, the place where a man named Mausolus built a great monument to himself, thus giving the ancient world one of its Seven Wonders and the modern world the word mausoleum. After the fall of Constantinople, the Knights of Rhodes captured Bodrum and used the Mausoleum as a quarry when they built what was to be the biggest and best castle ever, with the most up-to-date defences imaginable. Unfortunately, just as they finished this project, which took decades, Rhodes itself fell to the Ottomans and the knights had to abandon all their holdings in the Eastern Mediterranean and retreat to Malta. So it was the Ottomans, not the Knights of Saint John, who got to make use of the best castle of its time.

Nowadays the Castle of St Peter houses the Bodrum Underwater Archaeological Museum (and the guides will hasten to inform you that the museum itself is not actually underwater although the artifacts it houses used to be). We were given a tour by the Director of the Museum, Tugba, and one of the conservators, Asaf; when they realized both how interested we were and how many scientists we had in our group (a retired chemist, a research biologist and a pathologist), they very kindly invited us back to their lab up on top of the hill after lunch. Tugba confessed that although the new lab facilities were wonderful, she missed one thing about having the conservation lab in the castle: it was no longer possible to run down a long stair to a little stony beach for a swim at lunchtime. The new facility, however, is very nice; there’s a garden in front where we were greeted by friendly stray dogs who had found a home and regular food there, and inside it’s very clean and bright and white, with a cool marble staircase leading down to the labs. As you can imagine, the wooden parts of a ship that went down, say 2600 years ago pose particular problems for conservation; the water preserves wood very well, but when you take it out, it’s more like a sponge than anything else, soggy and fragile.

To explain how you preserve bits of ancient ships, Asaf made one of the best analogies ever (and, as a teacher who often depends on analogies myself to make something alien and complicated seem familiar and simple, I know a good one when I hear one). To make waterlogged wood solid, you have to impregnate it with polyethylene glycol (PEG), which is a sort of water soluble wax. To do this, you put the wood in a vat of water, and you heat it up very slowly. As it heats, you add the PEG gradually. It’s just like making marmelade: the wood is the fruit, the water is the liquid that it cooks in, the PEG is the sugar you add to preserve the fruit. And then simmer. But if it takes half an hour or an hour to preserve your Seville oranges as marmalade, it can take three years to preserve your piece of ancient wood—three years during which that particular laboratory is like a sauna from the steam. Once it is preserved, however, you might be able to reconstruct an entire Bronze Age or Byzantine shipwreck.

And then it was down to the harbour and onto our boat, the heroic Arif Kaptan, where I was more than delighted to find that we had the same cabin as last time. So late in the day, we sailed the seas and came to the ancient city of Kos.

We arrived in the village late on Friday, seriously discombobulated after a night flight and then a complicated trip across Paris—complicated because the bus we had expected to be able to take from the airport to the train station was on strike. Just that one bus, and just for that one day. As long as I live in France, I will never understand how they organize these work stoppages or exactly what they hope to gain! In any case, we found our house more or less in order, our neighbours more or less as we’d left them, and we went to bed. Saturday we pottered about, but by Sunday we were really ready to go out and face the world.

And what a surreal world it was that particular day! You should understand, first, that the village is tiny (about 200 year round inhabitants), medieval, and walled. In the old days, most of the inhabitants were farmers, raising dairy cattle, but they’ve retired, and their children have tended to opt for less arduous lives and moved to the city. There are three big working farms left. There is one industry, in the form of a candy factory that employs about 20 people; there’s a little shop, a café and a restaurant, and that’s about it, except for the two large religious establishments: on one side of town, a traditionalist seminary housing young men from all over the world in training for an extremely old fashioned version of the Catholic priesthood, and on the other, a Benedictine monastery housing a few dozen monks. Neither of these populations mixes much with the rest of the town and indeed they are regarded with a fair amount of suspicion, although the seminarians do like to go up and play rowdy games of soccer on the plateau with their cassocks tucked up into their belts.

So, this past Sunday was the féte de la musique, a more or less nationwide celebration. In their constant attempt to enhance our value as a tourist attraction, the Conseil Régional had plotted a series of events in town, four concerts at four different venues, to which groups of music lovers would be conducted by local guides, seeing the sights on their way, and then convening under a tent on the edge of town for a prix-fixe meal. It was rather the same concept as that guiding medieval pageant drama in places like York, where you could walk around town and see enacted all the different episodes of salvation history, from the Creation to the Second Coming. The music was eclectic, to say the least. There was a children’s choir in the church, singing traditional songs, and some kind of dreadful French rap music on the Place de Fossés, African drums down by the Trop Chaud, and a string quartet up near the fountain.

Now, I don’t know whether or not the Conseil Régional realized it, but Sunday was also the Fete-Dieu, one of the holy days that the traditionalists take most seriously and honour by taking the Holy Host, in a golden monstrance, around town under a brocaded baldaquino.. Small children go before with baskets of rose petals, and all the seminarians wear beautiful white surplices over their black cassocks. Every one sings hymns. So music enthusiasts carrying cameras and wearing shorts and halter tops were proceeding around town in one direction, listening to folk songs and French rap, while a cohort of ultra-conservative Catholics, the men in suits, the women in long skirts with their heads covered, the little children in Sunday best, were proceeding around behind the Body of Christ in the opposite direction at the very same time. The Catholics studiously ignored the musical types; the musical types, on the other hand, pointed at the Catholics and stared and photographed as though they were some strange primitive tribe—which I suppose they are, in a way, but their behaviour was by far the more polite and decorous.

It was a bit too much culture shock for a single day. We withdrew to our house, but we couldn’t escape the boom boom boom of the bad French rap from one direction and the plaintive and slightly off key hymns coming from the other.

Last night we went to see The Importance of Being Earnest. Generally I try to stick to Shakespeare, but it was on Lucy’s summer reading list, and frankly, I’ve never seen a performance of Earnest that disappointed. Nor did this one. It was directed by Brian Bedford, who also played Lady Bracknell. Algernon and Jack were very good, as were Gwendolyn and Cecily. The designer, Desmond Heeley, is just a stone genius. He lived on our top floor for a while and what I mostly remember about him is that he was always rushing in and out deploring the impossibility of what he was being expected to accomplish. And yet, every single time, he produces something extraordinary, even if he has to make it out of old panty hose and surgical tubing (a luminous Tempest, in the 1980s). In this production, the sets were fabulous—accurate but also somehow impressionistic, so that they never looked quite like a real Victorian drawing room or garden, but like an appropriately artificial version of such things—as were the outrageous waistcoats (one of them cerise!) favoured by Algy, but it was Lady Bracknell’s hats that stole the show. There were two, one black and silver, one red, both with feathers and sequins and I don’t know what-all, both enormous and anchored to an equally enormous wig in such a way that they could be made to quiver and vibrate with the equivalent enormity of her disapproval: “To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution!”

All very very funny, and the audience shrieked with laughter, and so did I, and yet nowadays the play makes me sad, because I can never see it without remembering that during its first run, poor Wilde was on trial and being convicted and sentenced to hard labour. It’s hard to decide which he would have liked least, the hard labour or being called “poor Wilde.” It’s difficult to watch that first scene with the cigarette case without remembering the cigarette cases produced against Wilde in evidence of his “gross indecency.”

I did figure out one thing about the play this time, though. It’s perfectly obvious in a way, but had escaped me until now. It’s always seemed to me that the playwright is much kinder to Cecily than to Gwendolyn, and I realized last night that it’s because she has an imagination. So too, of course, do the two young men (Jack fabulates a brother named Earnest, Algy invents Bunbury and indeed the entire concept of Bunburyism). Gwendolyn, on the other hand, has none whatsoever and is almost certain to grow up to be just like Lady Bracknell, as Algy foretells. But Cecily is actually an author, and one with an eye to the future audience of her diary: “You see, it is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions and consequently meant for publication.” And what she writes comes true; she writes an engagement with Earnest (who turns out to be Algy but never mind) and so it comes to pass. Her diary, in fact, proves to be the perfect expression of Wilde’s dictum that literature always anticipates life rather than responding to it.

Tonight we fly to Paris!

Tourists will flock to Stratford by the tens of thousands this summer to see Macbeth, or Midsummer Night’s Dream, or West Side Story (purists disapprove, but there’s one big musical every year), or The Importance of Being Earnest, which Lucy and I will see on Tuesday. Stratford is home to the continent’s biggest Shakespeare Festival for which I’m profoundly grateful, because it means that Shakespeare, for me, has never been dead words upon the page but always performance—good, bad or indifferent, but always live. And yet, there’s something profoundly odd about the Festival’s presence here, and about the way town and gown (or better, town and doublet?) co-exist.

Consider this: Stratford is also home to the Ontario Pork Congress, which meets here in October. Back in the old days, when I lived in town, the OPC was held at the fairgrounds, simultaneously with a good old-fashioned traveling fair with a ferris wheel and the terrifying Zipper and barkers selling coke bottles that had been heated and stretched to outrageous lengths and filled with coloured liquid. Nowadays there’s a spiffy new agriplex on the edge of town, with a convention hall and two ice-skating rinks (it is Canada, after all, and we take our hockey far more seriously than our Shakespeare). I’m not sure whether they still have a beauty pageant and elect an Ontario Pork Princess during the Congress, but I really hope they do.

In case you’re wondering, Ontario pork is spectacularly good. I’ve never eaten anything comparable in France, the U.S. or Australia. In fact, I’m doing a pork-roast with prunes for dinner tomorrow night.

So what is a Shakespeare Festival doing in the middle of pig country anyway? Such incongruities don’t happen naturally; in fact, I have a theory that when you find a situation as peculiar as this, you’ll almost always find one man’s obsession behind it, and that turns out to be the case here. The town was named Stratford in the mid-nineteenth century; homesick Brits even named the river that runs through it the Avon (although we pronounce that initial a long, “Aaah-von” , not with the short a as they do in England). But that was it for the Shakespearean connection until the 1940s. Stratford was having trouble recovering from the depression in more ways than one: it had been a railway hub, and railways were losing ground to highways. It had also had a brief flirtation with Russian-style Socialism; there were strikes by girls who worked in the egg-candling factory and young men who made furniture, and the town was called Red Town for a while which left it with a bit of a local reputation. What could be more obvious than theatre as a solution to such problems?

Somehow, it was obvious to a man named Tom Patterson, a little round man who was a local journalist with a passion for Shakespeare. I have never understood how, but he managed to convince Kenneth Tynan to come to this little agricultural town in the middle of nowhere, also known as Southern Ontario, to direct a production of Richard III starring Alec Guiness. In a tent.

More than fifty years later, there are four stages of varying sizes and varying shapes, and it’s no longer just Shakespeare. Brian Dennehey did Krapp’s Last Tape last year, and the year before that there was a production of Walcott’s Omeros. The Bard remains the big draw however, and big names come to act here (Maggie Smith, Christopher Plummer, even Peter Ustinov, years ago, in a production of Lear that stands out in my memory for all the wrong reasons). The outskirts of town are like those of any town of the same size; there’s a MacDonalds and a K-Mart and some light industry (Samsonite, FAG… they make ball bearings—really!) and comfortable but bland subdivisions. The city centre, in contrast, has spiffed up all its Victorian buildings and boasts an unreasonable number of fancy restaurants, bookstores and cafés, the lake is beautifully landscaped, there’s a public garden planted with herbs mentioned in the plays: “Here’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance…”

And (did I mention this?) there is always a faint smell of pig on the air, not just because pig farms are all around, but because the long-haul transporters will insist on driving their eighteen wheelers full of swine right through town rather than taking the long way round, as all the signs beg them to do. If you think about it, though, old Will himself was a country boy, and from pig country, in fact. So I doubt he’d mind too much.

Chaucer tells us that the Clerk had “at his beddes heed/ Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed/ Of Aristotle and his philosophie” but not whether any of these volumes accompanied him on his pilgrimage to Canterbury.  Personally, I bet he slipped a volume into his travelling bag, next to his breviary.  As for me, I travel with an unreasonable number of books, because I need  pleasure reading, the primary text my research is most engaged with at the moment, and, for the Far Horizons gig, books that might answer any question that I might be asked about anything from Byzantine iconography to the eminently silly novels of Dan Brown.  So, for people who like those lists on Facebook, here are the texts I’ll be travelling with this summer:

• Ada, by Vladimir Nabokov, which I began to reread this semester and look forward to spending more time with.
• Le Roman de Troie by Benoit de Ste Maure, because it’s the subject of my next research project and therefore accompanies me everywhere, more as a talisman than because I’ll actually have time to read it or think about it.
• Stephen Runciman,  A History of the Crusades.
• Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red and Other Colors.

Loaded onto my laptop, I have several reports made to the Royal Geographical Society in the 1920s, or earlier.  These splendid documents have titles like The Island of Roses and her Eleven Sisters, or, The Dodecanese by Michael D. Volonakis.  The Royal Geographical Society began in the nineteenth century as a supper club and sponsored expeditions like those of Stanley and Livingstone and Scott of the Antarctic.  The prose tends to be wonderfully fragrant: “Thus the sunny Rhodes rose into sight and stood forth over the blue Aegean Sea by the dawn, in the early morning light, and thus also we have in brief the secret of the origin of the island by a submarine upheaval due to a local earthquake…” Setting the style aside, however, the gentlemen who produced these reports always seem to have walked every square inch of every island described.

And I can’t help but imagine that they were impeccably dressed as they did so.

In just a few days, I’ll be leaving for my summer travels, which will take me and my family (although not always all at the same time!) to Canada, France, Turkey, the Greek Islands and Germany.  Believe it or not, this is actually work, although work of a sort no one in their right mind should complain about.  For the two weeks in Turkey and Greece, I’ll be one of the “talking heads” on a tour run by Far Horizons Archaeological and Cultural Trips, an outfit I’ve worked with before.  We’ll sail around the Mediterranean on a traditional Turkish gület; instead of bright and inquiring Haverford students, I’ll be lecturing to bright and inquiring accomplished adults.  Judging from past experience, many of them will be retired, and catching up on the liberal arts they’ve been missing since college.  On past expeditions I’ve travelled with an architect, several medical doctors, a futurist and a retired professional gambler (think “21″ without the iron knuckles).

Turkey, "turquoise" coast.

But it occurred to me that Fords might enjoy a trip with a medievalist too, and that the wonder of the blog would let me take them not only to Greece and Turkey but to all the other places, some familiar, some not, some just downright odd, that I’ll be visiting this summer.

So, next week… my hometown.  And Shakespeare.