CHAPTER 1

What the New Imam Did

The new imam was one of those hardliners stereotyped by the religious colleges in Konya, and it was not long after the departure of the Christians that he was righteously inspired to fire up a few followers to perform the following sacred duties:

Firstly, they broke down the locked doors of the abandoned houses. They did this because they felt it unnecessary to find the neighbours with the keys, and because God rewards the superfluously zealous. Inside the houses they located the stores of wine jars, carried them out into the streets, and emptied them into the alleyways. Then they smashed the jars because of their having been contaminated by wine, and then they went to the vineyards and tore out and burned the vines, even those whose grapes were cultivated solely for the manufacture of raisins.

Secondly, they entered the Church of St. Nicholas, the little church at the bottom of the town with the owl on the cross-beam, and the little white chapel at the top of the hill behind the town and above the ancient tombs. In these churches they assiduously scraped out the eyes of all the figures depicted in fresco, and broke any religious ornaments that were left.

Thirdly, they took the few Christian bones that remained in the ossuary behind the little church with the owl, and threw them over the cliff.

Fourthly, they defaced all figurative work on the tombs left by the Lycians from ancient times.

Fifthly, with very long poles, they rounded up a small group of pigs that had perforce been abandoned by their old owner. These pigs they drove to the top of the cliff above the little chapel, and, in front of Ibrahim, who was up there with his goats and was still in a state of horror over what had befallen Philothei, they herded them squealing and shrieking over the same cliff where they had disposed of the bones of the Christians.

Out of all these actions the only one that met with the overt approval of the general population was this last, as the taboo against pig flesh is inexplicably the deepest ingrained in the average Muslim. There were many, however, who would never forget that mouth-watering aroma of roasting pork that used to drift across the town, arousing simultaneous feelings of longing and revulsion. The other sacred acts, most especially the disposal of the wine, were greeted with various degrees of disquiet or horror, but the people were cowed by the mad light of moral certainty in the eyes of those who acted on God’s commands as laid down in holy books that no one was able to read. For that town these events began the interminably tedious years of respectability, observance and decorum that made everyone think that they had lived twice as long as they really had, so that even the Cretan exiles forgot how to sing their sustas and dance the pentozali. Only the substantial number of Alevis, feeling like a minority for the first time in their history, now that they were the only minority left, stubbornly continued in their old habits and escaped the deadening longueurs of a dis-enjoyed life.

In Greece the abandoned mosques were almost all demolished, and the graveyards of Muslims desecrated. No doubt these deeds were performed with a choleric and righteous zeal essentially identical to that of the holy vandals of Eskibahçe.