|
Here's
an excerpt from my humorous travel
memoir, Turkey:
Bright Sun, Strong Tea:(the
previous episode is Diplomatic
Démarche)
I love that part of Indiana
Jones and the Last Crusade where
Indie appears in the "Republic
of Hatay" between World Wars
I and II. Approximately one one-thousandth
of one percent of the people who
see that movie might have any clue
at all as to the whereabouts of
the "Republic of Hatay," or
its capital city of Alexandretta.
Therein lies its charm.
Hatay is the modern name for the historic Sanjak
of Alexandretta, at the eastern
end of Turkey's Mediterranean
coast.
The city of Alexandretta was founded
by Alexander the Great around
330 BC.
Just under a thousand years later
the Arabs conquered it and translated
its name to Iskenderun (Iskender means
Alexander in Arabic).
Almost 1400 years after the Arab conquest
people in Europe and America were still
calling the city by its old name and
marking the old name on maps. So for
almost a millennium and a half we've
refused to recognize the name change.
Talk about crusader mentality!
We did the same thing with Constantinople,
which became Istanbul in
1453. Although Atatürk insisted
that everybody call Angora Ankara and
Constantinople Istanbul and
Smyrna Izmir and
Antioch Antakya,
the Greeks still use the old names
to this day and entertain fantasies
of getting them back.
Hatay was not precisely a republic
between the world wars. It was a sanjak.
A sanjak was an Ottoman territorial
unit similar to a county in size. The
Sanjak of Alexandretta—or Republic
of Hatay—included the cities of Iskenderun (Alexandretta)
and Antakya (Antioch).
After the Ottoman defeat in World
War I, the sultan's lands in the Middle
East were claimed by the victorious
powers and governed by "mandate:" the
British got Egypt and Palestine, and
the French got Syria and Lebanon. Curiously,
the Sanjak of Alexandretta was designated
an autonomous district attached
to Syria rather than part of Mandate
Syria itself.
Atatürk recognized Hatay's strategic
importance: a foreign army based there
could threaten the Cilician Gates,
the mountain pass north of Adana which
leads directly to the Anatolian
heartland,
and which has been the entry point
for conquering armies for millennia.
He decided that Turkey had to have
Hatay to remain secure.
The French seemed about to make it
part of Syria, so in 1937 Atatürk
put pressure on the French to establish
the "Independent State of Hatay" in
place of the "Sanjak of Alexandretta." A
plebiscite was organized soon thereafter,
the vote went in favor of Turkey, and
the quasi-autonomous "state" became
the Turkish province of Hatay in 1939—just
in time to help Turkey preserve its
neutrality during World War II.
So Hatay is no longer independent
but, historically speaking, for a single
New York minute it sort of was,
and the Hollywood people seized upon
this fact for a clever bit of historico-political
engineering.
Most of the time, movie people don't
want to tick off potential viewers
so they try hard not to alienate anyone
except perhaps those with no money
for movie tickets. They particularly
dislike ticking off whole countries because
some of the citizens are going to have
the price of a ticket so they need
to be clever about where the action
is located, especially if the plot
is Standard Hollywood Plot
No. 1, ie,
there are lots of baddies trying to
do nasty to the hero.
Nazis are the convenient bad
guys because most people hate them
and the real ones are long dead and
therefore incapable of filing nettlesome
lawsuits, but what to do about the
location? What if you want some of
the movie action to take place in a
picturesque desert? There are no deserts
in Germany, picturesque or otherwise,
or in Austria for that matter, so you've
got to look elsewhere.
North Africa is the obvious place
to locate your movie Nazis because
during World War II there were in fact
Nazis there; but the countryside is
mostly boring desert, not picturesque
desert. You can't put them in other
countries of the region because there
were no German troops there during
World War II. Spies yes, troops
no.
You can shoot lots of desert scenes
for your movie in these places, and
in fact some of the most beautiful
and exciting scenes in "Last Crusade" were
shot at Petra in Jordan; but
you can't locate your movie
there.
So what do you do? Make up an imaginary
country to locate your movie in? Well,
you could, but that sacrifices a significant
amount of verisimilitude, and in an
Indiana Jones-type movie most
of the verisimilitude has already been
sacrificed so you want to hold onto whatever's
left.
Ironically, with so little left, every
tiny bit of actual truth takes on huge
importance. People come out of Indiana
Jones movies saying "You know
that part about the Rolls Royce Phantom
II, 4.3 litre, 30 horsepower, six cylinder
engine, with Stromberg downdraft carburetor?
It really can go from zero to 100 kilometers
an hour in 12.5 seconds," etc. If
there were only one actual atom of
truth in such a movie, that atom would
be talked to death.
In short, there've got to be at least
some fragments of truth in an Action/Crowd-Pleaser
movie, just as in advertising and government,
or the whole ridiculous suspension-of-disbelief
structure crumbles and you're left
with no paying customers.
That's why, as a movie-making person,
you love Hatay.
It is at least believable, if not
completely accurate, that there was
a pasha in charge
of Hatay, and that the Nazis bribed
him with a Rolls Royce
so they could go get the Holy Grail,
etc. Even if it's not strictly true,
it's so obscure that, as noted above,
only one one-thousandth of one percent
of your paying customers will notice,
and even fewer—perhaps only
two, namely Steven Spielberg and Yours
Truly—will
give a damn.
Speaking of accuracy, movie people
like to be able to say that such and
such a movie is "based on a
true story." This always kills
me. "Based on a true story," in
Hollywood parlance, means "we've
changed this sucker around so much
that it's a bigger myth than Enron's
ethics, but now it fulfills our ego,
box office and political-correctness
requirements, and it's important to
our amour propre to appear ethical,
so sit back, relax, and, against
your better instincts, believe that this
is true." If you need convincing
on this point, I refer you to "Midnight
Express," which was "based
on a true story" in which a two-bit
convicted drug smuggler is miraculously
transmuted into a suffering hero while
the Turkish authorities who are trying
to protect American youth from the
scourge of illegal drugs become the
heavies, and Hollywood cashes in at
the Turks' expense.
But more of that later....
Click
here to order an autographed
copy of the book online with
credit card or PayPal.
(Excerpts
from Turkey: Bright Sun, Strong
Tea copyright © 2004 by
Tom Brosnahan. All rights reserved.)
(Next: The
Bile Green Color Wasn't Even the
Worst of It)
More Excerpts
from Bright Sun, Strong Tea
Bright
Sun, Strong Tea Photo
Gallery
Turkey
Travel Planner Homepage
|
