This is a longer version of an article originally
published by BBC Arts in January 2017. The original piece is here.
Fittingly, I meet Bettany Hughes at a crossing point of the
past, present and future. We are in the Grade II listed English elegance of
Somerset House where her new film, radio and TV company SandStone Global is shortly
going to be based, beginning a new phase in her career, from writer and
broadcaster to producer and power-player.
Hughes’ book is dedicated to “those who can no longer walk
the streets of Istanbul.” It pays tribute to the citizens who have occupied the
land since the 5th century AD and were, as Hughes tells me, “forced
off the streets by an early death.” The comment is all the more poignant given
that the city’s conflicts are no less disturbing today; Hughes is telling a
story which is far from over. In 2013 there were protests in Gezi Park against
repressive President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s infringement of freedom of the
press, expression and assembly and the increasing religious conservatism of everyday
life, while in July 2016 a military coup against him was brutally quashed. Challenge
hasn’t only come from within: a terrorist attack at Ataturk airport last year
and another during the 2017 New Year’s celebrations at a city nightclub (the latter
claimed by Isil) have left dozens dead and hundreds injured.
“The history kept on happening,” she says. “During the week
of the attempted coup I was due to fly [to Istanbul] for my final stay. I went
to my favourite baker, where you can buy a loaf of bread, pay for two, they
make a cross on the blackboard outside and it means you’ve paid for a loaf for
someone in need. He showed me the bullet holes all around his oven.”
With a historian’s long view, she reminds me that recent popular
demonstrations against the government echo the Nika riots of 532AD, where jostling
between rival charioteering teams escalated into protests over taxation and
legal reforms.
Istanbul dissolves sharp distinctions between eras of
the city’s past and also between the conflicting parties who sought dominance
there: there is no stark latitudinal battle between broad-brush
Christian Western and Muslim Eastern forces, which Hughes refers to
sardonically as “the Ottoman peril that threatened Christian civilisation” in the
minds of Victorians in “the parlours of the west.” Instead there are cameos
from Vikings and Britons and an account of long in-fighting between Sunni and
Shia Muslim forces across swathes of territory from North Africa to Azerbaijan –
again, an ongoing story.
Istanbul was at the heart of a web of trade routes where
horses, crystal, jade and silk came from the East; amber, honey and wax came from
the North East; cotton and porphyry came from the South; oil, wine and fruit came
from the South West; and linen and livestock came from the North. Meanwhile
there were attacks and blockades from all points including Egypt, Russia and
Britain and immigration from everywhere including Albania, Georgia and Ethiopia.
“There’s a tenacious characteristic of the city, beginning
in the 5th century AD,” says Hughes. “It’s always been a city of
sanctuary. It’s very unusual in welcoming in and providing hospitality to
refugees of any nationality.” She first visited Istanbul when she was eighteen
and remarks, “In my study of the world I’ve never before come across any other
city where you have the notion that you have a duty to accept refugees. In the
Ottoman era you have dragomans coming in speaking nine or ten languages. It’s
very hard to be xenophobic when you can speak someone else’s language.”
Instead of a sequential history, Istanbul offers the visitor
a simultaneous history in which ancient pagan shrines are appropriated into
churches and then into sanctuaries and temples. Coins from 1st
century BC show Hecate, protector of a pre-Roman “citylette” called Byzantion,
whose symbol was the moon and star – “a design echoed in the Turkish flag
today,” Hughes notes. The ancient scriptoria of the city itself preserved Greek
plays, Roman philosophy, Christian texts and Muslim poetry.
At once thunderingly brisk and joyfully rich, the book is
unerring in its straight shot from the past to the future and yet generous in
its contingencies, exceptions and felicities. Hughes has looked into everything
from the city’s priestesses to the poetry written about it by foreign visitors,
picking out the lives of spectacular personalities like the Athenian general
Alcibiades, “acting like quicksilver, twisting and turning.” “A city is the
people who live in it, she tells me. “Architecture is a kind of
macro-historical guide. But it’s the lived, breathed, hoped, feared lives of
the people in it that stick with me.”
I ask why she’s telling the story of a city which has
already been depicted and examined so many times. She concedes that a historian
can only say something original if their work is based on “new evidence and
fresh archive discoveries, manuscripts, the physical accumulation of
documentary evidence.” She points to exciting material, much of it coming from
former communist countries in eastern Europe – “literally, sealed boxes with a
sign saying ‘old Turkish documents’” – which are now slowly being translated,
along with fresh archaeological finds:
“there’s going to be a lot of stuff coming out of the ground.”
Istanbul joins Hughes’ two previous books The
Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life and Helen
of Troy: Goddess, Princess Whore. In the course of her research, she has
had to adopt a panoply of different roles: linguist, archaeologist,
sociologist, art historian, military analyst, travel adventurer, natural
geographer and academic. The unique result, in all three cases, is history
which is astonishingly alive, told with the rigour of a scholar and the vigour
of a storyteller.
Hughes is also a prolific and magnetically erudite presenter
on TV and radio. For the BBC alone she has examined the geniuses of the modern
world (Marx, Nietzsche and Freud), those of the ancient world (Buddha, Socrates
and Confucius); studied the hidden history of women in religion in Divine
Women; explored the mythologies of Alexandria, Atlantis and Athens; and chronicled
the Aryans, the Ancient Egyptians, the Minoans, the Spartans and the Moors. Her
radio work has covered everything from playwright Shakespeare to poet Sappho.
Yet she goes red and says “I absolutely don’t feel prolific”
when I tell her I admire her work. She is motivated not by relics from a dig
but by “empathy and excitement with the characters, sharing the delight I feel
in discovering new evidence: ‘Aha! I get it. That explains why that person did
that thing and that moment.’”
Now she is launching her own production company. SandStone
Global will produce international documentaries, working with fully diverse
teams in front of and behind the camera. They are already well into filming the
story of Aphrodite, “the goddess of love and war – not a soppy Venus,” working
with Cypriot partners and “telling the story from the point of its origin
rather than helicoptering in.”
Yet in following a story from its origins, one can’t help
but notice the perennial quality of war and conflict. Istanbul takes us
past the Crusades, the Crimean War, the two world wars and the fall of the
Ottoman empire to eight months ago. And the headlines keep coming. Hughes
admits, “I was expecting the pages [of my Istanbul book] to be full of people
sitting listening to bees buzzing, having a sherbet at the hammam. The sad
truth of history is that rage is so close to the surface. It’s a city where as
well as the beauty, you feel anger crackling beneath the surface. The only
thing that keeps it together is people’s desire to do so, and to find something
to celebrate and respect.”
Nonetheless, Hughes asserts, “Whatever monoculture anyone
tries to impose on it, the people will shrug it off. There have been so many
rulers who tried to create the city in their own image. The city always fights
back.”
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