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Troubador Publishing Ltd - Robin Ratchford

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136 pages

English

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Robin Ratchford reflects on a series of unforgettable experiences across the Middle East. This innovative account of his colourful and atmospheric journeys shows us why this region has always caught the imagination of those who visit. From the historic bazaar of Aleppo in Syria, to the street markets of Baghdad, join Robin in a captivating account of his travels across the Middle East with its ancient cities and glittering metropolises. During his travels he gets lost in the Yemeni capital's maze of ancient winding streets and 'goes round the bend' in Oman, meeting a kaleidoscope of clerics, artists and artisans along the way. From Souk to Soukbreaks the rules of the traditional travelogue. Robin takes the many challenges this volatile part of the world faces and gives them a more human perspective, providing a new way to view these countries steeped in history. Travelling through a region rich in contrasts, discover how history and humanity link its cities and people to a past which is not only theirs, but ours too. With a combination of atmospheric descriptions and a critique both of Middle Eastern societies and Western perceptions of them, this book offers a personal insight into the Middle East in a way which is accessible to all, particularly those interested in travelling and the region itself.

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Travel writing

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	28 mai 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783067282
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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Extrait

About the Author
Robin Ratchford was born in the UK. He thinks it was collecting colourful stamps as a child that first sparked his interest in foreign lands and cultures. He has lived in six different countries and visited more than a hundred others and their territories. Robin has a background in international affairs, and travel, adventure and discovery are central themes in his life. He is currently based in Belgium, where he lives with his dog Mortimer.
FROM SOUK TO SOUK

Copyright © 2014 Robin Ratchford
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 978 1783067 282
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Ann, Eva and José for their help and support.
With thanks to James at Untamed Borders for having made the trip to Afghanistan possible.
“Possessed with the thought of travelling about the world of men and seeing their cities and islands.”
– Sinbad the Sailor, Scheherazade
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Journey to the Centre of the World
Saul
What Lies beneath
A Dry Tide Coming
The Whore and the Potter
White on Blue
Dreams of Rain
Marguerites of Hope
A Strange Immortality
Sunsets
In the City of Sinbad – Fortune and Fate
Babylon Revisited
In God’s City
Afterword
Preface
The Middle East fascinates me, not only because of its central role in the evolution of civilisation, but because of its pivotal position in contemporary geopolitics. Both aspects affect our everyday lives. In this part of the world, the links between the past and the present appear immutable, their hold on the future unbreakable.
From Souk to Souk is based on my experiences and impressions of places I have visited in and around the region. Only Kabul, according to geographers, lies outside it. Often, though, cartographers’ borders are somewhat artificial and when I visited Afghanistan it was clear that the cultural influences of the Middle East extend here too. Alexander the Great, whose exploits brought him to various cities featured in this book, founded several towns in what is today Afghanistan. And, given that the country also shares a religious heritage with the Middle East, I could not resist featuring the Afghan capital.
The vast majority of the people I met during my visits were friendly, kind and showed an intense interest in the world beyond the borders of their own country. For many of them, overseas travel is not an option and, when it does occur, sadly it is sometimes as a refugee, fleeing the sectarian unrest and internecine struggles that continue to plague parts of the region. Indeed, some of the cities I visited have, in the meantime, become caught up in the Arab spring, leaving me wondering what has happened to the people I met there. I have deliberately chosen not to write from the perspective of hindsight, choosing instead to describe the people and places as they were when I encountered them. And, it has to be said, most of the people I met were men: in many of the countries, for cultural reasons, social interaction with local women is simply not possible.
Turmoil is not new to the area. In the course of the centuries, the lands of the Middle East have been united under, and divided by, seemingly countless empires and kingdoms; they have been brought together through trade and wrought asunder by warfare. From this perspective, today’s frontiers seem to be merely the latest configuration of borders that shift like desert sands. In writing about what are sometimes quite disparate places, I realised that the souks are a common, if variable, element linking these various human settlements not only geographically, but also through time. Some of those that feature in the book have occupied the same sites for centuries, others have evolved to such a degree that they are now souks in little more than name.
From Souk to Souk is not a chronological travelogue. It does not claim to be journalistic reporting, but nor is it pure fiction. Rather, it weaves observations with perceptions and memories with imagination. After all, who, when visiting such a beguiling and exotic collection of lands, could be expected to return with a clear head and untouched by their enchantment?
Robin Ratchford
Journey to the Centre of the World
‘Hello, my friend! Where are you from?’
The voice jolted me from my thoughts. I looked up to see a man in his early twenties with an earnest and friendly aspect, on whose thin lips hung a nervous smile. His blue jeans and polo top with its little animal motif on the breast appeared smart enough, but his footwear betrayed his modest background.
‘I’m British,’ I said, after some hesitation, ‘but I live in Belgium.’ I was slightly alarmed, but let my face freeze into an expression that I hoped would not show it.
‘London?’
‘No, Brussels.’
‘Ah, Bruxelles !’ he beamed after a momentary blank expression, apparently delighted at having found a hook for continuing the conversation. ‘I have a cousin there. Vous-parlez français ?’ His accent was strong, his effort determined, his regard interesting.

Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul: three names for a city that conjures up notions of the exotic as few others do. Fabulous mosques and minarets, sultans in magnificent costumes and outrageous turbans, beautiful and ambitious women behind the closed doors of mystical harems, regimes at once incomprehensible and cruel: these are just some of the archetypal images that through the ages have been associated with the city on the Bosphorus. But the erstwhile capital of so many great empires represents more than anything a grand cultural bazaar where the small continent of Europe ends and the vast and populous landmass that is Asia begins.
It would be in this city that I would spend the last days of the twentieth century: not the simple, chronological hundred years, the passing of which was indicated by a date ending in two zeros and fêted by parties and fireworks, but the century whose end would be marked by an event that represented the opening of a door into a new, different era. In the same way that historians sometimes view the eighteenth century as a concept ending not in 1799 but in 1815 and the nineteenth in 1914 rather than 1899, I doubt future chroniclers will conclude that the twenty-first century began in 2000.
Istanbul was also where I began my travels to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. It was not my first visit to a Muslim land: I had already been to Morocco, but although it is an Islamic country, both its capital Rabat and the iconic city of Casablanca lie further west than either Barcelona or Madrid and face the chilly, tempestuous Atlantic rather than the sparkling and constant Mare Nostrum . It is not merely a question of longitude or tides, of course: Asia Minor and the Middle East are among the cradles of civilisation with many cities in the Fertile Crescent having been inhabited for thousands of years. The trip to Istanbul was my first foray into this beguiling world steeped in history. Like so many before me, and perhaps like you, too, I was tempted by the lure of the Orient and its promise of the exotic, of the unknown, and of seeing with my own eyes that which I knew only from countless tales and fables, history books and films. I was hungry to see what really lay behind the gossamer drapes of Turkishness that hung like so many cultural veils between the Levant and those as yet innocent of its ways. And I was thirsty to drink of its pleasures, to taste the wine of the country on my lips and in my mouth, to recline on its divans and let the aromatic smoke of a thousand nagilehs transport me to another world. To the uninitiated, the turbans and harems have been replaced by blood-red fezzes, the dark prisons of Midnight Express and perhaps a vague recollection of the mood captured in a happier film, the wonderfully atmospheric Topkapi . The reality is, of course, different, but traces of these elements still exist in some form or other: that is what makes the city so exciting.

‘Really? You have a cousin in Brussels?’ I asked, not overly surprised. ‘Yes, there are lots of Turks there. Mais vous parlez français ?’ My eagerness to escape from whatever the young man in front of me wanted to sell or beg for was blunted by my curiosity as to his language skills.
‘No, that’s all I can say,’ he laughed, displaying a mouthful of white but rather uneven teeth as he sat down on the bench next to me. ‘You are a tourist?’
‘I’m just visiting,’ I smiled, unconsciously inching away from him.
‘What would you like to see? You have been to Topkapi?’
‘No, not yet,’ I said, clearing my throat.

As I contemplated the delights of Istanbul from the comfort of my plane seat, it was difficult to determine whether the frisson my imaginings provoked were of excitement, of fear, or a dangerous melange of both. Yet I sensed that, somewhere in my subconscious, there simmered a worry that the experience might not live up to expectations. If I had looked a little deeper, though, I might have realised that the apprehension I felt was about something else altogether.
As the a