British Embassy,       July 9. 

Therapia

My dear Excellency, Your letter posted at the Cape awaited me here and you will by this time have realised that I also got the letter from Capri – no, by the way, I don’t believe I answered it, so this must serve as answer to both. It is most annoying that you should have gone off to a remote quarter of the globe just as I am returning from another remote quarter and I hope that you will bring your colleagues to agreement (though you sound an ill matched team) and draw up your report in the middle expeditious manner possible. I expect to be back in London by the beginning of next week. I have rather dawled on here; the fact is that the situation in C’ple is so deeply interesting and what with the kindness of the Lowthers and some personal knowledge of the place and the inhabitants I have had exceptional opportunities of hearing what is going on. It was not only the counts[?] of today about which I wanted to know, but the whole cause of the drama of last April, the effects of which I have been watching in the provinces. Well, the true history of the counter revolution can’t be written yet, if indeed it will ever be known, but it is already possible to eliminate certain opinions – so clear the ground a little. For instance I am inclined to exonerate Abdul Hamid; it does not seem as if he had any share in it. But I can’t tell you how the new C’ple takes ones breath away – I was there for a few days before I came here. It is not only that all ones friends in exile, people whom for the last 9 years I have seen eating their hearts out in distance vilayets, flock to tell me how great is their joy at their release, but the sense of personal liberty is so universal, so astounding. One realises at every moment what that heavy tyranny was like – why [illegible] I used always to be followed by spies when I came up here from the provinces; I’ve seen them standing in the street, waiting till I came out. I went to the Chamber with a  member of the Committee and heard a debate on the enrolment of Christians in the army – a very thorny subject. The Chamber really is a kind of index of the Turkish Empire. You have the polished Greek or Turk of C’ple, Salonica side by side with the white Turbanned Mollah, the Arab wearing the headdress of the desert and the half-negro deputy from the Yemen wrapped in [illegible] coloured silks. Anyone would be taken in by it – only if you happen to have just spent 5 months in the Turkish empire you know only too well that these worthies are representation only in name, there being as yet nothing to represent. There is no political idea in the provinces – how can you expect that there should be? Only morning I went with the Times correspondence to Yildiz Kiosk – the [illegible] open to the public. I may tell you in confidence that it’s not a patch upon Rounton! The park stretches down to the enchanting Bosphorous shores, but it is so planted that you [illegible] see anything but rather dingy slopes set with rather mean little trees, which are just big enough to conceal from you the whole exquisite universe. There are desolate ponds, green and oily, and at every corner menageries, some of them [illegible], some still inhabited by small [illegible] animals of the genus badger (I can’t describe them more nearly[?]) and dishevelled birds. Finally in the harem garden is found a restaurant and we sat and lunched by the dirty waters on which the Sultan’s ladies used to take the air in boats rowed by black slaves. Fat Greeks with their families were occupying those same boats; for a piastre a head you could go all over the harem ponds. The palaces are still closed – I believe there is a certain amount of good china and other things that are to be transferred to the museum – but the kiosks are all open. They are furnished with impossible objects and [illegible] hang most remarkable pictures. [illegible] I saw a cromo [sic] lithograph advertisement of a German factory solemnly framed and suspended; in another there was an allegorical piece representing Turkish and [illegible] soldier embracing on top of a pedestal, the [illegible] of which was heaped with wreaths of manifestly artificial flowers. Through the gates of the palace stream files of buffalo carts heaped up with fruits and [illegible] armchairs, wire jardinières and [illegible] wardrobes, journeying dismally to the second hand furniture dealers. Yes, yes; it was too curious. 

The grand vizir came to lunch the first day I was here and the Khadin[?] yesterday – I feel quite unused to so many highnesses after keeping company exclusively with camel drivers and sergeants of police for 5 months. And yesterday too Lady Lowther and I went to tea with Ahmed Riza, the President of the Chamber, one of my acquaintances in exile. That family has a story for you: the father exiled and poisoned to make things doubly sure, the son an exile for 19 years, the sons in law banished for marrying into the tribe, the very grandchildren, boys of 10, 12, turned out of the Lycee and excluded from all possibilities of education. “Toute la famille a ete ruines” said me of the unmarried daughters “moralement et materliclement” and then one accuses them of showing bitterness, of distrusting too universally men who are tarred with the brush of the old regime! I’m speaking like a woman now, not like a politician; but however well one knows that under the new men preserve a strictly moderate attitude they will [illegible] the empire, there are moments when we must go into [illegible] and look at the human side of the question – the suffering, the terror, the [illegible] and the triumph. They leave their mark. Goodbye, my dear Excellency – I wish you were in England.

Yours ever affectionately, Gertrude Bell