The Janissary Tree

[ 84 ]

Yes, Karagozi.” The man continued to smile gently.

So this is it, Yashim thought. At the same time he looked about him with sudden curiosity. Was it here, then, that the Janissaries had indulged in their bacchanalian rites? Bibbing, and women, and mystic poetry! Or something more prosaic, like a chamber of commerce, where business deals were fixed up and the soldiers who had become traders and artisans talked about the state of the market, and what they could squeeze from it.

There was nothing superficially sacred about the place. As it stood, it could easily have been the warehouse that Yashim had originally mistaken it for, a plain, whitewashed chamber lit by high windows, with an oak table running down the middle and benches on either side. A banqueting hall, say. The walls were freshly whitened, but they seemed to have been painted once, to judge by the cloudy images he could still make out behind the lime.

“The walls were decorated?”

The tekkemaster inclined his head.

“Very beautifully done.”

“But—what, sacrilegious?”

“To our minds, yes. The Karagozi were not afraid to make representations of what God has created. Perhaps they were able to do this with a pure heart. Yet those who believe as I do would have found them a distraction. I cannot say that this is why we had them painted over, though. It was more driven by a concern to return to the old purity of the tekke.”

“I see. So wall painting was introduced into Karagozi tekkes more recently? It wasn’t the original idea?”

The tekkemaster looked thoughtful.

“I do not know. For us, the Karagozi occupation was an interlude we preferred not to commemorate.”

Yashim looked up at the coffered ceiling.

“Interlude? I don’t quite understand.”

“Forgive me,” the tekkemaster said humbly. “I have not made myself clear, so perhaps you are unaware that this was a Nasrani tekke until the time of the Patrona Rebellion. The Karagozi grew very strong at that period, and they needed more space: so we gave it over to them. Recent events,” he added, with the usual cir—cumspection, “allowed us to reacquire the building, and the pictures were covered, as you see.”

Yashim turned to him with a defeated look. The Patrona Rebellion had been in 1730.

“You mean, this tekke was built by your order? It wasn’t originally a Karagozi foundation at all?”

The man smiled and shook his head.

“No. And so you see, we move in circles. What is open will be closed.”

Five minutes later, Yashim was back in the street.

Palewski’s map, drawn up by the Scotsman Ingiliz Mustafa, identified the old tekke correctly—for the time it was drawn up. The Karagozi hadn’t built it, though: it wasn’t one of the original four tekkes.

But the principle had to be right.

Yashim thought again of the little square under the old Byzantine walls of the city.

He pictured it in his mind’s eye. The mosque. The row of shops. An old cypress against the weathered stonework of the walls.

The tekke was there. It had to be there.