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by the sultan—he was also named Chief Confectioner to Topkapı Palace. This honorary title remained within the family as Hacı Bekir’s son and grandson (Ali Muhiddin) took over the business. Today the company is a fifth-generation family business, and is known to be the oldest company in Turkey operating out of its original premises (the original store, near the Spice Market, has been open for 237 years). Some of the boxes of lokum feature a painting on the lid—this is actually reproduced from a watercolor painting that now hangs in the Louvre, which depicts Hacı Bekir working in his shop. It’s by a Maltese artist, Count Amadeo Preziosi (1816-1882), a renowned Orientalist painter, and there is a lithographic print of the image in Topkapı. Hacı Bekir doesn’t fill mail orders, but Krinos Foods distributes the lokum in the U.S., so all is not lost if you return home and discover you must have more.

M

Manzikert

Manzikert (or Malazgirt), north of Lake Van in eastern Anatolia, was the scene of “a tipping point in world history—and a disaster for Constantinople” according to Roger Crowley in 1453. “Without Manzikert,” says John Ash in A Byzantine Journey, “Anatolia might now be, for better or worse, part of a Greek state. The Ottoman Empire would never have come into being, and there would be no Muslims in Bosnia for Serbs and Croats to slaughter.” The stage for the Battle of Manzikert, in 1071, was set years before when Turkish tribes continued to move westward until the Islamic world, from Central Asia to Egypt, was ruled by Turks. In Egypt the Turks were Shiite, while the Turkish Seljuks were Sunni. The Seljuks in Baghdad were troubled by unruly nomadic tribesmen, the Turkmen, who had a nasty reputation for plunder. The Seljuks convinced the Turkmen to set their sights on Byzantium, instead of on Islamic towns and villages within its realm. The Turkmen began raiding Christian Anatolia so frequently that there was no other choice for Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes but to personally travel east to repair the situation. When he arrived in Manzikert, he met a Seljuk army under the command of Sultan Alp Arslan, “the heroic lion.” What happened next is “a curious affair”: Arslan didn’t want to fight—his objective was to destroy the Shiites in Egypt—so he proposed a truce. Romanus refused, and the ensuing battle was a shattering Muslim victory. Romanus then reportedly knelt down and kissed the ground in front of Arslan, who put his foot on his bent neck in a symbolic show of triumph and submission.

For the Byzantines, Manzikert was the “Terrible Day,” and again according to Crowley, “a defeat of seismic proportions that was to haunt their future. The effects were catastrophic, though not immediately understood in Constantinople itself.” The Turkmen poured into Anatolia, and after the deserts of Iran and Iraq, the Anatolian landscape was rather like paradise. Within twenty years they reached the Mediterranean coasts, and met with little resistance from the Christian population. Before long, the Christians were invited to assist in the civil wars that were regularly occurring and were weakening Byzantium. “The conquest of Asia Minor happened so easily and with so little resistance that by the time another Byzantine army was defeated in 1176, the possibility of driving back the incomers had gone forever,” notes Crowley.

The battle is still commemorated every year at the site of the battlefield as one of the turning points in Turkish history.

Marmaray Project

In Istanbul’s excellent Archaeology Museum, there is a temporary exhibit on the Marmaray Project, which will provide yet one more way for people to traverse Istanbul from the European side to the Asian. The name comes from combining Marmara with ray, the Turkish word for “rail.” The system will allow for uninterrupted transportation for nearly one million people over a seventy-eight-kilometer-long commuter rail system between Gebze and Halkalı. If it’s completed, the percentage of trips made in Istanbul by rail transport is expected to be the third highest in the world after