acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

—
ROAD AND RAILWAY CENTRE 149
Russian frontier passes through it. So does the great
road from the Black Sea to Bagdad. So also the road
from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. From
these main roads lesser but still important roads go
off to other parts, and the traffic they carry depends
eventually on passing through Sivas. You may count
at least ten roads, serving a great area, which are
controlled absolutely by Sivas.
And as with roads, so it will be with railways, for
they also follow natural routes. Each scheme of
railway construction yet proposed for Anatolia aims
to reach to Sivas, or to link with it as the central
place giving communication with other railways.
Sivas seems destined to be the greatest and most
important railway junction in Asia Minor ; and this
factor, coupled with the agricultural and pastoral
value of the surrounding country, will give the city,
under any form of good government, greater prosperity
than it has ever known in the past. Those
who speak of Sivas as the heart and nerve-centre of
Anatolia, as the one central city with the natural
endowments of a commercial capital, do so Avith
reason.
The fluctuations that old cities of Asia Minor
Miletus, Sardis, Ephesus, Smyrna, Sinope, Maxaca,
Comana, Csesarea, to name only a few out of many
—have undergone, and the causes of their rise and
fall, would be an interesting study. So lately as the
eighteenth century there was Diarbekr with 400,000
souls where now are not 40,000. What closing and
opening of trade-routes, what political events, perhaps
outside the boundaries of Asia Minor, brought about
the rise and fall of such places might be hard to
trace, yet not altogether impossible. Of one thing
we may be sure, that simJlar influences, followed by
similar results on a larger scale, will be at work
before our eyes as the outcome of the present war.
About two miles south of Sivas the road to Bagdad
crosses the Kizil Irmak by an old stone bridge of
pointed arches, and rises into Terja Dagh. I came