free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

A dark age.
7
Turkish Crete
What can a man say of a country inhabited by Turks, if he is confined to what
he sees of it in its present condition? Almost their whole life is spent in idleness:
to cat rice, drink water, smoke tobacco, sip coffee, is the life of a Mussulman.
The speculative sort (of which there are not many) employ themselves in reading
the Alcoran, consulting the several interpreters of that book, thumbing
over the annals of their empire; what’s all this to us ? The things that attract
strangers thither, must be a search after antiquities, study of natural history,
commerce.
So Tournefort in the first detailed report on Crete under the new
master. He saw much to criticize, sometimes unjustly. By 1700 the
Turks had had time to make their mark on the island. But Tournefort
found that they entirely neglected to repair the ports and walls of the
towns, devastated after the war of Candia. Candia itself was the carcass
of a great city; hardly anything but rubbish. The only buildings of
which the Turks took reasonable care were the fountains, since ‘they are
great water drinkers, and their religion obliges ‘em very frequently to
wash every part of their body’.
Tournefort criticizes the gardens round Canea, planted without
order or symmetry; the figs insipid, the melons almost as bad. Skills
were lacking; the Turks cannot graft, or candy citrons. ‘As for those
pretended palm trees [in the east, at Hierapetra], they are so bunglingly
done, that they may pass for pines’; but this is unfair – there is a grove
of excellent palms at Vai on the east coast. The country is in a sorry
condition. Even the smells are abominable; for, as the world knows,
the Turks inter their dead upon the highways: ‘this practice were
extraordinarily well, did they dig the graves deep enough. Candia
being a very hot country, these smells are very offensive under the
wind. . . .’
It is not surprising that a bitter note creeps into Tournefort’s account;
sixty years earlier, a distinguished visiting French botanist would have
been treated with respect; he would have found himself among people
he understood. But the Turks were barbarians; when Pococke went out
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