Anglo-Turkish Society

Pat Yale gave a lecture for the Anglo-Turkish Society, at the Royal Anthropolical Institute, London on 8 February 2016 with the title The 'In the footsteps of Gertrude Bell'. Pat Yale is a travel author based in Turkey. This lecture accompanies a projected book on this subject and is happy to hear from prospective publishers.
The explorer, archaeologist and writer Gertrude Bell is best known for her travels in Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia but as a young woman she spent a lot of time in what is now Turkey. In 2015 Pat Yale set out to retrace her steps round the country, a journey that took her from a wonderful English garden in Izmir to the new world heritage site gardens of Diyarbakir, and from the forgotten ruins of Blaundos to the battered remnants of ancient Dara, near Mardin. - flyer - Pat Yale's website: - new book link: (2023).

Pat Yale at Binbirkilise, central Anatolia
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1- Much has been written about Gertrude Bell’s exploits especially about the later years when she was an advisor to the British Government and participated in various crucial post-war conferences. Your book mainly deals with her earlier visits to modern Turkey and follows her travels as depicted in her letters and journals. What was the spark that started that exploration?

In 2014 I dropped in on an exhibition hosted by Anamed on Istiklal Caddesi in Istanbul. It featured the guestbook kept by Nazli Hanim, the daughter of the great Osman Hamdi Bey, and in it I saw Bell’s autograph which set me thinking – to have visited such an eminent Ottoman at home implied a greater acquaintance with what was then still Constantinople than could have been had on a first visit. Then I remembered a New Year’s Eve party in a hotel created out of an old monastery in Güzelyurt in Cappadocia. On the wall there had been pictures taken by Bell of the nearby Kizil Kilise (Red Church). The next step was to read the biographies of her life which mentioned several visits to what is now the Republic of Turkey but glossing over them, unsurprisingly given what a full life she had had and how hard it must have been to boil it all down into single-volume biographies. Then came Bell’s own books. Then the Bell Archive at Newcastle University. My life was never the same again!

2- Do you think Bell’s popular image as the ‘Queen of the Desert’ makes it hard to reach the real person and understand her gradual evolution from casual tourist through multiple different career strands as a serious archaeologist, author and translator to political operator in the crucial period when the Ottoman Empire was unravelling?

Fortunately, I don’t think so because she left such a rich heritage of letters and diaries through which her unmediated voice can be heard. For me, one of the most interesting things was to watch her trajectory from breathlessly enthusiastic tourist visitor to Constantinople, Bursa, Troy and Ephesus to the woman who who camped for six weeks at Binbirkilise and worked relentlessly to record the many ruined Byzantine churches there with the eminent Sir William Ramsay. The Bell I looked at was a fluent speaker of Arabic and was doing her best to learn Turkish too. Her travel books were researched and written in the period I covered. But the First World War split her life into two parts. Her career as a political operative was a post-War development in the years after her many visits to Turkey.

No one can ever truly know another human being but I think the fact that we were both British women and that there were some parallels in our early lives – we both visited Istanbul for the first time when we were young (I was 19, she 20) and for both of us the city served as our introduction to the Islamic world – probably helped. But if you spend long enough immersing yourself in someone else’s mail you certainly get a very real sense of their personality. The hardest part for me was reading her letters to Doughty-Wylie. That felt a little too much like prying on a friend.

3- In the preface to your book you mention that you were surprised when you found Bell’s signature in the guest book of the daughter of Ottoman artist, archaeologist, statesman and leading light of Constantinople society, Osman Hamdi Bey. Clearly Bell was able to mix with and enter into the circles of the Ottoman intelligentsia despite being a foreign Christian woman. Do you think this is a credit to her social skills and ability to network? Was being a woman perhaps an advantage as she didn’t have the political baggage more common with men of the time?

The surprise came from the fact that I had no idea how big a part Turkey had played in her young life. Once that had been established it was obvious that she had access to almost all the great and the good of late Ottoman society. While some of that will certainly have been down to her own networking skills, one should never overlook the fact that she had the advantage of being born into a very wealthy and well-connected British family. In the days when she was visiting Turkey only the wealthy were able to travel and then, as now, they all seem to have known and looked out for each other. In those days invitations to dine at the relevant foreign embassies were extended to visiting citizens in a way that would be unimaginable today. But Bell’s travels in the Middle East and the books she wrote about them made her hugely famous – by 1907 she was boasting of how everybody who was anybody was fooling over themselves to meet her.

I’m not sure how much of her networking ability could be attributed to her being a woman. On her travels she will have been treated as an honorary man in the same way as modern female travellers often are. And she certainly did accumulate political baggage even before the war. Already she had had her famous falling-out with Mark Sykes. In some ways it was hardest for her to handle her fellow Brits; while she was travelling, she was outside the norms of the societies she was travelling through and could be treated as a special case but once she came in contact with members of the British establishment all the old social expectations came rushing back to ambush her.

4- This project took a lot of planning, time and presumably funds, as you criss-crossed Anatolia in Bell’s footsteps self-financed. What were the highs and lows of this pursuit?

Best not to dwell on the cost of the research! It’s sobering to think that this project couldn’t be carried out today, so expensive has Turkey become for those without hard currency. Hotels, buses, taxis – they would all be beyond the stretch of my purse now.

The highs were many. Bumping into fellow Bell fans across the country. Attempting the ascent of Hasan Dagi. Exploring the churches and monasteries of the Tur Abdin and meeting some of their doughty residents. Experiencing Ramazan in Sanliurfa. Just having the chance to wander across the country to the rhythm of someone else’s itinerary.

Ramazan in Sanliurfa at the Hasan Pasa Cami in 2015.

The lows? I suppose having to be rescued from the ruined walls of Ephesus would have to be one of them! Visiting Suruç during the ISIS siege of Kobani on the other side of the border when it was overwhelmed with desperate refugees would have to be another. And of course being forced to confront Turkey’s bloody past in places such as Harput would also go on the low scale.

5- You visited many of the archaeological sites such as Binbirkilise that Bell studied sometimes with other prominent archaeologists of the time. Clearly some of these Byzantine sites still stand today barely touched today although others have been overtaken by expanding towns and pillaging, leaving little now remaining. What were the most striking changes and losses that you encountered along the way?

The book includes a photograph of the Chora Church (now the Kariye Cami), near Edirnekapi in Istanbul, which shows it standing in splendid isolation where now it’s hard to take any overall photograph at all, so hemmed in is it by development. Bell’s archive contains many gems like that, often depicting the state of churches that now look very different such as the Çanli Kilise, near Aksaray, which has lost its dome since her visit, and the church in Anitli (Hah) which has acquired one in the interim. But one of the most striking changes – one might easily argue losses – is the cosmopolitan nature of the late Ottoman Turkey that Bell was traversing, a cosmopolitanism that couldn’t survive the wars of the early 20th century and has only recently reacquired a shadow of that old atmosphere via the onset of mass tourism.

Church at Anitli (Hah) with its original dome.
Ruined church at Çanli Kilise without the dome that Bell saw.

6- You noted the demographic changes that have taken place in Western Anatolia where villages have been emptied of young people seeking easier employment in cities and coastal tourist spots, a great contrast from Bell’s time. Do you think in the long-term Anatolian rural culture could be threatened? Have you detected the erosion of traditional manners in your long years of residency in Turkey?

There’s no doubt that traditional rural culture is under severe threat from the emptying of the villages although I’m happy to report that it still survives in places that are further off the beaten track, especially in the east of the country. I still anticipate many happy unplanned lunches in homes across the countryside!

7- You met some people whose grandfathers were guides to Bell. How emotional were these reconnections for you and them and did you get a sense of continuity in terms of Turkish hospitality to women travellers in a still conservative environment?

Time stood still for me when I bumped into Hamza Kaya in Dara, near Mardin, and he told me that his grandfather (I suspect actually great-grandfather) had guided Bell. The same thing happened when I met Hanem in Anitli and she said the same thing. It was as if Bell had just that minute walked out of the door and on to her next destination.

Sadly, on both occasions I had taxi drivers waiting which prevented me from stretching out these encounters. But elsewhere in the Tur Abdin I encountered great hospitality not so much as a woman but as a traveller, hospitality to travellers being such a key part of traditional Turkish culture.

8- Getting this book published was a saga in itself, taking many years. Why do you think such an original project - I presume nobody has followed in the footsteps of Bell before - attracted so little interest from British publishers?

I think there were two main problems. The zeitgeist – quite rightly – is now very anti-colonial, and unfortunately Bell is usually perceived as a ‘colonial’ figure despite the fact that in the wider Levant she was very pro-Arab self-determination. This meant that she was opposing the Ottoman Empire which makes her a very equivocal figure, both ‘colonialist’ in the UK context and ‘anti-colonialist’ in the Arab one. But beyond that the whole genre of travel writing is unfashionable because it, too, is seen as ‘colonialist’, with travel writers often approaching other countries from a perspective that barely credited the locals with agency in their own lives. It was not easy for me, with a British name, to get across my unusual outlook which was that of an insider who had lived in Turkey for decades as well as an outsider who would always retain some of her British perspectives.

9- While undertaking this journey and writing the book you have got to know Bell in all her brilliance but also in her idiosyncrasies. Would you use such modern expressions as ‘Feminist’ or ‘Trailblazer’ when describing her achievements and legacy?

This is a tricky one. In the past Bell was often viewed as a feminist icon (not so much these days, I think, because of the ‘colonialist’ taint). But the sad fact is that she actively campaigned AGAINST votes for women and that she clearly rated men’s company more than that of women, unless they were college friends or members of her family. ‘Trailblazer’ is much safer since clearly she struck out boldly into parts of the world that at the time few men chose to brave. I’m thinking, for example, of the Tek Tek Daglari and the Karaca Dagi region of modern Turkey. Even as a photographer she was something of a trailblazer – her name is remembered in many Turkish planning departments as the woman who took the first pictures of their neighbourhoods.

10- Although the current political/military situation in Syria and Iraq would make it dangerous and challenging, would you consider retracing some of Bell’s journeys in Arabia with the aim of publishing a follow-up book in the future?

I’d love to go to Iraq and am thinking of a trip to Baghdad to visit her grave next year. But since I don’t speak Arabic I could never approach such a journey in the way I could the one in Turkey. I would very definitely be an outsider in Syria and Iraq! To be honest, I’m more interested in pursuing some of her other youthful ventures in Europe. Or even her round-the-world cruise!

Questions by Craig Encer, August 2023