Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 212, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 September 1915 — Trebizond the Ancient [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Trebizond the Ancient

YEARS! Years! What are years? Only 365 days! What are 365 days, or any combinations of 365 days, compared with the unutterable past, whose dust is being stirred by Europe’s war, says Walter H. Main, in the Utica Globe. It was a mere pebble in a mill pond —that a Hna.iudna.tion of a petty ruler last summer —but the ripples it started have not yet begun to lap the shores of the sea of time along which shades of the past hover, nodding to one another that humanity is ever the same, always seeking, always avaricious, always as ready to kill as was Genghis Khan, who slew his 5,000,000 or 6,000,000 and wept for more. Take that single city of Trebizond there on the Black sea, of which we have hardly heard, of whose past we know nothing, and for whose trade, Turkey and Russia are struggling. What is the commerce of New York for a single century compared with the commerce of Trebizond for countless ages? We look with veneration on a building a century old; the Magna Charts we look upon with its 700 years as of iinspeakable antiquity; but here is a city whose past trails off into the dim realm of myth, to the tombs of Pharaohs, to antiquity that ends in fancy. It was 1492 when Columbus stumbled on San Salvador and marked the beginning of our four centuries of continental history, four centuries that seem an interminable past to us, but which are as a dream which passeth in the night for Trebizond and its hinterland. In fact America would not have been disclosed for many years had it not been for the trade of Trebizond. For Trebizond has been the outlet to the western world of the wonderful treasures of the inscrutable East. Was Great Trade Center. To Trebizond old Genoa turned when it wrested the sea power of the

world from old Venice. Many nations traded with Trebizond in its eventful past and everyone in turn waxed fat and prosperous and fell, until the Turk came to control the Dardanelles in 1453, and now Russia seeks to own the Black sea. It was because the Ottoman choked other traders that Columbus, the soil of proud, rich Genoa, Sought an allwater route to the East. When the first prow from Europe grated on the shore of the China sea and found the coral reefs of India, then began to dwindle that caravan trade which for ages beyond number had brought all the Orient, all Cathay westward in the shortest way. Then was doomed the camel traffic. It still persists; long strings of camels from the Orient still tread the streets of Trebizond, but there is a railway that brings goods to Batum, in Russian territory, faster than camels can travel and Batum has the trade. But Trebizond is still a metropolis, and the dust of Trebizond which is disturbed by the war strife carries with it the romance of the race and brings up a mirage to the fancy that includes the brave figures of a past as old as humanity. Better fifty years of Europe Than a cycle of Cathay. So sang Tennyson; but the cycles of Cathay, for all that, have tremendous human interest, could we but fathom them and read their story. It is the dust of the desert that settled about Trebizond, dust that Russian and Turk are stirring up in the final struggle of Jhe Ottoman to stem the invasion that would wrest from him the last remnant of-his once powerful sway. Mysticism of Far Cathay. When you feel that dust of ages rising and smell the sandalwood and spicery of the East and the same pungent odor of the camels that you may have noticed in new America on circus day, you lose all sense of time; you lose view of the land beyond the western sea, the land America, so new and fresh and inexperienced with a mere two or three centuries behind it; you lose all tangible things; you become infected with the mysticism of the East. For the nonce you forget time; you are transported to the Bagdad of the Arabian Nights; you remember Harun al Rashid, Genghis Khan and the rest of the half real, half mythical beings that peopled the fonrtfnl days of your childhood when

you lived within the pages of romance and the tales of wonder from the East captivated you. But the trail does not stop there with the heroes of the tales that came to barbarian Europe just‘before modern life dawned, when the Marco Polos boldly penetrated past the gates to the East. The dust of the city of Trebizond, which lies thick, dates back beyond the Crusaders. The bridles of their horses jingled, the armor of the warriors of the Cross rattled within this same city of Trebizond there on the Black sea. Romance in Its Spicery. Try to read its story as a history and you are hopelessly lost in a list of meaningless names. Absorb it as a romance, as ydu absorb India in Kip l ling’s “Kim," and the city of Trebizond' is of Entrancing interest When mankind began to fare thither to barter no man knows. The beginnings of time find him there. Jason and his argonauts there got the myth of the golden fleece, and the golden fleece was so old in Greece that it faded out of history and dissolved into the mythology of the gods. The earliest navigators, the Phoenicians, plied the Black sea and did carrying trade for the caravans from the East. Then Britain was but a wild place, inhabited by savages, where the low, black ships of the Phoenicians got tin from the mines to trade at Trebizond for the jewels of India and China. Britain we consider old, with its ruins, about which cling the story of the Roman soldiers. But this was even before Rome entered the world stage. It was when Hiram of Tyre was bringing cedar for Solomon to build his temple. It was when Joseph was the wheat king of Egypt and before then, even. It was —heaven knows when it was. Trebizond was a metropolis when the earliest man in the West and his womankind began to covet the silk and gold and jade and perfumes of the East. Even Egypt, the Egypt of 5,000

years ago, was a flippant youth when the Orient was hoary with age—not hoary with years, years are not a measurable standard to use —hoary with age, eons and eons of time. , So,' as the Turk crouches in his little remaining corner of Asia Minor, the Turk of the third Turkish invasion' of the region about Trebizond — as the Turk tries to stand off the Russtan glacier which is grinding its inexorable way down from the frozen North, we may well wonder at the haze of mystery that appears in the dust that the warring hosts raise in that venerable section. Bound the West to the East. The dust of Trebizond was tracked there by countless caravans of patient camels through countless centuries. The route they followed was the slender thread of a trail that for centuries bound together the East and West—-the West vigorous in its crude barbarity, ornamenting itself with the jewels and silks of the East? Between the avarice of the West' and the riches of the East nature had put a barrier of mountain and desert which could be penetrated at only a few places. Unerringly, with the experience of ages, the caravan leaders picked the trail. It ran south 600 miles from Trebizond to Bagdad, the Bagdad of the Arabian Nights and Harun al Rashid; it broke over into Persia on the east and ran 350 miles to Ispahan; then among the mountains and plains east, always east, 750 miles to Kandahar in Afghanistan; then up to Kabul 400 miles farther and to Jelalabad and through old Khyber pass into India—a full 2,000 miles as the camel trails. At Khyber pass the caravans divided, going into far Cathay, into Cashmere’s lovely vales, sung by Lalla Rookfi’s minstrel prince, to mysterious Mongolia, to all the oldest tribes on earth, who made the luxuries for the rest of the worldThis is the storied city, whose dust is being stirred by the warriors of this the twentieth century. Perhaps ths very gunpowder that may yet awaken the echoes in the* bld camel-trod streets is now being made in a factory in that crude, upstart land, America, which Columbus stumbled on when he was hunting around for a way to circumvent the Ottoman, to beat ths camel drivers by getting there with a ship.