Gilbert sailed back from Batum on a Turkish ship with Reshid Pasha (This cannot be the Reshid Pasha who was the Ottoman Foreign Minster because he died in April 1924.), formerly the Sultan’s Governor of Sivas. Located in central Anatolia, Sivas was a transportation centre inhabited by Greeks and Armenians, even more so after forced deportations there from Trebizond. After Kemal landed at Samson in May 1919, he began organizing resistance to the Allied occupation, first with a congress of representatives from the eastern provinces at Erzurum and then a smaller congress at Sivas in September. Its intent was to have delegates representing all the Turkish provinces to legitimize the National Assembly being formed in Ankara. The Sultan ordered the local Governor, Reshid Pasha, to prevent the congress from occurring in Sivas and to arrest any delegates attending. Kemal, however, told Reshid how impossible it would be for any force of the Allies or the Sultan to stop the delegates attending. Reshid agreed with Kemal and was replaced. When Reshid gave Gilbert an “earful,” it is no wonder that Gilbert wrote that he could not put their conversation in a letter from Turkey and would have to tell his mother about it privately back in Rome. Reshid died later in the same year.
Decades later, Gilbert explained to a student interviewer at the University of Toronto that he traveled to eastern Turkey because he had been interested in the “Byzantine churches in Armenia,” an evident cover story, as the only church structures still standing in Armenia had been Armenian, not Byzantine, and the only church he ever mentioned seeing was Ayia Sophia in Trebizond, not in Armenia. On the other hand, however, there was indeed an academic controversy then brewing over the influence of Armenian architecture on the churches of mainland Greece, which Gilbert could easily have expatiated on if called upon to do so. In any case, Erzurum and probably Batum were afterthoughts added on to his originally planned trip to Trebizond. His mission, presumably assigned by Roberto Paribeni, was to gather up-to-date political, military and/or commercial information in the region that might be of use to the Italians.
Gilbert stayed another week in Constantinople, presumably at the Italian Embassy again, where Ambassador Montagna was back in residence from his recent trip to Rome. Gilbert sailed across the Sea of Marmara over to Mudania on his way to Broussa, the modern Bursa, where he could enjoy the famed hot thermal springs in a Turkish bath. While sailing there Gilbert could not have avoided recalling the tense British-Turkish negotiations the previous October at Mudania over Lloyd George’s last stand at Chanak, several miles downstream in the Dardanelles. He probably reflected as well on the first perceived encounter between East and West at Troy at the entrance to the Dardanelles.
Gilbert celebrated the end of his mission in Constantinople with a mild shopping spree, buying two large and expensive Byzantine icons, a Venetian lantern resembling a birdcage, and “two perfectly lovely old Turkish mashlaks, a kind of kimono, simply gorgeous.” One of these was later described as “a wonderful Turkish robe of a queer [blackish] purple & white made of the most beautiful silk.” Centuries earlier the wearing of purple silken robes had been restricted to the Byzantine emperors. So as mementos of his sojourn Gilbert chose a blend of eastern and western objects which taken together were reminiscent of the Byzantium of the Venetian Crusaders’ era.
Then on July 5, 1924, Gilbert sailed on the Leopolis to Athens for a week, where he was reachable at the Italian Embassy. He retrieved the silver bowl, tassels and amber comboloi (“worry beads”) he had left with Anna, and sailed from Athens Monday 14 for Rome, his home in the West. Gilbert would have many more adventures before returning to Greece in 1936.
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Thank you for your kind comments.