Open up a world of Turkish inspiration with a Cornucopia digital subscription

Buy or gift a stand-alone digital subscription and get unlimited access to dozens of back issues for just £18.99 / $18.99 a year.

Please register at www.exacteditions.com/digital/cornucopia with your subscriber account number or contact subscriptions@cornucopia.net

Buy a digital subscription Go to the Digital Edition

Bell Lettres

The Thousand and One Churches
Sir William Mitchell Ramsay and Gertrude L Bell. Edited by Robert Ousterhout and Mark P C Jackson

University of Pennsyvania, Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology


The Thousand and One Churches
William M Ramsay and Gertrude L Bell, ed. Robert G Ousterhout and Mark PC Jackson
Univ. Penn. Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology

The Lonely Planet guide to Turkey is far from enticing in its description of Binbirkilise. “You won’t see any nomads around these days, or indeed much to mark the ruins out as churches,” it warns of the remote central Anatolian site, “but plenty of goats and tortoises graze peacefully and a few curious villagers amble around the low piles of loose stone foundations.” Binbirkilise, located southeast of Konya on Karadağ, is a vanishing artefact, and was disappearing even a century ago, when scholars first took an interest.

Despite the title’s promise to deliver a “thousand and one churches”, there are probably a mere several dozen, dating from the fifth to the 11th centuries, and of varying sizes, as well as houses, public buildings, tombs, cisterns, aqueducts and fortifications. From the moment of the site’s discovery by scholars, it was clear that two things needed to be done. The surviving structures must be surveyed and photographed before they, too, were reduced to rubble. Equally important, the information collected would only acquire meaning – be transformed into knowledge – if the data could be combined with what was already known, and slotted into a “big picture”.

Gertrude Bell saw the area for the first time on May 11, 1905, when she had the good fortune to find a room with the local sheikh, up in the hills of Karadağ. (She was too polite to inform the man that he habitually and mistakenly faced west when praying.) “Rode down to Binbirklisse [sic] and spent the day there,” she recorded in her diary the next day. “Horrid place and very hot… Very bad water which I did not drink.” But Bell recognised the place as a treasure trove, almost untouched by scholars, or at least unpublished. She photographed and surveyed everything she could and, “with great regret”, left after four days.

For Gertrude Bell, now a cultural icon, coming from a rich family had never been enough (though she was always addicted to clothes). Nor was she satisfied with a First in history from Oxford. A visit to Istanbul the year after coming down sold her on the East, and she was soon off to Persia, Jerusalem and, in January 1905, through the Syrian Desert to Konya, where she spotted the potential of Binbirkilise. By that time she had acquired Arabic and Persian and was working on Turkish.

In the next two years she published scholarly articles based on the surveys she had made on her travels in remote areas. In 1915, the only woman in an otherwise all-male team, she was summoned to join wartime Cairo’s Arab Bureau, an important architect of the tumbledown structure that became known as Iraq. With the benefit of hindsight it is easy to paste in Bell along with the other British colonial officials and diplomats who exploited their early lives as archaeologists in order to establish themselves as regional experts, in the style of AH Layard, discoverer of Nineveh and later British ambassador to the Sublime Porte. Certainly a sound knowledge of Arabic or Persian and first-hand familiarity with the local geography was at least as important for a diplomat then as an executive MA in international relations and security studies is now. But Gertrude Bell’s motivation in those early years was genuine excitement at being among the first scholars to brush away the sand of centuries and reveal structures that had been concealed. She was not merely following the well-worn male path to Foreign Office influence.

Despite her extreme efficiency in travelling, measuring and photographing, Bell lacked scholarly credentials apart from her Oxford degree. It was not simply a matter of prestige. She had genuine academic reverence for the professors who had gone before her and, more importantly, for those with the broad knowledge that could take her findings and ability for hard fieldwork to paint a larger picture on a far broader canvas. This is where Sir William Mitchell Ramsay came in. Bell invited him to join her in a six-week survey of Binbirkilise, at her expense, in May–June 1907.

Like Bell, the brilliant Ramsay had headed East after Oxford, taking his wife with him. At Smyrna he had the good fortune to meet Sir Charles William Wilson, another British diplomat with a background in archaeology. Ramsay and Wilson made a number of trips together in central Anatolia in 1881–82, and Ramsay’s continuing rambles served as the basis for his Historical Geography of Asia Minor (1890).Ramsay was interested in the connection between geography and religion, in the spirit of his Scottish countryman George Adam Smith, author of the classic Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894). Another influential Scot was William Robertson Smith, whose Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889) applied the most advanced principles of Victorian anthropology to the ancient society of the Bible. It was he who commissioned James George Frazer to write articles on totemism and taboo for the Encyclopaedia Britannica – they had just reached the letter T – which ultimately begat The Golden Bough (1890) and Freud’s later contribution to the subject.

Ramsay had a special interest in the concept of awe – mankind’s experience in the presence of the sublime – communicated to particular geographical sites such as Mount Sinai. Having studied Sanskrit in Germany and been at Oxford at a time of fierce religious debate, Ramsay swam in the waters made clear by the Sanskrit scholar Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), who sought to pull all of this together, from the sublime wonder of primitive man, through Eastern religions, and from there around the globe. Christianity was now part of a pantheon of comparative religions – superior, no doubt, but not entirely alone.

For Ramsay, an even greater influence was Josef Strzygowski, whose Kleinasien ein Neuland der Kunstgeschichte (1903) made the case that Anatolian history deserved a place at the table of comparative civilisations. Strzygowski was not alone: an entire contemporary movement of “furious Orientalists” championed the claims of the East against the domination of Greece and Rome. Ramsay and Bell had Strzygowski’s book by their side, and dedicated their own to him.

Gertrude Bell needed William Ramsay to give her measurements and photographs meaning. But despite her modesty, where is the meaning of their joint book now? Strzygowski has largely been discredited, and not just because he died a Nazi. Ramsay’s key notion of the awesome is today used to describe pizza. Bell and Ramsay lived in the era of the “big idea”, but most of those big ideas were wrong.

Bell’s painstaking measurements and thousands of photographs, however, are a resource of eternal value. In so beautifully republishing this work – first published in 1909 – with an informative foreword and better prints of the original photographs, Robert Ousterhout and Mark Jackson have rendered a hugely important service to archaeologists, historians and intrepid future tourists. Armed with this book, they will be able to apply to Gertrude Bell and William Ramsay the Lonely Planet slogan of “almost too much information”.

David S Katz holds the Abraham Horodisch Chair for the History of Books at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of six books, including ‘The Occult Tradition: from the Renaissance to the Present Day’ (Jonathan Cape/Pimlico, £8.95)

Other Highlights from Cornucopia 49
  • Heavenly Berries

    Mulberries come in an array of hues: black, white, pink, purple; some enticingly sweet, others astringent and healing. As Berrin Torolsan can testify, having grown up with them in her Istanbul garden, all are adored – by man, mallard and pine marten alike. Here she traces the history of this lucious fruit

  • The Unlikely Saviour of Sancta Sophia

    Thomas Whittemore, the American scholar and philanthropist, was instrumental in restoring the Byzantine treasures of Ayasofya. Robert S Nelson delves into his enigmatic life


  • Parisian Panache

    The V&A’s Tim Stanley eyes up the Louvre’s astonishing new Islamic offering


  • Nine Days in Crimea

    From the towers of Tatary to the tombs of Scythian kings, from clifftop citadels to an underground castle, from Balaklava to the beaches of the Tsarist Riviera, Crimea is a land to fall in love with, waiting to be enjoyed, not destroyed


  • Palaces of Silk

    As the Sadberk Hanım Museum celebrates the art of embroidery, Min Hogg marvels at the motifs of palaces, fruit and flowers, sea and cityscape, wrought stitch by stitch, to adorn every Ottoman home

  • The Dutch Orientalist

    Aard Streefland tells the story of the Dutch orientalist Marius Bauer (1867–1932)



  • Crimea: the Heartland

    The Crimean khans founded their capital in the fertile foothills of the Crimean Mountains in the 15th century. This was the nucleaus of the land known as Cim Tartary. The garden palace of Bahçesaray is a glorious reminder of the khans’ 350-year reign

  • Crimea: the South Coast

    Dramatic and picturesque, Crimea’s southern coast became a resort for doomed royalty and a refuge for ailing literati


  • Crimea: the West Coast

    Two ports – Sevastopol and Yevpatoria – rule Crimea’s flat west coast. One was built for war, the other for recreation. Both played a part in the Crimean War


  • Eastern Crimea and the Kerch Peninsula

    Geonese merchants, a millionaire painter and a symbolist poet brought fortune and fame to the eastern stretches of Crimea’s south coast and its fertile hinterland


  • The Crimean War: Into the Mouth of Hell

    Balaklava, Sevastopol, Inkerman, the Valley of Death – in Britain, where the savage toll was so acutely felt, these names still have the power to arouse pride and fury. Algernon Percy travelled to Crimea to visit the evocative battlefields

  • Crimean War: The Empire Strikes Back

    From the Danube to the Caucasus, conflict raged. The Ottomans were fighting for their territories and their lives, but the full story of their courage is only now being told, says the military historian Mesut Uyar 



  • The Crimean War: The Real Reason Why

    The war of 1853–56 was a calamitous clash of imperial ambitions. Turkey sustained heavy losses, but without them she might have ceased to exist. David Barchard puts the conflict in context

  • Yevpatoria: Bathed in splendour

    With its healing brine baths and golden beaches, its wealth and variety of architecture, and its layers-deep history, this resort offers something for everyone – from hedonist to hypochondriac


  • No surrender for Anna

    Yevpatoria in Crimea was the home the young Anna Akhmatova, an icon of Russian literature, who fell foul of Stalin


  • Chekhov’s ‘Warm Siberia’

    Like many writers, Chekhov made his way to Crimea to nurse his TB in a milder climate. His two houses, now museums, became magnets for artists. One he left to his sister, the other to his wife.


  • Prince on Tour

    Philip Mansel on the future Edward VII’s Ottoman expedition

  • Into the silence

    By any standard, Hüsamettin Koçan’s mountain-top Baksı Museum, in the northeastern Anatolian village where he was born, deserves a place among the world’s top ten remote museums.



  • Connoisseur 49

    This silver goblet was one of more than 600 medieval treasures from Central Asia crowding Bonhams’ elegant rooms in Edinburgh for six days in January.

Buy the Book
Buy the issue
Issue 49, April 2013 Travels in Tartary
£10.00 / $13.06 / 447.48 TL
More Reading
Cornucopia Digital Subscription

The Digital Edition

Cornucopia works in partnership with the digital publishing platform Exact Editions to offer individual and institutional subscribers unlimited access to a searchable archive of fascinating back issues and every newly published issue. The digital edition of Cornucopia is available cross-platform on web, iOS and Android and offers a comprehensive search function, allowing the title’s cultural content to be delved into at the touch of a button.

Digital Subscription: £18.99 / $18.99 (1 year)

Subscribe now