It was naturally in Turkish and as my command of that language is, unfortunately, less than minimal, I was about to throw the leaflet away. But my eye caught an illustration of a handsome-looking pilot in a picture of a book cover. He was looking skyward, his goggles on his forehead, his flying helmet unbuttoned and looking for all the world like Biggies of the RAF or Richard Barthelmess in The Dawn Patrol I glanced at the blurb under the picture and gathered that the title of the book was Wings over Cyprus. My curiosity fully aroused, I recruited the aid of a Turkish-speaking friend and deciphered the text which read as follows:
‘For the first time, a Turkish pilot tells, in his own words, the thrilling story of our heroic intervention in Cyprus last July. Wing-Commander Ekmek Kataif, who led a squadron of fighter-bombers streaking across the sea from Mersin to Kyrenia, carries the reader with him to share the excitement of the first shots ever fired in anger by the Turkish Air Force except against the Kurdish rebels in the east.’
‘Strafing the Greek-Cypriots,’ Wing-Commander Ekmek says, ‘is even easier because they mark their more important buildings with large red crosses.’
The blurb ends with an appeal for food parcels for Wing-Commander Ekmek who is currently serving a thirty-year sentence in a military prison at Budrum for accidentally sinking a Turkish destroyer on his third mission from Mersin.
Another book that appeared interesting was entitled Turkish Relics on the Continental Shelf. From the description of the contents, I realised this effort was a thinly-disguised attempt to strengthen the Turkish claim over the continental shelf of Asia Minor by establishing the presence of artifacts and other items on the sea bottom that were of indisputable Turkish origin.
The author is a deep-sea diver named Mehmet ‘Blublu’ Koprit, the nickname being a reference to the many bubbles he releases while under water.
The book contains illustrations of broken pieces of pottery that are said to be of Hittite origin, an oyster-encrusted narghile that is attributed to the Grand Admiral of the Turkish Fleet Kheired-Din Barbarossa and a segment of what looks like a glazed chamber pot that the Sultan Murad III is said to have lost overboard while on a pleasure cruise in 1584.
The most incredible of Koprit’s assertions is that while walking on the sea-bottom in his diving suit off the west coasts of Lemnos, Mytilene and Chios he actually carried on a conversation with a school of dolphins who spoke to him in flawless Turkish.
In the concluding chapter of the book, Mehmet Koprit claims his findings prove the entire continental shelf of Asia Minor to be of such archaeological, historical and cultural importance to Turkey that no international court could ever deny her sovereign rights over the area.
Another item offered by the Book Club is a slim volume on gardening. It deals with only one plant, papaver soinniferum. The book describes the best kind of soil it should be grown in, how often it should be watered, when to re-pot and how to extract the milky fluid from the capsule (best time is nine to fifteen days after the flower petals fall).
The second half of the book is taken up completely with the names and addresses of Mafia agents in the Middle East and a currency conversion table.
The last book in the prospectus is entitled The Joys of Turkish Cookingby Delila Sublime, a jolly housewife from Samsun who, in the preface, says she was taught everything she knows by the cook of a Greek freighter that called regularly at Samsun to pick up tobacco cargoes. While the ship was in port, the cook would dally with Delila’s mother, who ran a waterfront boarding house, and then go into the kitchen to whip up a succulent moussaka or imam bayldi while little Delila watched on the sidelines.
The volume contains one thousand and one recipes and the author refutes the claim that Turkish cuisine is really Byzantine in origin. Ί don’t know where that Greek sea cook picked it up,’ she writes, ‘but it wasn’t in the Aghia Sophia—not by a long chalk!’
