Maktoub

By Nestor Pierrakos

Maktoub describes the events and political
upheavals that changed the Middle East
from the demise of the Ottoman Empire to
the eventual death of Colonel Nasser.
These events are seen through the eyes of
Peter Angelakis, an Ottoman Greek who left
Constantinople for a more secure existence in
British controlled Egypt.
In Alexandria, Peter marries into a Lebanese
family and the history of that period with all
its upheavals unfolds through the lives of his
four children.
The second world War provided Peters eldest
daughter who is married to a British Officer,
offers a peek into English reactions to Egyptian
Nationalism. It also acted as a catalyst to the
free Officers movement resulted in King
Farouks abdication.
Peters second daughter Alexandra, marries
a Greek businessman who escaped from
communist Romania, and throws light into
the socialist nationalisations that eventually
wrecked the Egyptian economy.
Peters two sons with his father-in-law are
immersed in the Egyptian interior and provides
a picture of life at the time that included
acquiring business contacts; the reasons and
results of the burning of Cairo; the Suez attack
and the disastrous six day war of 1967 until
the death of Nasser in 1970.
All the events, once they had occurred, the
muslim population stoically accepted them.
To them it was MAKTOUB (it is written).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469182216

Nestor Pierrakos

Nestor Pierrakos was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1934 of Greek parents. He was privileged in every way a Greek family could possibly dote on their one and only heir. He had an English education, starting at Victoria College Alexandria, followed by Trinity Hall Cambridge to read Economics, then a post graduate MBA at Harvard Business School, with two semesters in between, at Heidelberg University to learn German, which gave him one more language to add to his Greek, English, French, Arabic and Italian. He worked in the family wine making in Egypt until it was nationalized, then moved to Kenya and worked on a coffee plantation, and later started his own winery in Libya until the 1970 revolution. Finally moving to Greece and turning to shipping. He married twice and has two children from each marriage. Presently he is an insurance broker and has just completed his first book.

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Copyright © 2012 by Nestor Pierrakos.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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CONTENTS

1.   Alexandria (1923)

2.   Settling In

3.   The Interwar Years

4.   The War (1939-1945)

5.   Wartime Romance

6.   Desert Fox out of Tricks

7.   Abrogation of Treaty

8.   Alexandra

9.   Romance

10.   Toward the Explosion

11.   The Spark

12.   Cairo Burns

13.   Catalysts to Coup

14.   Farouk Feeds Army Discontent

15.   Decision for Coup

16.   Farouk’s Abdication

17.   The Day After

18.   Governing Egypt

19.   Nasser Emerges as Leader

20.   Russian Arms

21.   Aswân High Dam

22.   Suez (1956)

23.   Summary of Nasser’s Progress

24.   After Suez

25.   Syrian Lesson

26.   Nationalizations

27.   Exporting Revolution

28.   Escalation to Disaster

29.   Israel Attacks

30.   Reshuffling after Six-Day War

31.   Excuses and Maktoub

32.   Nasser’s Last Days

33.   Leaving the Sinking Ship

CHAPTER 1

Alexandria (1923)

The SS Güneysu with the assistance of two tugs backed away from the Perama quay into the busy Bosporus, teeming with shipping of all shapes and sizes. Peter, leaning against the top railings, waved to his parents, who, along with numerous family members and friends, had come to see him off.

The leave taking in the customs shed had been emotional but dignified on the part of his father and tearful on the part of his mother. The custom’s officer, by now used to young men leaving the country looking for a new life abroad, hardly blinked at the number of chests passing before him. Peter’s luggage consisted mainly of books. At thirty, books had been his life and until now his only real possession. Almost everything he knew he had learned from his books, his dreams and expectations had been inspired by them. All his life’s experiences were drawn from the heroes and heroines whom he so cherished and felt it necessary to have with him in his search for a new beginning.

He had never left Turkey, and being very closely tied to his family, especially his mother who spoiled him being the first born, while he looked up to his father as a god, he was feeling nostalgic, frightened and exalted all at once. He knew he had to leave and that his future success would depend on his personal initiative and a large measure of luck.

Greek mothers and wives from time immemorial had been used to seeing their sons and husbands leave the hearth in search of a better future. The prevailing culture held that it was selfish for women to try to hold their menfolk back from searching for something that could not be provided for by a semi-fertile and rocky homeland. This view had populated and developed the rich lands of Sicily as well as the Eastern Seaboard of Asia Minor, even before the time of the Trojan War.

Behind his father stretched the Golden Horn, the western bank of which served as one of the three lines of defense of old Constantinople. The other two barriers of the triangle, the Bosporus in the south and its triple formidable walls on the western land side, completed the defense. The famed Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) church, the Imperial Byzantine Palace, Blachernon, and the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate were all enclosed within this supposed impregnable triangle.

The eastern bank of the Golden Horn had warehouses, shipyards, and factories situated there due to the ease and convenience of water transport in a land sadly lacking in roads. Its location, next to the Ottoman capital, Constantinople, was ideally placed near the biggest urban, military, and commercial market in the empire.

The receding Golden Horn brought back to Peter memories of his childhood and adult years when he was taken to the Greek Patriarchate to attend weddings; christenings, of his friends and family; and especially the obligatory Easter celebrations, the most holy Orthodox feast. Most Greeks looked toward orthodoxy for strength and moral support in a Muslim environment, even though they blended in effortlessly with the tolerant Turks.

On innumerable occasions, he had visited the depots and factories, either to visit friends or collect goods for the family business. Two of his friends had shipyards and repair facilities on the Horn, and this had always interested Peter as it was an ideal place to meet seafaring mariners and thus broaden his knowledge of the world in an age of very poor international communications, especially in the somnolent and traditional Ottoman Empire.

As the SS Güneysu passed in front of the Dolmabahçe, the lush garden on the Bosporus in front of the sultan’s palace, Peter remembered all the pleasant evenings he had spent there with Shake, his Armenian girlfriend and his first love.

In 1918, after Turkey had lost the war and signed the Moudros cease-fire, Peter was demobbed and returned to Constantinople. In 1914, at twenty one after graduating from Robert’s College, he had been called up to join the Ottoman army when Turkey declared war as an ally of Germany against the Anglo-French. He was determined to make up for the four miserable years he had spent building roads in the work battalions, where the Turkish state put all its Ottoman minority subjects who could not be trusted in the front lines.

As he was sitting in the tram coming down Pera, Constantinople’s main shopping street, he thought he recognized Shake coming out of a shop. He quickly jumped off the tram and ran to her. Shake, I thought I recognized you. You haven’t changed at all since our last meeting in 1914. If anything, you have matured and become more desirable.

Peter, exclaimed Shake, how wonderful to see you. How lucky you are to have survived the work battalions, when half the people, we have been told, died of overwork, diseases, or were killed.

Yes, I have been most fortunate to come out alive. I kept my head down, my tongue still, and, with the occasional traditional baksheesh, made it through the war. But I am determined to make up for lost time. However, tell me, unless I’m mistaken that was your father’s shop I saw you coming out of. Is it now named Ismail’s Emporium?

Yes, Peter, she answered slowly, you were lucky to survive the work battalions, and our family, the Armenian bashing. It was only due to my father’s friendships and connections as a merchant and store owner that we escaped being rounded out for the death marches. We then thought it wiser to rename the shop from Matosian to Ismail. Every week or so, some official or other came around, chose what they pleased, and had it added to their ever-growing unpaid accounts.

As Shake had a Circassian mother and a very open-minded Armenian father, she had been allowed to occasionally stray out of the traditional Armenian circles. Peter had first met her in 1911 when she was eighteen, straight out of school, and he in his first year at Robert College. After six months of seeing each other at the college’s social gatherings, they graduated to cakes and coffee at Taksim Square and evening strolls at Dolmabahçe which progressed to petting, kissing, and declaring love.

Shake was a doe-eyed blonde beauty, rare in an Armenian circle, taking after her mother, but still believing in conservative Armenian behavior, thanks to her father.

One evening, two years later, as they were sitting below some palm trees in the Dolmabahçe, she had told Peter, You see, the way things are going here, there could be a revolution, civil war, or at least the sultan’s dethronement with the following inevitable troubles. My father fears for our safety, and I do not think you Greeks are any better off after your army landed in Smyrna. My father has promised me a good dowry, if you would marry me as we are both Christian Orthodox. We could leave Turkey and start a family somewhere else.

Peter, who could see living in Turkey becoming ever more risky, was thinking along the same lines. Shake, there is nothing I would like better than marrying you, but, as the eldest son, I’m obliged to stay with my numerous family until the family council decides otherwise. I love you, but we must be patient.

Shake, who had been brought up in the conservative family traditions which alone promised protection, fully understood. All right, let’s be patient for a little longer and see what the future holds.

However, events were not to develop as the young couple had hoped for. The internal situation in Turkey showed no signs of improving, and Mr. Matosian, worrying and wanting to protect his only daughter, was searching for a way to have her leave the country. The solution appeared in the form of a young American of Armenian extraction, working in a US agency in Constantinople. He presented him to Shake, but although she found him quite acceptable, she still did not want to give up Peter, Constantinople, and all she had grown up with. But, after long nightly discussions, calm at first but growing more heated with each meeting, worn out by this battle of nerves she eventually gave in to her father’s impositions and accepted the inevitable.

At one of their last meetings at Dolmabahçe, she told Peter, "My father is becoming quite worried by the situation and quoted Shakespeare’s King Lear at me. ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.’ He really believes that after the Allied army leaves Constantinople, Armenian persecution is likely to start again and that I am ungrateful after all he’s done and will do for me. It is my duty to give him some peace of mind by marrying the diplomat and acquiring my passport to safety."

Peter was heartbroken at Shake being forced by events to obey her father and consoled himself by seeing her as often as possible till she married and left for America.

Constantinople slowly faded away as the Güneysu steamed westward, scattering before it the small boats and ferries plying the islands. These were the Prinkiponisia (Princes’ Islands) where most of the well-to-do had their homes and commuted by ferry every day to their various occupations on the Perama mainland, where the Angelakis family had their clothing business. This could hardly be separated from Constantinople rising on the hill behind it. Only the dome of Hagia Sophia, with its corner minarets, was easily distinguished in the distance.

Peter gazed at this picture of Constantinople, with mixed feelings, the most important city, at that time, in the Middle East. He wanted to print in his mind the last glimpse of the place he had spent his childhood and now had to leave in search of a better future.

Peter Angelakis was a descendant of a family who for hundreds of years considered themselves Phanariots, a term applied to residents of Constantinople, where the Phanari (lighthouse) of Orthodoxy was domiciled from its conception, the time when Emperor Constantine split the Roman Empire into two parts with Constantinople and Rome as the twin spiritual and administrative capitals.

The Angelakis and millions of other Greeks lived in the multiethnic Ottoman Empire; accepted the problems of an autocratic sultan with the powers of life and death over all his subjects; and kept out of politics and concentrated on business in competition with Jews, Armenians, and other minorities of the empire. Life was better and easier than in other parts of the Mediterranean as nationalism and religious fanaticism was not yet a problem in this multiethnic Ottoman Empire where everyone knew their place.

All these conditions changed in the twentieth century with the eruption of the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 when the moribund Ottoman Empire lost its last European vilayets (provinces) under the coordinated attacks of the Balkan people inspired by a spirit of nationalism and liberty. Within a few months, the Ottoman Empire was reduced to Eastern Thrace, stretching from Adrianople in the north to the Gallipoli Peninsula in the south. The rest of previously European Turkey was now divided up into more or less its nationalistic components of Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Albanians, and Montenegrins.

World War I dealt the coup de grâce for the Asiatic Ottoman Empire when the empire chose the wrong partner and lost the war and all its Asiatic provinces. With Arabs, Iraqis, Syrians, and Palestinians shorn off in separate independent states, the Ottoman Empire was left basically with only its Turkish component in Asia Minor.

In the sharing of the spoils, the allies had rewarded Greece for having fought on their side, with Smyrna and a good hinterland in Asia Minor. Greek politicians and national pride jumped at the chance of integrating two million Greek Orthodox settlers in Asia Minor in an attempt to recreate the Byzantine Empire. That dream was called Megali Idea (Great Idea). As a result, Greek troops landed in Smyrna in 1919. Lloyd George and the Allies were keen to stop the Italians from annexing more of Turkey by moving north. The Greek army was the only available force on the spot, so the altruistic gesture of offering Smyrna to Greece also served as a blocking move to further Italian expansion.

The idea of enlarging Greece by redeeming its lost territories and populations was very attractive but completely impractical. In 1919, nationalism did not permit wholesale annexations of territories with their inhabitants to the winning side, as had been practiced earlier.

With Constantinople occupied by the Allied forces and the remaining Turkish area of the Ottoman Empire without efficient government or army, the annexation of Smyrna and its hinterland seemed to work for the Greeks for a few years.

This state of affairs could not last, as, strategically, an inferior population could not control a vastly more numerous local Turkish nationalistic element reinforced by a different faith. Tactically, also, the position was hopeless as no natural frontiers or barriers separated the Greek from the Turkish areas. A Greek army, exhausted after continuous fighting for ten years, with poor logistics, in very difficult terrain, tried to advance as far as Ankara to force the Turks to come to an agreement.

The Turkish army of hardened peasant soldiers, rearmed by the Russians from the Caucasus and the French in Syria, in an effort to buy peace, was a new element the Greeks had not counted on. Under the able leadership of a successful general, Kemal Atatürk, a new capital and government were created at Ankara. Kemal was determined to chase all foreign troops out of Turkey and reunite the country. He copied the Russian tactics of a scorched earth policy, which had defeated Napoleon, and withdrew into Anatolia, draining the Greek army into the inhospitable Anatolian terrain.

The inevitable happened; the Greek army ran out of steam and was chased all the way back to Smyrna and had to evacuate Asia Minor along with all the local inhabitants who were not massacred and could find space in boats and flee to Greek islands nearby.

Smyrna, except for the Turkish quarter, was burned. Many Greeks were killed by the victorious Turkish army, which recaptured all their territory up to the Aegean coast. Two million Greeks, who had never left Asia Minor, even to visit Greece, suddenly, turned up as refugees from various parts of Greece. The Constantinople Greeks, like Angelakis, had not been touched, thanks to the occupation of the Anglo-French forces, but everybody saw the writing on the wall and prepared to organize their emigration to safer parts.

The Angelakises decided that the father; his two unmarried daughters, his second son, Michael; and all the old generation would stay with their property and business in Perama while Peter would go abroad to seek his fortune. Peter had graduated from the Greek school, Megali tou Genous Scholi, and the American Robert College in Constantinople. He spoke Turkish, French, and English, and was considered adequately equipped to start a new life somewhere safer. With the help of his father’s friends established in Alexandria, Egypt, it was hoped he would make a new beginning.

The Angelakis family spent many evenings discussing where Peter should emigrate to, and advice was sought from all and sundry. America (welcomed the whole world to its shores on an inscription on the Statue of Liberty, part of which reads: . . .Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send me these, the homeless…) was a magnet and the favorite for most Europeans, but it needed mostly strong muscle power at that period of underpopulation and industrial growth. The same reasoning applied to Canada, Australia, and also a little to Argentina, which, however, had a different culture and language.

Egypt, a former Ottoman province, on the other hand, was considered ideal, as Peter would find there a lot in common with life in Constantinople. Egypt needed able management and coordination to organize its abundant muscle power and fertile land. It was theoretically independent but practically under British control, since 1882, thus providing a certain security. Furthermore, the British sent mostly administrators to their colonies and protectorates; their workers and muscle power went to English-speaking territories.

Peter’s father had a friend in Alexandria who, it was hoped, would help Peter get started in a, basically, European city with a numerous Greek element.

Peter naturally thought his forced migration was frightfully unfair in upsetting his comfortable life in Constantinople with the loss of all his friends and familiar surroundings.

The Greeks, after all, had been in Asia Minor since Homeric and pre-Christian times, while the Turks had only appeared in the sixth and seventh centuries as different tribes of nomads from Asia, in search of fresh pastures.

Unfortunately, the Byzantine Empire with its Greek culture, language, and orthodox faith tried, under Emperor Digeni Romanov III, to regain some provinces in the far west of its Asiatic Empire in Armenia. Romanov, however, was defeated in AD 1071 at Manzikert by the Seljuq Turks, led by Apt Arslan, who had adopted the Muslim faith and organized the various Turkish tribes and Muslim allies in a powerful confederacy. The empire never recovered from the Manzikert defeat and finally succumbed in 1453 when Mohamed II conquered Constantinople and slew the Byzantine emperor, Constantine in battle.

The Greek population in the Ottoman Empire adapted to the change of sovereignty and provided the sultan with advisors and ministers who reached positions of authority in the administration but naturally suffered when mainland Greek vilayets started their war of independence in 1821. The patriarch on that occasion was hanged in Constantinople and