From the Jewish Virtual Library:
ISKENDERUN (formerly Alexandretta), harbor town on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey on the gulf of the same name; population (2004), 173,900. The town (along with its district), first attached to Syria under the French mandate, was annexed to Turkey in 1939. Jews settled in Iskenderun in the Middle Ages. They were expelled by the Crusaders in 1098, but returned during the 16th century. During the 17th century the Jews of Iskenderun were among the supporters of Shabbetai *Ẓevi. The community was small and numbered some tens of families. After World War I about 20 families remained in Iskenderun. Most of the Jews emigrated from Iskenderun to Israel with the establishment of the State.
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My father's travels on cargo ships were always a source of fascination for me. He found the world fascinating and travel a worthwhile way of penetrating its mysteries, his university, in fact. My youthful travels were limited to those trips to Spain we took as a family, so, as a child, to know that my father had traveled much further --down the west coast of Africa, across North Africa, and most exotically of all, to Iskenderun, as far east as it is possible to go in the Mediterranean, further east than Alexandria, than Port Said, than Cyprus, than Haifa-- created a sort of envy in me. That he had had so much more excitement in his life than our settled life would suggest, probably explains my own wanderlust and the admiration I have for his wanderings.
"Iskenderun is also called Alexandretta", my father would say, and I (--arrogantly thinking I knew more because I read books, than my father who had lived them) said,
"Oh, Alexandria--"
"No, Martita, my father would gently correct-- Alexandretta", and I would be confused.
My father's ship stopped in the port of Iskenderun (named after Alexander the Great) some time after the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and his coming to the United States about 1947. I would guess that he probably stopped there sometime in late 1945: as until May 2, when the Battle of the Mediterranean ended (followed by Germans surrenderer May 5) the Mediterranean was not entirely free of risk to shipping.
In Iskendeun, on shore leave after unloading the cargo, my father and his shipmates went to a cafe in the town. Iskenderun had been part of French Transjordanie until it was captured by the Turkish Army in 1938 and was recognized part of Turkey in 1939. Seated at the cafe, my father and his shipmates were approached by a few local men who spoke to them in Spanish, but a Spanish whose pronunciation sounded a bit odd.
"They explained to us that they were Jews whose families had fled Spain on account of the Inquisition. They had settled in Iskenderun centuries ago, and lived as Jews, although they spoke Turkish, too."
The excerpt from the Jewish Virtual Library above, says there were only twenty Sephardic families left in Iskenderun after World War I. The men my father and his shipmates spoke to were among them.
"Life was very primitive in Iskenderun, Martita. Everything was carried on donkeys, all the women were covered up, and the men, too, they wore long clothes. I thought Galicia was backward, but I never see [sic] in Galicia what I saw in Iskenderun."
I wonder whether how much of what I saw in Carsamba, that conservative Muslim area of Istanbul --the women dressed in black veils from head to toe, their faces covered, the men in skullcaps and beards-- resembles what my father saw in Iskenderun in 1945.
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While I was in the Avrupa Pasaji (the Mirrored Passage) in Istanbul, I was surprised to find a tiny souvenir of the city in the shape of a circular fridge magnet with an Orthodox icon of Mary at its center, bordered by an Islamic motif and ISTANBUL written on the bottom. The image looked very familiar, but I could not place it.
I asked the seller, a fair-haired woman, whether she could tell me what incarnation of Mary was depicted, but she could tell me nothing. All she could tell me was that the Christian churches were located off the Golden Horn. Perhaps someone could tell me more there. I left Istanbul with the mystery unresolved.
Back in Caunes, I looked at the image of the icon again and thought it might be of Our Lady Of Perpetual Help, a popular object of devotion among Roman and Eastern Catholics. I went to the Internet and sure enough, the image on the fridge magnet was a copy of the icon.
Here the story gets curiouser: Our Lady Of Perpetual Help is an icon painted in Crete and first exposed in San Mateo Church in Rome in 1499. (At the time, Crete formed part of the Republic of Venice.) "Why would someone manufacture a fridge magnet souvenir of Istanbul using a Cretan icon that hangs in a church in Rome?" you may ask.
The answer is, I think, that the icon of Our Lady Of Perpetual Help is a Byzantine icon, dear to Christians Roman, Greek, Russian and Oriental Orthodox. Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul was conquered by the Ottoman Turks in 1453; the icon was painted some time between 1325 and 1480 and it was well known: a parchment attached to the icon tells that it was brought to Rome after being stolen by a merchant traveling there from Crete.
So my little refrigerator magnet is a highly charged repository of Istanbul's Christian religious past as Constantinople. Yet the letters ISTANBUL on the souvenir's bottom place it firmly in the present--
As if to say, "Istanbul is for Christians, too. Our Lady Of Perpetual Help --PROTECT US."
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