Hav by Jan Morris

 


Welsh travel writer Jan Morris imagines a tiny peninsula in the Mediterranean, a city-state by the name of Hav.

Jan Morris spent six months in Hav in 1985 and she returned for six days in 2005. Part One of her book provides a month by month account of her time in 1985 while Part Two is day by day in 2005, all in exquisite detail as Jan Morris includes enough information, description and insight to fill three hundred pages.

Thanks to New York Review Books, I recently joined Jan Morris for three weeks in Hav. What a country! Of course, for a full account, you will have to read Jan Morris' book for yourself. But what I can do is share a number of highlights from my trip.

Like any traveler, real or armchair, I'll turn the spotlight on what I found particularly noteworthy. And since, for me, the arts and literature are the thing, I put together the following slide show:

Trumpet in the A.M.
A trumpeter greets each day not with a blaring reveille but a plaintive lament. I hesitate to say dirge but each time I was roused from sleep, those notes possessed such a mournful quality, I wouldn't be surprised if a number of women and men were moved to tears. As I understand, this music on trumpet has a history going back to the European Middle Ages and involves a bloody conflict between Christians and Muslims.

Hubble-bubbles and Much More
Crack of a crisp, clear 6 a. m. and I'm down by the water at an open air market reminding me of Baltimore Inner Harbor or Fisherman's Wharf San Francisco. Absolutely everything is for sale: spare parts for cars and trucks, rolls and rolls of silks, apples, casaba melons, coffee beans, meat on hooks, ponchos, shoes and, of course, second hand books - one great find - a copy of Moby Dick with 'Property of the American University, Beirut' stamped on the inner cover. We should anticipate seeing all the world's goods on display in the Hav market since, after all, among the city-state's population: Turkish, Arab, Greek, African, Armenian as well as Russian, German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Swiss.

Viewing Rainbow
If you like watching TV, you're in for a treat and it doesn't matter what corner of the globe you happen to be from. In Hav you'll have an opportunity to watch old Hollywood movies in Turkish, the most recent American soap operas in Arabic, talk shows in French, Italian, English or Chinese. I even caught a replay of a soccer match with Pelé in Portuguese with Russian subtitles.

Gala Events and Red-letter Receptions
Positioned as it is at the crossroads of East and West, as a geographical hub for various cultures, Hav has hosted receptions and grand balls for Russian nobility, world leaders, famous artists and writers, Leo Tolstoy among their number. Also of special note: Rimsky-Korsakov, a naval officer at the time, became so enchanted with everything he saw in Hav that he was inspired to play one of his own compositions on a grand piano in a prominent Hav garden. Then, years later, he adapted the melody the Hav trumpeter played at dawn for the recurrent theme in his Scheherazade.

Chance Meeting
Sipping Turkish coffee at a coffee shop in the old district, Jan Morris and I had the good fortune to meet novelist Armand Sauvignon who came to Hav from France in 1928 and has remained in the city-state ever since, a man currently in his eighties with a long beaky nose, creased brow and sharp gray eyes that combine to give one the impression he's looking out at the world in continual irony. Armand Sauvignon was gracious enough to write his name in the notebook I had with me. The next time I returned to the Hav market, I searched out a bookseller displaying a Armand Sauvignon novel (actually, she had five English language novels of his for sale). I made the purchase and scotch-taped the author's signature on the title page. Incidentally, the novel is Returning, the saga of two aristocratic families that's set in a fictional Polova that's really Hav.

Souful Geometry
The newly constructed section of Hav (New Hav) is breathtaking in its symmetry, as if an exercise in geometry, Mies van der Rohe meets Buckminster Fuller. As Jan Morris writes, "The city was supposed to be a physical representation of the cooperation, of unity in variety. Its circular shape was meant to symbolize eternal peace, and each boulevard was planted with a different species of tree (planes, catalpas and ilexes) to express the joy of amicable difference."

Maximal Splatter Sport
No account of Hav would be complete without reference to a May 5th event that takes extreme sports to unfathomable limits: the Hav Roof-Race. Here are the words of Jan Morris on this death-defying spectacle originating in the 16th century:

The Roof-Race (author's caps) begins "with the scaling of the city wall, beside the Market Gate, and it entails a double circuit of the entire Medina, by a different route each time, involving jumps over more than thirty alleyways, culminating in a prodigious leap over the open space in the centre of the Great Bazaar, and ending desperately in a slither down the walls of the Castle gate to the finish. The record time for the course is just under an hour, and officials are posted all over the rooftops, beneath red umbrellas like Turkish pashas themselves, to make sure there is no cheating."

For hundreds of years, the race was run at midnight but so many runners (usually about 50 runners run the Roof-Race) were maimed or fell to their death, in 1882 the Hav leaders, Russians at the time, shifted the race to dawn. Evidently many of the Hav youths disapproved of the switch - they derived great delight from watching splayed bodies of runners falling through the street-lights to their deaths. Oh, well, at least nowadays those youthful souls can record Roof-Race deaths on their cellphones.

To read all the juicy details, run to your nearest bookseller (or computer) and start reading this New York Review Books edition beginning with an informative introductory essay by Ursula K. Le Guin. Travel writing has never been more imaginative.


Welsh author Jan Morris, 1926-2020