reconciliation. "You see," he said, "it is only the Turks themselves who can protect 'minorities.' It is easy enough for any Armenian to get on with them. The supposed antipathies are made in the States."
The Governor-General of the Ottoman Bank, M. Louis Steeg, also begged me to do all in my power to stop this useless propaganda. The Armenians are begging to be 'left alone.'"
It is manifest again that Mustapha Kemal includes Christian minorities in the "New Turkey" he has determined to save from veils, harems, and lattices; the crumbling remains of Byzantium, anti-progressive Hodjas, and the Byzantian Patriarch imposed on Constantinople!
Certainly these Christian musicians gave us only Turkish music and songs: love songs, military airs, the Moslem 'Hymn of Independence' (known to every child in the land), Anatolian folk-songs, and, most interesting and incomprehensible of all, the weird, piping solo that accompanies the dancing dervishes, a combination of sacred mystery, sentiment and melancholy.
Unfortunately, no European can expect to enter fully into Turkish music without a good deal of study.
And yet, deeply as I feel the charm of Eastern landscapes, the glorious sunsets or brilliant sunshine revealing white minarets against the black cypress, I still hold dearer memories of the old talks with my Turkish sister, beside the roseate mangal, as she revealed to me the fascinating mysteries of the life of the sons and daughters of her land.
It is the same to-day in the more strenuous and, in some respects, more Western atmosphere of the proud National Assembly. Even if I have done but little to convey the admiration their splendid resistance demands, which I so strongly feel, the effort to understand has brought me the greatest pleasure. And whether or not I have earned, or merited, the joy, none can take it from me.
