Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/192

 XVII

ANGORA

FEVZI, RAFET AND KIAZIM KARABEKR PASHAS AND THEIR MILITARY DICTATORSHIP UNDER KEMAL PASHA—THE "PONTUS" DEPORTATIONS—MOSUL, THE KURDS AND THE SPLIT IN ISLAM—THE FRANCO-ARMENIAN FRONT IN CILICIA, THE GREEK FRONT BEFORE SMYRNA, AND THE ALLIED FRONT BEFORE CONSTANTINOPLE—HOW THE BROKEN PARLIAMENT WAS RECONSTRUCTED AT ANGORA—FERID'S COUNTER-REVOLUTION AT KONIA.

Angora lies tilted up on its hill, a gray blanket of flat roofs pierced with white minarets and green cypresses, and scarred across its middle with the ruins of 1915. At its foot lies a shallow marsh stretching from the town itself to its railway station, a mile and a half away. Along the rim of the basin up whose southern slope it sprawls, are the summer villas of its wealthier families, secure above the hot-weather malaria of the marsh.

The heart of the town lies along its lower fringes. When the Sivas congress moved the Nationalist Party's council to Angora late in September, 1919, Kemal himself took up his abode in an upper room at the railway station and a Decauville locomotive was kept fired up night and day beneath his win