‘I glimpse her ahead of me’ – a solo female traveller follows her hero across Turkey

Green-eyed Gertrude Bell belongs in Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, that slab of velvety antique that enthralled the English (they were not yet British) in the love-affair phase of their relationship with the Arabs. County Durham-born to a wealthy industrialist father, Bell (1868-1926) was a key player when the Powers tried ineptly to mould the Middle East, as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. She is well covered in the literature and appears in a large hat alongside Churchill in conference photographs. But as Pat Yale announces in this new book: ‘Her time in Turkey has been largely overlooked.’

Bell travelled extensively in that country before the first world war (starting in 1899) and in its aftermath. She wrote two books about it, The Thousand and One Churches and The Churches and Monasteries of the Tur Abdin, as well as another three in which it featured, plus diaries, voluminous letters and articles in the Revue Archéologique. Yale draws extensively on the sources and quotes judiciously. A British-born resident of Turkey, a guidebook writer and a Turkish-speaker, in these pages she retraces Bell’s steps. ‘I hoped,’ she says at the outset, ‘to see how much had changed in Turkey and how much had stayed the same.’

The book starts, as Bell did, in Istanbul (Constantinople then), dips south as far as Bodrum and works east through the Anatolian interior, following the Syrian border in the south and continuing almost to the Iraqi border. Bell travelled on a horse, in a private train compartment and, across the Tigris, on a kelek, a raft buoyed by an inflated goatskin. Yale follows close behind in a dolmuş (shared minibus).

The reader sees Bell purchasing bolts of silk, scaling mountains, arguing over hotel bills and co-leading an archaeological dig in Binbirkilise (‘See what we have got out of it!’ she wrote to her beloved father.