After sailing through the Persian Gulf, William Warfield travelled across Iraq, Kurdistan and Armenia before reaching Tiflis, where he spent just a few days before moving on to the Black Sea.
Tabriz we reached the Russian frontier in a huge auto bus that runs regularly over the splendid military road, to the railway terminus at Julfa. Julfa was once an important Armenian centre, but its ancient prestige has now entirely departed, and there remains only a dirty, offensive Russian frontier town. After being shamefully robbed by a vicious-looking set of customs officers, we succeeded in catching the one daily passenger train to Tiflis with the welcome assistance of an English commercial traveller. Then followed twenty-four hours in the train during which we passed under the very shadow of Ararat, through the heart of Russian Armenia.
Russian railway carriages are comfortable enough, and the place of dining-cars is taken by clean, pleasant station restaurants, where the train stops at convenient intervals for meals. Speed is no consideration in this distant corner of the Czar's Empire, and the trains potter along in an indifferent way that savours decidedly of the East.
Tiflis however is quite like a provincial town of European Russia, having lost all the Oriental character it possessed a generation ago. As we bumped over the crossings into the railway station, Edwin Warfield remarked that we might almost be running into Philadelphia. We agreed that we preferred Bagdad, and would take a horse in preference to a railway carriage, and let Asoufi's charcoal brazier do for our buffet, whenever we again had an opportunity.
Picturesque as is the situation of Tiflis, it is in a hollow without mountain views. But it is the terminus of one of the most striking scenic highways in the world. This is the splendid military road across the Caucasus to Vladikavkaz. We found this section a wild jumble of deep gorges, splendid valleys, and towering peaks, that shame the Alps, and are not to be compared with anything in Europe. The natives, sturdy hillmen in long skirted Circassian coats and huge sheepskin hats, yield nothing to the Kurds in barbaric appearance. That this region has not become a tourist's haunt, a mountaineer's paradise, is due solely to the backwardness of the country and the lack of proper accommodations.
Tiflis was once the capital of Georgia, the home of a gallant race of open-handed swashbucklers, whose picturesque costume is still common in the streets. But the old Tiflis is gone and instead we saw an imitation of Europe, ugly brick houses, with tin roofs, a museum, a picture gallery, pretentious parks, and slums,—foul, narrow allies full of white-faced women and dirty children, homes of the labourers who bear the burden of European civilization. In Turkey we saw no such thing. There were beggars and dervishes, the halt, the lame, and the blind, but they did not suffer for lack of food, and there were no slums.
From Tiflis we reached the port of Batum on the Black Sea, and there boarded an Austrian steamer for the Bosphorus. The cities of the Turkish coast are strange mixtures of East and West, Ottoman and Byzantine, as is the Sultan's capital itself. With its Byzantine mosques, its bazaars, its European stores, and crowds of people in many garbs it seems an anomaly to the Western visitor, a bit of Asia in Europe. But we who had come from the eastward knew that it was really an European city in most essentials, and that Asia was far away on the other side of Anatolia, beyond the portals of the great gateway we had but lately traversed.
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