Ortakoy was one of a dozen or so Greek villages strung out along the Bosphorus between Pera and the summer houses of the European diplomats. They had been there two thousand years ago, and more-when Agamemnon had assembled fleets, as Homer sang. Greeks from the Bosphorus had manned the ships that sailed against Xerxes, four centuries before Christ; they had ferried Alexander the Great across to Asia, when he took his helots on their legendary campaigns in the East. An Ottoman pasha, Lefevre recalled, had explained that God gave the land to the Turks-and to the Greeks He left the sea. How could it have been otherwise? Four hundred years after the Turkish Conquest, the Greeks still drew a living from the sea and the straits. They had been sailing these waters while the Turks were still shepherding flocks across the deserts of Asia.
The thought made Lefevre frown.
Foreigners seldom visited the Greek villages, in spite of their reputation for good fish; before long, Lefevre found himself with a tail of curious small boys, who shouted after him and pushed and shoved one another while their grandmothers looked on. Some of the smaller boys imagined that Lefevre was a Turk, and all of them guessed that he was rich, so when Lefevre stopped and turned around they drew together, half curious and half afraid. They saw him pull a coin from his pocket and offer it with a smile to the smallest boy among them. The boy hung back, somebody bolder snatched the coin, and pandemonium erupted as the whole pack of children turned as one to chase after him down the street.