Lost Levantine
Michael Through Michael Vatikotis’s lenses Middle East’s unending conflict and violence, lost in the litany of perpetual strife and struggle are the layers of culture and civilisation that accumulated over centuries.
Middle East was once a region known poetically as the Levant – a reference to the East , where the sun rose. Amid the bewildering mix of races, religions and rivalries, was above all an affinity with the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Today any mixing of this trinity of faiths is regarded as a recipe for hatred and prejudice. There was a time, in the last century, when Arabs and Jews rubbed shoulders in bazaars and teashops, worked and played together, intermarried and shared family histories.
Michael Valikiotis’s parents and grandparents were a product of this forgotten pluralist tradition, which spanned almost a century from the mid-1800s to the end of the Second World War in 1945. The Ottoman Empire, in a last gasp of reformist energy before it collapsed in the 1920s granted people of many creeds and origins generous space to nestle into and thrive. The European colonial order that followed was to reveal deep divisions. Vatikiotis’s family eventually found themselves caught between clashing faiths and contested identity. Their story is of people set adrift, who built new lives and prospered in holy lands, only to be caught up in conflict and tossed on the waves of a violent history.
Lost Between the Lines creates a world where the Middle East was a placed to go, not flee from, and the subsequent start of a prolonged nightmare of suffering form which the region has yet to recover.
Vatikiotis hails from once prosperous Italian Jewish Sornaga clan which, in the 19th century, decamped to Egypt to seek its fortune. His father’s side descended from the Greek Orthodox Vatikiotis family, which emigrated to Palestine in the mid 1870s. He has been faithful to these many layered roots, “escaping the mind-numbing normality” of a childhood in London suburbia to become a journalist and conflict mediator who has lived all over the world.
Lives Between the Lines, is a moving story of a journey to explore his identity by visiting the places – primarily Egypt and Israel-in which several generation so his Levantine ancestors made their homes. It is demonstrates tolerance between diverse faiths and different communities at a time when much of the Middle East is being consumed by bigotry, fanaticism, and sectarian violence.
Today one of international migration where refugees fleeing the Middle East to Europe in flimsy overcrowded boats.
His great grandfather Samuele was a pioneering entrepreneur who left Livorno for Egypt in the 1860s, shortly after the start of the Suez Canal construction. He made a fortune in the cotton-ginning business, fuelled by global shortages brought about by American Civil War.
Samuele’s eponymous grandson, Michael’s great uncle, followed in the family footsteps, founded a ceramics business south of Cairo in 1905 and amassed another fortune.
The polyglottal Sornagas led a gilded life, rubbing shoulders with the high society, playing cards with the modernising Khedive Ismail and waiting through endless cocktail parties in Alexandria and Cairo. The cultural contributions made by several generations of Levantines including Constantine P Cavafy, Edmond Jabes, Jacquelline Kahanoff and Lawrence Durrell enhanced Egypt. Vatikiotis’s brother Leontios a great uncle who spent 60 years rebuilding a monastery in the Judaean Desert.
He recognises the Ottoman Capitulations, under which foreign communities within the empire could trade, pay taxes, worship and deliver justice according to their own laws, ultimately proved a double-edged sword. Although on one hand, they became the foundations of diversity and cosmopolitanism in the Middle East.
After the Ottoman Empire’s implosion following the first World War, European colonialism ushered in arbitrary dividing lines and fixed borders unleashing a rising tide of Arab nationalism, Islamism and Zionism. Both the Sornagas in Egypt and Vatikiotis in Palestine were buffeted by the storm. By’ mid 1950s they had upped sticks and left to rebuild their lives in the West.
Between the Lines: A Journey in search of the Lost Levant by Michael Vatikotis, Weidenfeld & Nicolson £20, 304 pages.