Hannah Lucinda Smith: Finding Turkey in Narnia

Source:Engelsbergideas Date:13Sep2023

I was oblivious to Narnia’s religious symbolism when I first read the Chronicles, aged around seven. For me, Lewis’ world was all about its landscapes and characters, places, people, talking animals and fantastical beasts, which he describes so bewitchingly they danced in my mind. I devoured the stories again and again in dog-eared paperbacks, on audio versions on cassettes that I played until they unspooled, and in the BBC dramatisation that played on Sunday evenings in the early 1990s. I never really got into fantasy novels beyond Narnia, and by the time I was around ten I had moved onto other genres. But Lewis’ stories stayed with me – and when I moved to Turkey a decade ago I started seeing Narnia everywhere. Some references were overt, like Aslan, or the Turkish delight whichtreacherous Edmund craves. Others were more cryptic, or woven in with my own mental landscape of Turkey. Over the years, as I crisscrossed the vast Turkish landscape as a newspaper reporter, I was often slapped by a strange deja vu. Flying over the velvety-green cone-shaped hills on the Black Sea around Istanbul conjured up blurry memories of Fledge, the winged horse, soaring over verdant Narnia. From a train window in December the endless snowy Anatolian plain looked like the White Witch’s winter-locked wasteland. In a holy shrine close to the cave cities of Cappadocia I saw the sumptuous fur-trimmed costumes and hunting horns of the Bektashi, an Islamic mystic order – exactly how Lewis described Narnia’s regalia.

An intellectual tour de force for those of us who  watched Chronicles of Narnia breathlessly