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bastards appeared to be troubling Paul. After the caravan of horses and mules jangled up the mountain and down the other side, the village of Mushar finally came into view. What a contrast to the glory of Constantinople and the elegant harbour at Trebizond! Dusty, foul-smelling streets, full of yelping dogs and ragged children, buzzed with flies and mosquitoes.
    ‘
Şapka giyen insanlara gel!
’ the children chanted, which Paul translated as ‘Come see the people wearing hats!’
    Black-eyed, brightly dressed children crowded around us, while their mothers drew their scarves over all but one eye and ambled through chickens, lambs and dogs to see for themselves. Many of the children had swollen eyes covered with clusters of black flies and I asked Paul why they didn’t shoo them away.
    ‘Because they believe that to do so would bring on the eye-sickness. Trachoma. It’s rampant in these parts.’
    Trachoma, caused by flies, leads to chronic infection and, if left untreated, would cause blindness in at least half of these children. I watched them run after our horses, clouds of black flies following them. The adults were no better off, and they didn’t try to brush away the flies either. Instead, they made us gifts of fruit, goat’s milk and grapes, huge bunches of them that they pressed into our dusty hands. A woman carrying a baby pressed a bit of blue cloth, with the shape of an eye embroidered on it, into Hetty’s hand, nodding to where Thomas dozed on her back.
    ‘It’s called the
atchka ooloonk
,’ Paul explained. ‘People carry them to ward off the evil eye.’
    The children were wearing blue beads, shells or triangular bundles of cloth,which had the same symbol and verses from the Koran sewn inside. Hetty leaned down to touch a dark-eyed baby wearing one around her neck, but the woman pulled away, covering the child with her veil.
    ‘Don’t take it personally,’ Paul said. ‘You must never praise a child because it draws the evil eye to him, and if you forget you must say
Maşallah
, “God has willed it”.’
    Mushar, it turns out, is bigger than I first thought, running east to west along the Black Sea coast. Heavily wooded hills reach down almost to the shoreline where pristine, undisturbed white sand gleams in the midday sunlight. The centre of the village is more developed than the outskirts with wooden two- and three-storeyed houses looking onto a reasonably sized square. A Christian church and a mosque dominate either end, and the only other building of note is what looks like a store, with a haphazard jumble of items spilling from an open doorway. Paul led us down a small street, behind the Armenian church, and we turned onto an overgrown, cobbled pathway. At the end of this narrow lane we saw a neat, biscuit-coloured stone house, which looked as though it had been transported fully formed from the English countryside. It was a house such as a child might draw, with a central wooden door surmounted by a small, arched fanlight and two mullioned sash windows on either side. This arrangement is repeated on the second floor, with the addition of an extra window in the middle. The remnants of a garden were visible in the overgrown borders both sides of the door, and old fruit trees blossomed in a little orchard to one side.
    ‘It’s just wonderful,’ Hetty said.
    ‘Who on earth would build such a house here?’ I asked.
    Paul looked at it as he got down from his horse. ‘It’s called
usuts’ch’I tuny
, “the teacher’s house”. Jane Kent had it built when she taught at the school here.’
    ‘It reminds me of a house from an English novel,’ Hetty said.
    ‘That was the idea. It’s supposed to be a model of Jane’s home in Surrey.’
    I asked Paul why the teacher had left, but he was preoccupied with unloading the mules and didn’t seem to hear. Inside we walked from room to room.
    A small parlour and drawing room look out either side of the front door, while the dining room has a