Читать книгу Around the Black Sea. Asia Minor, Armenia, Caucasus, Circassia, Daghestan, the Crimea, Roumania онлайн

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Although the Turkish ministry was exceedingly anxious to close the arrangement and obtain the credit of promoting such an extensive scheme of internal improvements, they were afraid of Germany—first, on account of the controversy with Greece over Crete, and, second, for fear the kaiser would object to a proposed increase in the Turkish tariff. This situation was complicated by the fact that the kaiser’s sister is the wife of the crown prince and the future king of Greece, and the Turkish administration cannot raise the necessary revenue by advancing duties on imported goods 5 per cent., as is now proposed, without the consent of the five European Powers.

The concession involves the construction of about fifteen hundred miles of track through Armenia, Kurdistan, and Mesopotamia, and the vilayets of Trebizond, Sivas, Van, Diarbekir and Mossoul. The road begins at the port of Snedis, on the Mediterranean, at the mouth of the Orontes River, about sixty miles south of Alexandretta, and about thirty miles from the ancient town of Antioch. From there it runs eastward through Aleppo, Urfa, Diarbekir, Bitlis, and other populous cities to Lake Van and encircles that lake, which is the most important of all the interior bodies of water in Turkey. From Diarbekir, which is to be a junction, one branch of the road will run northwest to the city of Sivas and another southwest to the Persian boundary at Suleimanieh, crossing the valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris Rivers and bisecting the province of Mesopotamia, which it is proposed to reclaim to agriculture by the reconstruction of the vast systems of irrigation which were used by the ancients, and for some mysterious reason have been allowed to go to waste.