Side’s Haunted House

In Side there is a falling-down old house that villagers believe is haunted. They are right. The lingering spirit is that of Eleanor Thomson Sel—‘Tomi’ to her friends in Side and around the world.
The roof of her cottage is caving in, the stone walls are giving way, the vegetation almost covers it, like a grave. And so it is, a place of death as well as a place of life and of post-life.
She was a singular sight in Side, walking the town with her large brown dog in tow, her day’s liras in her shoulder bag—a cord and two squares of faded kilim. She had short, fair hair and blue eyes; she was slight in frame, but not to be trifled with. She was friendly but careful—a woman alone, a foreigner, of a certain age….Yet Tomi was accepted and even assimilated in Side, known for its hospitality to strangers and the unconventional. (Nureyev swept through, one blistering August, in a long fur coat. His Tatar stock were Turkic-speaking.)
So why will no one touch her house—now a valuable piece of real estate in touristic Side? Why will her ghost not rest in peace?
Eleanor Thomson was an American, from San Francisco. But she left her native city and land as a young woman, never to return. No family, if any, ever mentioned. She became a journalist, notably in Paris, working for the eminent Agence France-Presse, translating from and into English. They sent her to China in the decade leading up to the Communist Revolution that succeeded in 1949.
In China, Tomi—or Tommy? was she even then Tomi?—one of her great friends was Henri Cartier-Bresson, not yet the world-famous photographer. His arresting and artful and humane pictures have recently been presented posthumously at the luxurious new Pera Museum in Istanbul at Tepebaşı, yet another benefaction of the Suna (Koç) and İnan Kıraç philanthropies, like the transformation in Antalya of the former St. George’s Church into a museum and research center for Mediterranean civilizations.
The photographer’s approach and philosophy can be summed up in his phrase and book, The Decisive Moment: a memorable picture occurs in the split second when an actual human event happens to be caught at a moment of maximum compositional and lighting values. The scene speaks both of human significance and of its formal qualities. In Tomi’s house in Side, Cartier-Bresson’s books, affectionately inscribed to her by him, survived. One went, as intended, to her talented, dear friends in Amsterdam, Hans Kemna and Adrian Brine, also householders in Side.
An even more intimate friend of Eleanor’s in China was the French journalist and writer, Jacques Marcuse, cousin of the famous neo-Marxist thinker, Herbert Marcuse, guru to American leftist students of the 1968-69 uprisings (he was then at the Berkeley campus of the University of California). Jacques Marcuse’s two sons considered Tomi their ‘real’ mother, and visited her in Side, the elder also coming at the time of her death, and inheriting her flat in Paris. The younger came, earlier, from India, traipsing the dress and hair-style and attitudes that some Western youth like the Beatles absorbed from the sub-continent in the 1960’s and ‘70’s.
Tomi got to Side in the early ‘70’s, initially as a traveler on vacation. But there she met and fell in with Suat and Mizou Kabaağaç, hosts at Pamphylia Pansiyon by the Little Beach--that haven for the discerning--half-Istanbul, half-Side—and half-French. And half like Erewhon—‘nowhere’ else. Tomi’s stay turned into retirement and residence in the village for the rest of her life.
She made trips to London and Paris (always with adventures: losing her money or documents to thieves on the underground…), to Istanbul and around Turkey—once overland to Iran and back—but she and Side adopted each other. And she adopted its stray dogs and cats, as they gravitated to her. Few people are equally fond of both; for you feline partisans, I tell you Tomi called her favorite dog Kedi—‘cat’ in Turkish; I’m not sure it was a language mistake. Her Turkish was shaky but not her affections, or her opinions: don’t get her started on controversial topics, at the dinner table.
On her trips away from Side, a house-sitter was required because of all the pets to feed. Several of us were called on in turn to fill this office. The house was one square bedroom and one square bed, mosquito net-draped, one square sitting room with fireplace, a bath and a small kitchen. The unroofed front porch was not quite high enough to see the sea. On blazing summer days Tomi slept in the afternoons underneath that terrace, only surfacing at dusk for her rakı and meze and round of visits. In later years she went to SoundWaves Restaurant (inheritor of the Pamphylia) at noon for the first rakı, and sometimes didn’t appear at all in the evening.
Mornings might involve a walk to Sorgun; then it seemed longish, across the empty Big Beach, to the deliciously cool pine forest. There were a dozen or so çardaks on stilts near the water, for the summer bathing of some Manavgat families. Now the beach is wall-to-wall tourist, big hotels sprout at Sorgun, competing with the pines; the çardaks, ‘fled like the flood’s foam’….
I took my American-writer friend Jeannette Mirsky to Side in summer 1976, and she and Tomi became enthusiastic friends (rakı, like vodka, connects people). In those days some of the restaurants were named for Cyprus places, then in part recently ‘liberated’ by Turkish forces: the Girne (Kyrenia), the Baf (Paphos, where Aphrodite rose from the sea), the Kıbrıs (Cyprus) itself (a headline I remember: Kıbrıs Bizim !—ours). We drank our lion’s milk with piping hot pide and humous—and high good humor—the two American women, but both world travelers and Turkey aficianados, warming to each other and to the clinks and chugs of rakı.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Alfred Friendly and his wife Jean were there then , too, staunch friends of Tomi and regulars at Mizou’s evening table at the Pamphylia—one big one for the well-favored. Friendly, on hearing I taught philosophy, immediately insisted, ‘Explain existentialism to me!’ It was that rare a place and atmosphere. Tomi was no mean cook herself, a speciality being Mongol pot. She brought the fine brass equipment from China (rather like a fondue set): boil water over the little sterno stove, cook cubes of meat on skewers in it, then dump in scallions and other greens to make the rich broth. Another favorite was her chicken Marengo, done slowly (fowl were tough then) with bouquet garni in a big earthenware crock (güveç). When the bottoms burned out, Turks sometimes put them on top of the chimney.
Tomi appreciated such details of local culture and wrote about life in Side and some of its characters for publications like The Christian Science Monitor of Boston, a distinguished newspaper (discounting the C. S. editorial). One of Tomi’s protégés, in English lessons, was the local milk-girl. Another loyal Side friend was the once tailor then halıcı (carpet-seller) and pansiyon and hotel owner, RecepYaşa.
Recep Bey and Tomi would drive over to Alanya occasionally to visit friends and to eat ice cream at Bamyacı, then at the top of the İskele Caddesi rather than at the bottom. We commiserated with Recep Bey and his family when his young daughter was killed in a car crash. And with Mrs.Friendly, when her visiting American friend was killed in her car on a Turkish highway. And Recep was there when the end came for Tomi, as suddenly and horribly.
When she didn’t show up at Soundwaves one day, Ali Bey, its patron, went to see whether she was sick. He found her at home—dead—in her bedroom, strangled by the cord of her own shoulder bag. She must have waked and resisted her attacker(s)—that would be like her—in the night—the rooms were plundered.
Who? Why? Locals would have known there was no treasure there: a few kilims, a few books, a little cheap local jewelry. Passers-through may have heard ‘American’ and sniffed money, or someone may have thought she was harboring valuable antiquities. Much speculation but no sure intelligence, to this day. The mystery lives. And the sadness.
Her faithful friends, Ali and Penny Yeşilipek, despite much difficulty, succeeded in giving her a dignified burial, in the little Muslim cemetery, on the old road from Side to Kemer. Tomi’s grave is close to those of her Istanbul-Side friends, Suat and Mizou Kabaağaç.
Oh, ‘Sel’—her married name? Another Istanbul-lu, who married her, surprisingly, in the ‘80’s (his sister worked for the U.S. Consulate when it was still next door to Pera Palas Hotel overlooking the Golden Horn). What each expected of the marriage can only be guessed. But soon enough it unraveled, perhaps little harm done. But the wicked harm of her murder lasts, and haunts the little house Tomi loved as home in Side.

–Frank White, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, City University of New York, divides his time in retirement between New York and Alanya . fwhitetr@yahoo.com