The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘The most popular sartorial souvenir of all’
Continuing our series focusing on 80 travel-related objects from around the world, Nick Trend sheds light on a ubiquitous form of beachwear, an original view of Venice and a triumph of Viking design
20
THE SARONG
Asia
Adopting local dress, as a tourist, can be a problematic concept. I’m not thinking about accusations of cultural appropriation, though I guess that could be an issue, more the almost inevitable risk of looking faintly ridiculous. If there is an exception to the rule, however, it is the sarong and its close cousin, the lungi, which must surely be – after the T-shirt – the most popular sartorial souvenir of all.
True, it doesn’t make convincing streetwear for a sunburnt visitor. It also doesn’t travel well – despite the efforts of David Beckham in 1998, when in an epic fashion fail, he wore one over a pair of trousers, and also celluloid stardom wrapped around the torsos of Ralph Fiennes and Pierce Brosman. But the sarong has become almost de rigueur as beachwear for holidaymakers in sunnier climes.
Traditionally the simple rectangular piece of fabric – typically about a yard wide and two and a half yards long – is fashioned into a simple skirt for men or women and worn by locals in hot climates everywhere from the Horn of Africa to the South Pacific.
The word sarong is an English adaptation of the Malay term for the variant worn mainly in Indonesia, but they are known by many, many different names. In Malaysia, it is called a kain; in parts of the Philippines, a tapis; in Fiji they are known as isulu; and in India different names include Phanek, Mekhela, kaili and vetti.
Sometimes sarongs are used only as nightwear, sometimes for formal occasions, sometimes for manual work. In some cultures they are worn only for ceremonial or religious occasions. There are differences too in the way the fabric is tied and secured around the waist, and sometimes between the male and female styles.
But while some sarongs are pure white or even black, one of the most popular characteristics – which is surely part of its appeal as a souvenir – is the preference for bright colours and elaborate patterns. Sometimes these are gender-specific. For example, in Malaysia men often wear woven check patterns, and women prefer their sarongs dyed in batik style, which is also highly popular in Indonesia.
But it is unlikely that many tourists will worry too much about the details. It is their designs, their portability and their sheer practicality on the beach that have made sarongs such a popular holiday investment.
21
MAP OF VENICE
Italy
Mounted high on a wall in one of the later galleries of the Museo Correr in Venice is a black and white map of the city. It’s huge. Six pieces of paper have been fitted together to form a view more than nine feet wide and four and a half feet high. The city is seen from an unusual angle – not from directly above, but looking down obliquely, across the lagoon, so that you can see directly into St Mark’s square and many of the smaller campos and canals. In the far distance you can see the Alps, from where the figure of Mercury (patron of commerce) descends, with, beneath him, the date stamp: MD (1500). In the foreground is Neptune, protector of Venice’s trading empire.
It’s full of fascinating detail. The campanile (bell tower) in St Mark’s Square is still showing the damage caused by a lightning strike in 1483 (though later versions of the map depict the repairs). There is no Bridge of Sighs – it wasn’t built until 1600 – and the Rialto Bridge is not the stone version we know today, but a clumsy wooden construction. You can see into
the shipyards of the Arsenale and the gondoliers on the Grand Canal. In short, it’s an extraordinary depiction of what, at the time, was arguably the greatest and most powerful city on Earth – a chance to let your eye roam over the streets and byways that have changed so little since then.
The map was made by a German artist who took the Italian name Jacopo de’ Barbari, and it was paid for by Anton Kolb, a wealthy Nuremberg merchant operating from Venice. It’s far too big for practical use and was probably intended more as a showpiece, a celebration of the city at the exact halfway point of the second millennium. It was also a revolution in map-making – probably inspired by a similar, though much less detailed view of Florence made 20 years earlier. And it is also a reminder that Venice was not just a military and commercial superpower in 1500, it had already become, just a few decades after Gutenberg had designed his first printing press, a world centre of printing and publishing. Even so, such was the size of the sheets making up the de’ Barbari map, presses had to be built in Venice to produce it.
How did he make it? De’Barbari probably made sketches from the tops of bell towers around the ciy and, in an extraordinary feat of perspectival imagination, stitched them together into a convincing view. There are minor distortions and inaccuracies, but nothing as successful as this had ever been made before. It changed map-making forever. Correr Museum, Venice (correr.visitmuve.it/en/home)
Ready for raids: the Oseberg ship demonstrates extraordinary craftmanship
22 VIKING SHIPS
Norway
There is something compelling about Viking longboats. They carry the whole weight of our mental – and comic-book – image of a red-haired chieftain in a horned helmet bestriding the bows as his raiding party of oarsmen-warriors propels the ship towards a beach and the defenceless Anglo-Saxon village beyond.
But while some of the details – including the horns on the helmet – are figments of the Victorian imagination, our idea of the longship is not. We know exactly how they look, partly because of the extraordinary survivals in a small museum on the Bygdøy peninsula, a short ferry-ride from the centre of Oslo.
The Viking Ship Museum is home to the most perfectly preserved examples anywhere, including two – the Oseberg and the Gokstad – that are virtually complete, and the substantial fragments of a third. They were unearthed from Norwegian burial mounds between about 1880 and 1903, but they are far less fragile than our own 7th-century find at Sutton Hoo. The majority of the oak timbers and iron rivets of these ships are intact and polished to a deep shine. Where the Sutton Hoo ship was a ghostly archaeological imprint, albeit found together with some astonishing treasures, the Oslo ships look as though they have just rolled out of the shipwright’s yard.
Their elegant lines, and the craftsmanship of the timber work is extraordinary. The planks are laid clinker (overlapping) style and taper together sharply as they sweep up to a high, curving prow. My particular favourite is the astonishingly fine Oseberg ship, which retains the delicate wooden scroll at the peak and some highly intricate carvings of dragons along the stem. It is dated to 834AD, at the height of the Viking raids on Britain.
The Gokstad is a few feet longer and a little later, dating from about 900AD, a generation after the Vikings had lost Wessex to Alfred the Great in 878AD, though they remained in control of much of the north and east of England.
Propelled by 32 oarsmen, it could carry about 70 men and, with a large sail, its top speed was probably about 14mph, which is no slouch, even by modern standards.
Travel within the UK and overseas is currently restricted. See Page 3.
It’s an extraordinary depiction of what, at the time, was arguably the greatest city on Earth
The Daily Telegraph
Deep in the mountains of northeast Azerbaijan I am discussing Noah with an elderly villager. Wrapped in a headscarf and woolly hat, Malaksima, a formidable 80-something (she isn’t sure) with a weathered face like a walnut, is collecting spring water in a silver teapot. I ask about a tale that the people of Khinaliq are direct descendants of Noah. Had the Bible’s original sailor really dropped anchor on these flat summits?
“Noah?” says Malaksima. She laughs. “Show me: where’s the ocean? Noah’s not even Muslim.”
Though Khinaliq lacks two-by-two wildlife, from aardvarks to zebras, it might pass as somewhere from the Old Testament. At the head of one Azerbaijan’s remotest valleys, the village coils over a mountain spur above the valley floor. In the silence you can hear the river below. Natural gas fires burn like divine portents in the surrounding mountains. Before Islam – before the Hebrews wrote about Noah, even – Azerbaijanis were Zoroastrians, fire-worshippers who discovered magic according to Pliny the Elder.
Old habits die hard. Azerbaijan’s favourite name for itself remains “The Land of Fire.”
“Anyway,” continues Malaksima, “everyone knows an angel founded this village. He was called Nabi. He was sent by Allah to build a mosque in the valley. Maybe he came along with Noah, I don’t know. But it’s true. I swear on bread.”
“On bread?” I ask.
“Of course. It’s older than the Koran,” she reasons.
In the jigsaw of nations that forms the Caucasus, the least accessible, most interesting country is Azerbaijan. While Georgia is on the cusp of travel superstardom and Ryanair launched direct flights from Italy to Armenia in January 2020, Azerbaijan has a blank-slate appeal.
Capital Baku has tarted itself up with oil money, ringing a historic core with ego-architecture in an aspiration to become a Dubai of the Caspian Sea. But life in rural Azerbaijan carries on much as it has for centuries: venerating bread, ritualising tea-drinking (see panel), tending sheep. Figuring the way to experience that is on foot, I want to walk.
Sheki is in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, a five-hour drive west of Baku. That sounds a drag after your flight until you see the price of fuel (40p a litre) and the scenery. Beyond the capital, the desert ends abruptly and you are rolling past wooded hills and vineyards and blokes scything rhythmically in fields. It resembles a long-vanished Provence, if Provence had ever included samovars and Soviet trucks for sale at the roadside. They go for a song since Azerbaijan shrugged off Russia’s bear-hug in 1991.
In July 2019, Sheki won World Heritage status for its “tangible Silk Road heritage”. In the cool water garden of an old caravanserai, I sit beneath arcades where merchants once bartered for metalwork, ceramics and silks. In the Palace of Sheki Khans, I tour rooms with Persian carpets, a decorative fusion of the Middle East, India and China, of geometric Islam and the pictorial west.
The culture clash continues in a café beside the market. The owner flashes me a mouthful of gold teeth, then rattles through the day’s dishes: Central Asian sheep kidneys, Russian borscht, oriental dushbara dumplings, all accompanied by watery sheep’s yogurt served by the pint. The local delicacy is Ottoman, a sweet walnut baklava. Let’s just say Sheki has a lot of dentists.
For a change of scene I walk three miles to Kish village. As Sheki falls behind, woods take over, dotted here and there with former dachas. For the Russian elite, Azerbaijan was a Soviet shire, a place to breathe mountain air and enjoy a simple rustic life facilitated by servants.
Kish is the real deal, with cockerels strutting along rough-cobbled lanes. On the main square stands a bust of Thor Heyerdahl. The Norwegian adventurer has a cult following in Azerbaijan having funded the restoration of Kish’s first-century church, the country’s oldest. To understand why, you need to know about his pet theory concerning Azerbaijan as the wellspring of Scandinavians. They went west when the
Romans arrived, he thought, citing an Icelandic saga that describes Odin’s homeland as “Aser” east of the Black Sea and petroglyphs like Viking ships at Gobustan, 40 miles from Baku.
Azerbaijanis seem happy to indulge the idea. At the church, an attendant shows me two skeletons.
“You see?” he asks pointing into the crypt. “They’re giants.” They are, although Bronze Age skeletons over 6ft 6in seem on the large side even for proto-Scandinavians.
Throughout my time in Sheki, people mention Quba Rayon. Near the Russian border in the north-east, the district is said to be a throwback even by Azerbaijani standards; a mountainous place that was almost isolated until a road was built in 2006, where traditional culture still thrives in sheep villages. It is beautiful, remote, fascinating, people said.
I return to Baku and head north. Beyond Quba town, in the taxi of a rakish cove with a brigand’s haul of gold teeth – my driver refuses to risk his new car on the roads ahead – I ascend up a narrowing valley past new guesthouses and slow cows. The road swerves through a ravine, ducking under overhangs, to emerge on a broad plateau riven by canyons as if God has gone mad with a pickaxe.
An hour up the road we come to Khinaliq, the highest village in Europe (7,645ft), heaped above a shallow river like a braid of rope. As we arrive a boy canters past on a horse, a blanket for a saddle, a toddler clinging to his waist.
The modern age has encroached with the new road but Khinaliq hovers uneasily beside the 21st century. Compacted manure and hay is burned for fuel. Most water comes from a spring – the hammam turns out to be the village shower (singular) in someone’s basement – and loos are long drops which smell several stages beyond ripe.
There is a shop selling tea and wire, a school, two mosques and the air of permanence that can only be acquired through 5,000 years of existence. The 2,000 residents farm sheep, speak a unique language and live in boxy stone houses hunkered down against the weather. I stay in that of Rauf and his wife Junata: four rough-walled rooms with space for the sheep downstairs – a budget way to take the bite off chill mountain air if you don’t mind the smell of ammonia.
In a place that seems beyond time, stories swirl like the clouds over surrounding peaks. In 1988 a goat-herder fell asleep in a cave. Babaali Babaaliev said he woke to see a huge hairy humanoid staring at him. Understandably, he has never quite been the same again.
I want to believe it. If Azerbaijan could accommodate Noah and angels and Vikings, why not a lost yeti? Bilal, my hosts’ 16-year-old son, is unconvinced. “But there are bears in the j‘When you drink tea, you don’t count the cups’. For Azerbaijanis, the drink is a symbol of generosity mountains,” he said. “Wolves too: you can hear them at night.” He takes me for a stroll around the village. Anything to avoid his parents – they are furious he has dropped out of school. “What would I do at college in Baku?” he asks. “I’m a shepherd. I only know sheep and mountains.”
There seem worse things to know. We stop on a terrace. A few villagers in crumpled suits grin shy grins and shuffle awkwardly. They direct my gaze across the valley to Shahdag (King Mountain), propped between peaks. Gilded in the sunset, it shines like a crown.
The next day I go for a walk. Beyond women thwacking fresh wool in a trough, the old dirt road clings to slopes above the valley floor. I spend the day in this wild place, swishing through buttercups and harebells, watching jackdaws tumble across big skies and waving to shepherds who trail behind their sheep.
When I drop into Kalaykhudat village, after a few hours a man invites me for mountain-thyme tea. He tells me about a fortress of the Quba Khans that had controlled this ancient trade route and of a fire temple recently rebuilt in the Shahdag National Park. Apparently the shepherds use it to make tea.
Yet change may be coming. The Azerbaijani government is keen to promote Khinaliq. It has plans to transform my walking route into a tourist drive. Another project would create the world’s longest cable car from Khinaliq to Qabala ski resort.
This is the point where you are expecting me to condemn both. I won’t. Frankly, life is tough enough in these remote villages. If residents want a road and it sustains their futures, good luck to them.
In the night, after a dinner of kid goat and shots of Tsar vodka, Rauf envisages Saudi bus tours and new hotels. He makes them sound as fantastical as abominable snowmen or Noah dropping anchor on a nearby summit. “Great news isn’t it,” he says. “No,” I reply. “Terrible.” There is a brief silence, then we both begin to laugh.
I’m still not sure who is right. But I’d go there sharpish if I were you.