Hotels for Camels: The Inns of Seljuk Anatolia

A modern traveller who stops for the night expects, as a matter of course, a bed, a meal and a locked door. Seven or eight centuries ago, a merchant crossing Anatolia with a string of heavily laden camels had rather different priorities: fodder for the animals, a wall between the goods and the highway robbers, and a roof under which he did not need to sleep with one eye open. The institution that supplied all three was the caravanserai, and the Seljuk sultans who ruled much of Anatolia in the thirteenth century built a remarkable network of them. The best known of these, Sultanhanı near Aksaray, was completed in 1229 during the reign of Alaeddin Keykubad. It is easily recognisable from a distance: a high, fortress-like enclosure of pale stone, relieved by a monumental entrance portal whose geometric carving has the intricacy of lace. Passing through that doorway, a visitor entered not an inn in the modern sense but a self-contained walled settlement, with a courtyard for unloading, covered halls for livestock, rooms for travellers and, at the centre, a small mosque raised above the ground. The logic of the arrangement was commercial as well as charitable. Caravanserais were spaced along the principal routes at intervals of roughly a day's journey, so that a caravan could always reach shelter before nightfall. According to tradition, travellers were typically offered food and lodging for a limited period without charge, a service paid for by the endowments of the ruler. Whatever the exact terms, the policy made sense for the state: secure and predictable trade routes meant a steady flow of merchants, and merchants meant taxes, new goods and the wealth that kept the sultanate prosperous. Equally striking is the investment in architecture. Why, one might ask, would a ruler spend so lavishly on a building intended for strangers, many of whom would stay only a single night? Part of the answer is probably prestige. A magnificent inn on a lonely road announced, to every merchant who passed through, that this was a land whose government could be relied upon, and that its rulers wished to be remembered as generous. Today, the caravanserais of Anatolia occupy a curious place in the landscape. Some stand roofless in fields, visited chiefly by shepherds and the occasional photographer; others have been carefully restored and serve as museums, concert venues or, with a certain pleasing symmetry, hotels. Their grandeur, though, is not merely picturesque. It is a reminder that the movement of people and goods has always depended on someone taking trouble over what lies between one city and the next.