Word: alexandretta
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...collar laborer who discovers the one artifact all WASPier scholarly types have been hunting. Then the information that the Spear of Destiny was last seen during World War II —it must have been the Nazi backup plan after the whole Holy Grail debacle in Alexandretta. Constantine’s ride, the Angel City cab, even uses the transportation-name-as-witty-commentary trick of A Streetcar Named Desire, or more recently, The Royal Tenenbaums’ Gypsy Cabs. Then the exorcism—wait, was that Sigourney Weaver from Ghostbusters lying possessed...
...seeking to absorb and understand the power of those ties and the "splendour and desolation" of the land, Glass set out from Alexandretta, now in southern Turkey, to Aqaba in Jordan, following the invasion path used by Alexander the Great and the Crusaders. His odyssey ended abruptly when a peculiarly modern kind of tribe, the Hizballah, kidnaped and held him hostage in Beirut for two months until his escape. The trip is the framework for this book. He describes it as a "literary and spiritual ramble through the history of a troubled land." It is really a travelogue, letting...
...only doctor nursed him through, and in 1903 he was ready to make the hard trip to Constantinople and the three-year course at the academy. In a mule-team caravan with 72 other boys bound for the academy, he traveled 27 days across bandit-infested desert to Alexandretta and caught the boat for Constantinople. In all it was a 40-day trip that Nuri now makes in less than four hours by Iraqi-piloted Viscount...
...vast areas of distant plateau. Counting everything which wasn't simply a wagon track, ECA found barely 13,000 miles of roads, only 5,000 miles of them good enough for a truck. In the event of a Soviet attack on Turkey, the eastern Mediterranean port of Iskenderun (Alexandretta) would be vital; 360 miles northeast of it is Erzurum, headquarters of the Third Army which controls the Soviet-Turkish frontier. Yet there was no direct road between the two places...
...treaty of Lausanne, fixing the country's borders, set up the small sanjak (sub-prefecture) of Alexandretta, between Syria and Turkey, as an "autonomous" region under French control. To the Turks, this Levantine Sudetenland, which they called the Hatay, was a symbol of humiliation. In 1939, Menemencioglu used France's fear of war and need of an ally to win back the Hatay for Turkey, thus forever endearing himself to all Turks...