TURKEY: Snow

Unprecedented last week was a deluge of snow which spread death and destruction in Trebizond. Nineteen feet lay piled on the Gümush-Khane plain above the city while, across the mountains, Constantinople and Angora were sweltering in their hottest summer.

Students of Xenophon quickly recalled that Trebizond is that ancient Hellenic city of Trapezus, the Tableland, where the famed 10,000 halted for rest. Those with a more curious eye for the romantic characters of history recalled Alexius Comnenus, fugitive of the fourth crusade, imaginative, able 22-year-old knight-errant who crowned himself king of the land.

To his grandiose ambitions natives of this district owe their emergence from obscurity to empire. To the renowned beauty of the imperial princesses of his line they owe the foreign alliances which for centuries secured their independence. But to the topography of their country they owe most. This plateau, sloping to the southeastern angle of the Black Sea, is cut off from the rest of Asia Minor by a barrier of rugged mountains, blessing it with political and climatic isolation. Rarely above 88° in summer or below 10° in winter, the weather, humid, temperate, contrasts with that of not distant inland regions where great extremes of heat and cold are common.

So it was, last week, that inhabitants of Trebizond were totally unprepared when its mountain guardians, reliable for centuries, failed to guard.

Orthodox Mohammedans remembered the ominous adoption of hat in place of fez, the displacement of the Arabic alphabet in the Koran (TIME, July 23), saw in the icy visitation a manifestation of Allah’s wrath, turned to the mosques for repentant prayers.