The railways made Englishmen more time-conscious. Whereas before, "local time" had been good enough, "standard time" was needed for the efficiency of the railways whose schedules of arrival and departure times required greater temporal uniformity. Greenwich Mean Time was introduced in the country. The replacement of local time-reckoning with supralocal standards of time marked a fundamental change in the relationship with time: human activity was to be increasingly oriented towards social as opposed to natural time schedules.
In Turkey Barkley had to face another anachronism: time was measured by the movement of the sun. Unlike England, where "high noon" was when the sun was at its highest point, the native inhabitants had a system of their own to read the time of the day from the sky:
The time will be given in Turkish fashion, which begins to count at sundown, and goes on for the whole twenty-four hours, so in the middle of the afternoon one may be told it is exactly 17 o' clock. Then as the sun does not have the politeness to set every day at the same time, it is necessary to carry an almanack in one' s head to reduce the Turkish time to English. (Barkley, Bulgaria, 181.)
The inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire also had a different idea of how much an hour was. The ' Oriental' concept was determined by the technical development of the country. In the Ottoman Empire the travelling Englishman was thrown back into an age where no railways and coaches existed. Physical fatigue of horse and rider determined travelling distances. Time and space were difficult to separate in Turkey, because the space stretches were measured by the time it took a man to ride them through, the pace being that of a man on a long journey:
Where the ground is good, and no hills intervene, as on the Dobrudja, ' an hour' would represent a little over four miles, but in the mountainous districts not more than three, and it will sometimes happen that when there are two roads both going to the same place, the longest by mileage will be much the strongest by hours. (Barkley, Bulgaria, 93-4.)
Barkley in his turn measured time by the work he could get done. For his utilitarian understanding an hour meant a lot done and a respective quantity of money made. The civil engineer only occasionally discusses money matters but he often indulges in describing his business:
Before I had been on the shore an hour I had rescued my portmanteau from the custom-house, eaten a break-fast with the English consul, hired two clean though rough rooms in an Armenian' s house, engaged a man-cook and a cavass and set up house-keeping. Besides this I had made the acquaintance of a lot of countrymen who had congregated here for the construction of the line. (Barkley, Bulgaria, 3-4.)
The energetic man, who had the important and difficult task of building a railway almost without qualified workers, did not have the freedom to indulge in useless conversations. But in Turkey one had to pay tribute to time-consuming daily rituals and etiquette. Especially when one had a visitor:
I would from my corner of the divan make my salaams, and say a lot of ' pretty-pretties,' to which he would respond in like terms, and for the next hour or two we sat like two fools, making speeches to each other, and carefully avoiding the one subject that we wanted, or rather that the Turk wanted, to talk about. At last out it would come, and I had to get over the difficulty of refusing as well as I could, without making an enemy, and then after a few more salaams away waddled my visitor, leaving me weary and tired, but very thankful my troubles were over. (Barkley, Bulgaria, 318.)
In this quotation Barkley clearly shows his irritation about the complicated social relations of the Ottomans. In his opinion the fact that watches and clocks were rarely used by the Turks showed that time for them was of no value. The Englishman overlooks the fact that the ceremonial visits he received were part of a rank system that prescribed the behaviour of the subordinate to the higher members of society and vice versa. Whether he wanted it or not, his special mission of fulfilling a Sultan's order automatically made him an important member of the Turkish community and in this way a "victim" of their cultural traditions.
Barkley, Henry C., Bulgaria before the War during Seven Years' Experience of European Turkey and Its Inhabitants (London: Murray, 1877).
Last modified 2001