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POSTCARD FROM

THE TURCO TRAIL

PASSPORT

Ruta Nacional 40 is the longest and most famous road in Argentina. Stretching for more than 3,000 miles, the highway crosses the country from bottom to top – traversing the windy Steppe of Patagonia before snaking up along the edge of the Andes, past hidden glacial lakes and snow-capped peaks, through vineyards and green orchards and river valleys, and into the high desert, ending at the border with Bolivia. It feels, in some places, like one of the remotest roads in the world, a seemingly endless stretch of stunning landscapes and abundant wildlife.

Along Ruta 40 in Patagonia, huemul deer, ostrich-like rheas and guanacos (camelids native to southern South America) dart in and out of the sagebrush. Shepherds on horseback corralling hundreds of woolly sheep stir up little sandstorms, cloaking the horizon in haze and dust. In the north, the road winds through mountain towns at dizzying

Jordan Salama follows the ghost route of his great-grandfather, a Syrian merchant, across the Argentine Andes altitudes, past salt flats and coppercoloured canyons.

“Surely your great-grandfather would have seen this, and been amazed” – people said this to me all along Ruta 40, where I had come in search of a curious family history. In the 1920s, when today’s highway was but a few disjointed mule trails, my greatgrandfather Selim Salama travelled as a salesman along the northernmost part of its route. Selim was a Syrian Jewish immigrant to Argentina, who peddled his wares from a horse-drawn cart across more than 1,000 miles of mountains, valleys and high deserts, between Mendoza (the capital of the central-western province of the same name) and the border with Bolivia. Some 100 years later, I had come from New York to follow in his footsteps, looking for his traces in the most unexpected of places.

I quickly realised that Selim wasn’t alone in his pursuits. In those days, it was quite common for Jewish and Christian immigrants from the Middle East to work as peddlers in Argentina. Indeed, many of them had done the same in Ottoman Syria, as merchants on the great Silk Road, where they traded in Turkish spices and Persian rugs and wool from the Steppes of Central Asia.

Selim grew up in the old Jewish quarter of Damascus, which was home to one of the oldest continuous Jewish communities in the world – a mixed population of Sephardi Jews descended from those expelled from Spain and Arab Jews indigenous to the region for some 2,000 years. Turn-ofthe-century immigrants – of Jews and all backgrounds and religions – hailing from places such as Damascus, Aleppo, Beirut and Jerusalem in the Ottoman Empire, began to leave in waves as the empire fell apart. They came to be known as turcos (Turks) because of the Ottoman passports they carried. The misnomer persists to this day in Argentina, where some 16 percent of the country’s 200,000-strong Jewish community claim non-Ashkenazi

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