Some checkpoints were more cooperative than others

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 228. 

At Antalya we turned inland towards Istanbul, and that evening found ourselves in the little town of Kütahya, celebrated then as now for its pottery. We strolled around before dinner and bought a set of dinner plates; they might do rather well, we thought, in the London house that we should have to start looking for when we returned. The only problem was that we had no money to pay for them. We therefore asked the proprietor to pack up the plates, explaining that we would go to the bank first thing in the morning, cash some traveler’s checks and be back at 9 am to collect our purchases.

We woke at first light to sounds of considerable hubbub. There was a lot of excited shouting beneath our hotel window, with martial music being played at full volume on the loudspeakers which for some reason lined the street. Mystified, we got dressed and headed off to the bank—only to find on the doorstep two soldiers with submachine guns blocking our way. Since I spoke not a word of Turkish, I had no means of discovering what all the fuss was about; but then, by an astonishing stroke of luck, two girls who were obviously employees of the bank arrived, chatting between themselves in a language that I at once recognized as Serbian. (After a recent agreement between Turkey and Yugoslavia, a considerable number of ethnic Turks from Bosnia had returned to their original homeland a year or two before.) After three years of disuse my own Serbian was rapidly rusting, but I managed to ask them what had happened. It seemed that there had been a military coup against the government; the Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, was under arrest and was at that very moment being held in the local castle, which we could see on a hilltop only a mile or two away.

[snip]

There was still, however, the matter of those dinner plates. I explained the situation to the Bosnian girls, who rather to my surprise told the soldiers to let us into the bank and cashed my traveler’s check without hesitation. We went to the plate shop, collected our purchases, and soon afterwards were on our way. Alas, our problems were far from over. Between Kütahya and Istanbul there must have been twenty military checkpoints. Foreign diplomats were rare on the roads of central Anatolia, and by definition suspect. True, we had our laissez-passer from the Turkish Ambassador in Beirut; but he was almost certain to be a Menderes appointee, and his signature in present circumstances might well do more harm than good. I produced it anyway, and though some checkpoints were more cooperative than others—on several occasions we were held for up to an hour while the soldiery made anxious telephone calls—we reached Istanbul without serious mishap.