I am much looking forward to watching 1000 Years a Slave on Channel 5. My daughter Rachel has been in Turkey, trying to “shine a light”, as she puts it, “on the complex story of white slavery around the Mediterranean and Black Sea”. 

She has made some interesting discoveries. Her own great-great-grandmother, Hanife Feride, was herself a Circassian who, at the age of 14, may have actually been “bought as a slave” by her great-great grandfather, Ahmet Hamdi, then 43.  

Rachel says it is possible her great-great-grandfather picked Hanife out of the line for his harem, though in truth she was more likely sold directly to Hamdi by her father, “a warlike brigand with mutton chop whiskers”. Though she was unable to find a certificate of that particular sale, she did uncover many others from the time, which “exist as proof that the main treasure of the Caucasus at that time was its beautiful females”. Rachel’s cousin, Sinan, confirmed that was likely the case for Hanife, too. 

But while television producers might have hoped these revelations would conjure a sob story, my daughter had the opposite reaction: “How could I cry when this girl’s chances, as judged by her father, were far better if she married a rich merchant in Istanbul, than if she stayed in a poor village by the Black Sea – and he was right?” 

There’s the small matter that she “gave birth to a future politician, whose great-grandson became a world leader”, as well as the fact that slavery was only abolished in Turkey in 1909, making that transaction in the years prior perfectly legal.

I have always been intrigued by the family’s Turkish connection. Ahmet Hamdi and Hanife Feride’s son, Ali Kemal, was a journalist and politician who was kidnapped from a barber shop in 1922, lynched for his views on the country’s independence battle and his limbs strung from a tree. A photo of that decorated tree was used during an episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, which would turn out to be one of a number of programmes delving into our family tree.

Being part of it was fantastic, particularly as growing up, though I had always known that my grandfather was Turkish, he had never been much of a fixture in my father’s life. My father, Wilfred, was born in 1909, in England, where his mother had been sent to avoid the dangers of being married to a politician back home. He had never really met Ali Kemal by the time of his death, when my father was 13 – or scarcely knew him, even though my grandfather sometimes did make trips to London. Winifred, my paternal grandmother, was half-Swiss and half-English, and sadly died of puerperal fever a few days after my father was born. 

The Turkish connection was little felt at home, then – less still when my father joined the RAF during the war as a pilot in Coastal Command, and later farmed on Exmoor, where I still live.  

When I myself was growing up, I was keen to meet my Turkish relatives. Back in 1959, aged 18 on my “gap year” from school, I headed for Istanbul to meet for the first time my father’s half-brother, Zeki Kuneralp, and his wife Neçla. Zeki was at the time the permanent secretary of the Turkish Foreign Ministry and the family lived in Ankara. 

Over the years that followed, I met my Turkish relatives frequently, particularly when Zeki was posted in the Sixties as Turkey’s ambassador to London. The more members of the family I met, the more determined I became to maintain the family connection.  

I visited Zeki more than once at the ambassador’s residence in Portland Place, London. I remember him once talking about Kalfat, the Anatolian village where Ali Kemal’s father, Ahmet Hamdi, lived before he moved to Istanbul (or, as it then was, Constantinople).  

“You should try to go there yourself one day” Zeki said.

I had taken two-year-old Boris along with me on that occasion. Zeki inspected Boris’s blond hair approvingly. “The blond gene comes from Kalfat,” he told me. “If you ever go there, I’m certain you will find some blond Turks there even today.”

I will go there one day,”  I said. “I can promise you that.”

Well, it took me 45 years to fulfil that promise.

It was finally in July 2008, not long after Boris was elected mayor of London for the first time, that I visited Kalfat, the village on the Anatolian plateau east of Ankara.

My cousin Selim came with me. The population of the village at that time stood at around 2,000 and a high proportion seemed to be waiting for us as we drove into the village. They had gathered in front of the mayor’s office, ready to greet us, and the mayor made a speech of welcome. Selim translated for me. “He’s saying how much the people of Kalfat welcome you today. They are very proud that a descendant of Ahmet Hamdi has been elected mayor of London. They hope that London can be twinned with Kalfat!”

Later that day I was introduced to some of Ahmet Hamdi’s relatives. The mayor explained that these were “members of your Turkish family. The family is still known in the village by the name they used to have before Ataturk introduced surnames to Turkey.”

“And what is that?”

“Sairolangilil … the family of the blond boys!” I thought that was amazing – I had no idea that the trademark Johnson “look” would indeed stretch back so many generations. 

That day in Kalfat I met members of my Turkish family I had never met before – including one little boy whose hair was just as light as my own.

I was introduced to Ahmet Demir and his father, Behir. “His grandfather was Haci Ahmet. They call him Haci because he made the haj to the Holy Places. Haci Ahmet’s father, Ali, was probably Ahmet Hamdi’s brother.”

Selim added: “Ahmet Hamdi was Haci too. He also made the haj to the Holy Places. He was one of the first, if not the first, to make the pilgrimage to Mecca from this village.” 

Bear in mind that this would then have been no simple trip, involving long stretches of travel by camel through day and night. “That’s why the men kissed your hand,” Selim explained to me. “As a mark of respect, honouring our great-grandfather.” Some people referred to me the same way, haci – a title I couldn’t help but feel I hadn’t quite earned. 

Learning more about my family through these trips over the decades – including, of course, through television programmes – has certainly been interesting. I wonder what’s coming next.

From An Antique Land by Stanley Johnson is published by Black Spring Press. Buy now for £20 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514