From the Cradle to the Grave
Once home to two of the seven wonders of the Ancient World – the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus and the mausoleum at Halicarnassos – southwestern Turkey can also lay claim to being the cradle of Western civilization. Jeremy Seal takes a tour of one of the world’s greatest open-air museums. Geographical Magazine, January 2007
All along the road to Knydos the olive groves went untended. Ruined watermills stood beside streams seamed pink with oleanders. Skyline windmills squatted beneath the skeletal remains of rotted sails. Abandoned chapels, weather-stripped of their frescoed plaster, had been customized as cow byres and country storerooms. Goats gathered in the road dips to nibble at the low-hanging branches of carob and acacia trees. A scruffy village spiked by a single minaret was a cluster of gimcrack houses where old women prayed behind their windows and hens pecked at the dust. Pungent clouds of tobacco smoke rose outside the cayevi (tea house) where the men flicked out playing cards or pushed worry beads between thumb and forefinger.
Amidst this neglect - a characteristically Turkish mix of the picturesque and the poverty-stricken – it was hard to believe there could ever have been an illustrious port city, home to the founder of Greek geometry, Eudoxus, where medicine, astronomy and the arts flourished from the 4th century BC. As I travelled west to the antique ruins at the very tip of the little-visited Datca Peninsula, which pokes a thin 70-mile finger of mountainous limestone into the Aegean towards the adjacent Dodecanese Islands, a notion occurred to me which would quickly become familiar on my tour of the antique sites of southwest Turkey. I was repeatedly struck, in this region so profuse with evidence of its classical prosperity that it ranks as one of the world’s great open-air museums, by a present hopelessly outgunned by the past.
The coastal fringe between Ephesus and Knydos – the heartlands of ancient Ionia and Caria – achieved a dizzying array of cultural advances in the centuries before Christ. Early developments in coinage took place at Sardis. The urban grid system was first implemented at Priene where the supreme example of early Ionic architecture, the Temple of Athena, was built. The earliest practitioners of medicine, notably Galen, worked at Pergamon. And at the great city of Miletus, in the course of the fifth-century Ionian Enlightenment, nothing less than the original stirrings of western rational thought first emerged. Add two of the Seven Wonders – the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, and the mausoleum at Halicarnassos (modern Bodrum) – not to mention a third, the Colossus, at nearby Rhodes, throw in the likely composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey somewhere in Ionia during the eighth century BC, and you’re led to a conclusion with profound implications for the present. Those who would exclude Turkey from the EU or make glib simplifications about where the West ends and the East begins should be reminded that it was here, on the shores of Asia in Turkey, that western civilization did much of its growing up. Never had these sites and their associated achievements seemed more current than now, as Turkey’s geo-political future moves center-stage. My tour served up a resonant reminder, at a decisive moment in the continent’s history, of Europe’s cultural debt to the region.
A truly atrocious road (only recently improved out of all recognition) has long isolated the Datca Peninsula from the package-holiday transformations which have taken place in neighbouring Marmaris and Bodrum, and across the water in Greek Rhodes, over the past three decades. I discovered an authentic and unspoilt Aegean atmosphere – bars full of raffish fishermen with not a lewdly named Bodrum-style cocktail in sight – along with dilapidated evidence of numerous pasts, most recently the ruined mills and chapels of the local Greeks who were deported from Turkey in the Christian-Muslim population exchanges of the 1920s. But I was going way back – from beyond the end of the Christian era in Asia Minor to before it had even begun. The winding peninsula road ended at Knydos’ superbly sited ruins – the trireme harbours sheltered beneath the windbreak bulk of Cape Crio and the waterfront theatre, with the hazy island outlines of Kos and Nissiros rising beyond – where I parked and set off into the ruins. Much of the site remained unexcavated and the terraces were overgrown with scrub oak, though scraps of mosaic were visible among the ruined Byzantine basilicas of the Christian period. Then I came to what I was looking for; the circular foundation tiers of a temple, uncovered amid great excitement in 1969.
The city, which was founded here in the fourth century BC, quickly grew rich by controlling the shipping routes to the eastern Mediterranean; to Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. But its chief claim to fame – and a boon to its revenues - was that it was also home to a much admired cult statue of Aphrodite housed in the temple sanctuary which once rose, experts believe, from those same circular foundations. The sculptor Praxiteles’ long lost statue, generally considered the first large-scale nude, attracted goggle-eyed visitors from across the ancient world. Blueprint for everything from the Venus de Milo to the cover girls of today, the Knydos Aphrodite was the very source of erotic art. And - since the statue so aroused one visitor that he broke into the sanctuary and stained Aphrodite’s thigh with his attentions – Knydos might also contend for a more dubious title; the cradle of pornography.
The Datca Peninsula’s wild north shore was a sub-tropical tangle of sandalwood, mastic trees and wild pistachios where a modest car ferry left the quayside for Bodrum (home town, since we’re on the subject of firsts, of the so-called Father of History himself, Herodotus). On the two-hour crossing, with Kos to our left and the mountain-hemmed Gulf of Gokova to our right, I chatted with a young local teacher called Murat. I asked Murat what he made of European reservations about Turkey joining the EU. ‘Look how close the Greek islands are,’ he said. ‘And think of all those ruins you’re visiting. Most people in Europe think of us as barbarians. They don’t even know that European civilization began here.’
Bustling Bodrum was awash with crowds of British and German holidaymakers. It was true that very few of them had found their way from the waterfront bars, restaurants and nightclubs to the city’s World Wonder just a few minutes’ walk away. Little in truth remained of the resting place of King Mausolos; earthquakes had damaged it, the Knights of St John had stripped it of its sumptuous friezes to decorate their nearby harbour castle, and nineteenth-century treasure hunters had carted off much of what remained to the British Museum. Even so, the fact that the very word ‘mausoleum’ was named for the fourth-century ruler entombed in this particular one could not but evoke much of its original magnificence; the burial vault surmounted by a huge roofed colonnade some sixty metres high, in turn topped by a chariot-riding effigy of Mausolos, which had stayed largely intact until the fifteenth century.
I was now closing upon Ionia’s classical heartlands. At Priene, best preserved Hellenistic landscape in Ionia and with Arcadian views across the valley of the Maeander River, even a glimpse of the city’s prototype grid system evoked human history unspooling to the modern age and Manhattan. Then there was the magnificent oracle’s temple of Apollo at Didyma, which had rivaled Delphi until it gave the wrong answer to a testing question regarding the intentions of neighbouring King Croesus. Here, as elsewhere in Turkey, I was taken by the sense of modern life continuing alongside, and sometimes within, sites as yet untouched by the dead hands of the heritage bureaucrats. Passing shepherds drove their goats across agoras. Cattle cropped grass among the foundations of bathhouses. Fallen capitols and the feet of columns were picnic tables for the site guardians. Chunks of fluted marble columns served as rubble in the walls of nearby paddocks. So prolific were these ruins – so little excavated – that they were invariably country scrambles full of surprises rather than packaged experiences.
There were only a few visitors at Miletus. Little about the site, poorly served by a modern setting in silted marshes some distance from the sea and by a plethora of later structures, bore witness to the city’s dazzling heyday. But beyond the Byzantine churches, the Muslim Selcuk baths and the fifteenth-century mosque of Ilyas Bey were plentiful remnants from the classical period. It struck me as I walked by the theatre, agoras, baths, gymnasium and bouleuterion (council hall) that a whole series of ‘firsts’ from the Ionian Enlightenment were once among these stones, watching, exercising, washing or doing what they were particularly good at, which was thinking; Thales, the original philosopher, who saw water as the source material for all life; Anaximander whose own reflections led Greek thought on its own giant leap from myth to rationalism; and Hecataeus, author of ‘Geography’, who might even be considered the first travel writer.
What finally brought Miletus to life were the two marble statues of lions which I came across embedded deep in the marshlands. Here, far from the receded shoreline, were the entrance portals to the city’s ancient inner port. I was standing at the very point where ships left packed with goods – and notions – which would give rise to what we know as the West. Here in modern Muslim Turkey was where our very minds had once begun.
I came to Ephesus, best known of all Turkey’s ancient sites, where St Paul had preached and St John settled. Crowds milled about the sprawling site, with its temples and baths, fountains and latrines, its basilicas, brothels and the wheel-rutted Arcadian Way – Broadway of the ancient world. They gathered outside its crowning glory, the beautiful niched two-storey façade of the great library which was built in the 2nd century AD.
The guidebook made bare mention of the nearby World Wonder, the Temple of Artemis, which Philo of Byzantium put above all other works of man. ‘I have seen the walls and hanging gardens of ancient Babylon, the statue of Olympian Zeus, the Colossus of Rhodes, the mighty work of the high Pyramids and the tomb of Mausolos,’ he wrote. ‘But when I saw the temple at Ephesus rising to the clouds, all these other wonders were put in the shade.’ Now the stump of just one column, topped by last season’s stork nest, stood in a desiccated marsh. It was barely a remnant. But just being here was to bear witness to the fact of an incredible structure, with over 120 columns more than twenty metres tall, which had been raised here in the third century before Christ. It was another reminder of what these lands, which some would exclude from our future, had given to our past.
Amidst this neglect - a characteristically Turkish mix of the picturesque and the poverty-stricken – it was hard to believe there could ever have been an illustrious port city, home to the founder of Greek geometry, Eudoxus, where medicine, astronomy and the arts flourished from the 4th century BC. As I travelled west to the antique ruins at the very tip of the little-visited Datca Peninsula, which pokes a thin 70-mile finger of mountainous limestone into the Aegean towards the adjacent Dodecanese Islands, a notion occurred to me which would quickly become familiar on my tour of the antique sites of southwest Turkey. I was repeatedly struck, in this region so profuse with evidence of its classical prosperity that it ranks as one of the world’s great open-air museums, by a present hopelessly outgunned by the past.
The coastal fringe between Ephesus and Knydos – the heartlands of ancient Ionia and Caria – achieved a dizzying array of cultural advances in the centuries before Christ. Early developments in coinage took place at Sardis. The urban grid system was first implemented at Priene where the supreme example of early Ionic architecture, the Temple of Athena, was built. The earliest practitioners of medicine, notably Galen, worked at Pergamon. And at the great city of Miletus, in the course of the fifth-century Ionian Enlightenment, nothing less than the original stirrings of western rational thought first emerged. Add two of the Seven Wonders – the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, and the mausoleum at Halicarnassos (modern Bodrum) – not to mention a third, the Colossus, at nearby Rhodes, throw in the likely composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey somewhere in Ionia during the eighth century BC, and you’re led to a conclusion with profound implications for the present. Those who would exclude Turkey from the EU or make glib simplifications about where the West ends and the East begins should be reminded that it was here, on the shores of Asia in Turkey, that western civilization did much of its growing up. Never had these sites and their associated achievements seemed more current than now, as Turkey’s geo-political future moves center-stage. My tour served up a resonant reminder, at a decisive moment in the continent’s history, of Europe’s cultural debt to the region.
A truly atrocious road (only recently improved out of all recognition) has long isolated the Datca Peninsula from the package-holiday transformations which have taken place in neighbouring Marmaris and Bodrum, and across the water in Greek Rhodes, over the past three decades. I discovered an authentic and unspoilt Aegean atmosphere – bars full of raffish fishermen with not a lewdly named Bodrum-style cocktail in sight – along with dilapidated evidence of numerous pasts, most recently the ruined mills and chapels of the local Greeks who were deported from Turkey in the Christian-Muslim population exchanges of the 1920s. But I was going way back – from beyond the end of the Christian era in Asia Minor to before it had even begun. The winding peninsula road ended at Knydos’ superbly sited ruins – the trireme harbours sheltered beneath the windbreak bulk of Cape Crio and the waterfront theatre, with the hazy island outlines of Kos and Nissiros rising beyond – where I parked and set off into the ruins. Much of the site remained unexcavated and the terraces were overgrown with scrub oak, though scraps of mosaic were visible among the ruined Byzantine basilicas of the Christian period. Then I came to what I was looking for; the circular foundation tiers of a temple, uncovered amid great excitement in 1969.
The city, which was founded here in the fourth century BC, quickly grew rich by controlling the shipping routes to the eastern Mediterranean; to Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. But its chief claim to fame – and a boon to its revenues - was that it was also home to a much admired cult statue of Aphrodite housed in the temple sanctuary which once rose, experts believe, from those same circular foundations. The sculptor Praxiteles’ long lost statue, generally considered the first large-scale nude, attracted goggle-eyed visitors from across the ancient world. Blueprint for everything from the Venus de Milo to the cover girls of today, the Knydos Aphrodite was the very source of erotic art. And - since the statue so aroused one visitor that he broke into the sanctuary and stained Aphrodite’s thigh with his attentions – Knydos might also contend for a more dubious title; the cradle of pornography.
The Datca Peninsula’s wild north shore was a sub-tropical tangle of sandalwood, mastic trees and wild pistachios where a modest car ferry left the quayside for Bodrum (home town, since we’re on the subject of firsts, of the so-called Father of History himself, Herodotus). On the two-hour crossing, with Kos to our left and the mountain-hemmed Gulf of Gokova to our right, I chatted with a young local teacher called Murat. I asked Murat what he made of European reservations about Turkey joining the EU. ‘Look how close the Greek islands are,’ he said. ‘And think of all those ruins you’re visiting. Most people in Europe think of us as barbarians. They don’t even know that European civilization began here.’
Bustling Bodrum was awash with crowds of British and German holidaymakers. It was true that very few of them had found their way from the waterfront bars, restaurants and nightclubs to the city’s World Wonder just a few minutes’ walk away. Little in truth remained of the resting place of King Mausolos; earthquakes had damaged it, the Knights of St John had stripped it of its sumptuous friezes to decorate their nearby harbour castle, and nineteenth-century treasure hunters had carted off much of what remained to the British Museum. Even so, the fact that the very word ‘mausoleum’ was named for the fourth-century ruler entombed in this particular one could not but evoke much of its original magnificence; the burial vault surmounted by a huge roofed colonnade some sixty metres high, in turn topped by a chariot-riding effigy of Mausolos, which had stayed largely intact until the fifteenth century.
I was now closing upon Ionia’s classical heartlands. At Priene, best preserved Hellenistic landscape in Ionia and with Arcadian views across the valley of the Maeander River, even a glimpse of the city’s prototype grid system evoked human history unspooling to the modern age and Manhattan. Then there was the magnificent oracle’s temple of Apollo at Didyma, which had rivaled Delphi until it gave the wrong answer to a testing question regarding the intentions of neighbouring King Croesus. Here, as elsewhere in Turkey, I was taken by the sense of modern life continuing alongside, and sometimes within, sites as yet untouched by the dead hands of the heritage bureaucrats. Passing shepherds drove their goats across agoras. Cattle cropped grass among the foundations of bathhouses. Fallen capitols and the feet of columns were picnic tables for the site guardians. Chunks of fluted marble columns served as rubble in the walls of nearby paddocks. So prolific were these ruins – so little excavated – that they were invariably country scrambles full of surprises rather than packaged experiences.
There were only a few visitors at Miletus. Little about the site, poorly served by a modern setting in silted marshes some distance from the sea and by a plethora of later structures, bore witness to the city’s dazzling heyday. But beyond the Byzantine churches, the Muslim Selcuk baths and the fifteenth-century mosque of Ilyas Bey were plentiful remnants from the classical period. It struck me as I walked by the theatre, agoras, baths, gymnasium and bouleuterion (council hall) that a whole series of ‘firsts’ from the Ionian Enlightenment were once among these stones, watching, exercising, washing or doing what they were particularly good at, which was thinking; Thales, the original philosopher, who saw water as the source material for all life; Anaximander whose own reflections led Greek thought on its own giant leap from myth to rationalism; and Hecataeus, author of ‘Geography’, who might even be considered the first travel writer.
What finally brought Miletus to life were the two marble statues of lions which I came across embedded deep in the marshlands. Here, far from the receded shoreline, were the entrance portals to the city’s ancient inner port. I was standing at the very point where ships left packed with goods – and notions – which would give rise to what we know as the West. Here in modern Muslim Turkey was where our very minds had once begun.
I came to Ephesus, best known of all Turkey’s ancient sites, where St Paul had preached and St John settled. Crowds milled about the sprawling site, with its temples and baths, fountains and latrines, its basilicas, brothels and the wheel-rutted Arcadian Way – Broadway of the ancient world. They gathered outside its crowning glory, the beautiful niched two-storey façade of the great library which was built in the 2nd century AD.
The guidebook made bare mention of the nearby World Wonder, the Temple of Artemis, which Philo of Byzantium put above all other works of man. ‘I have seen the walls and hanging gardens of ancient Babylon, the statue of Olympian Zeus, the Colossus of Rhodes, the mighty work of the high Pyramids and the tomb of Mausolos,’ he wrote. ‘But when I saw the temple at Ephesus rising to the clouds, all these other wonders were put in the shade.’ Now the stump of just one column, topped by last season’s stork nest, stood in a desiccated marsh. It was barely a remnant. But just being here was to bear witness to the fact of an incredible structure, with over 120 columns more than twenty metres tall, which had been raised here in the third century before Christ. It was another reminder of what these lands, which some would exclude from our future, had given to our past.
