Romancing the Stones

Stony: Head at Didymi’s Temple of Apollo.

ISTANBUL – A Love for Ruins

I love a good ruin. And so, it seems, do a lot of other people if the growing number of archeological tours being advertised in newspapers and magazines is any indicator. I have been particularly drawn to the classical world and have searched out its monuments in the course of my travels. One day, however, I realized that I was visiting only the wonderful cliches of history—the Parthenon, the Coliseum, the Roman Forum—and not the less-trammeled but equally exciting remains of Greek and Roman imperial greatness that lie tumbled all around the edges of the Aegean and Mediterranean seas. Turkey alone has more Greek ruins than Greece and more Roman cities than Italy. The trouble was, I could never figure out a way to get to such sites on my own.

A Tour Opportunity

Then came the opportunity to go on a bus tour of Turkey led by an archeologist/architectural historian. His itinerary—which offered more than a dozen centers of ancient Greek and Roman culture—might have been lure enough, but the price last year was irresistible: $900 per person (without airfare) for 14 days, including hotels, most dinners and breakfasts, and a Turkish guide.

Prof. Robert Lindley Vann of the University of Maryland would prove an amiable and knowledgeable leader, bringing to our group his skills as a teacher and a popular lecturer on classical architecture at the Smithsonian Institution. Gray-haired, trim, and relaxed, he is the kind of telegenic communicator who would make a fine host on an educational TV show.

The professor had little trouble persuading us that in Turkey, the old Anatolia of the history books, the past is everywhere. Not only, of course, was this East Greece between 750 and 130 BC, but also a province of the Roman Empire between 130 BC and AD 395. Here strode Aristotle and Alexander the Great; the Roman emperors Trajan, Hadrian, and Constantine; St. John the Evangelist and the Virgin Mary, and a host of other awesome figures.

First Steps in Istanbul

On our first day in Turkey, we found that the past lay just a stone’s throw from our Istanbul hotel, the Ferhat, in the venerable Sultanahmet district. Down the street was the site of the hippodrome, the Roman racecourse, now a park, where a 3,500-year-old obelisk removed from Egypt by the Byzantine emperor Theodosius still stands, close by the remnant of the bronze monument erected by the Greeks at Delphi in 478 BC to commemorate their victory over the Persians. And farther on lay the cistern, an enormous underground reservoir constructed between AD 527 and 565. Its high ceiling is held up by a forest of 336 giant, often mismatched, columns removed from Roman temples and monuments. It is an eerie space of dripping water, long slippery walkways, and deep shadows that puts in mind the moody etchings of the 18th-Century master engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

The Journey Begins

However much my wife, Liet, and I wanted to linger in this city that straddles both the European and Asian continents, we were eager for our tour to begin. The names of some of the places we would be visiting—Chryse, Assos, Erythrae, Clarus, Priene, Miletus—called out like Odysseus’ Sirens. And so, on the third day, we enthusiastically boarded our bus, in the company of 20 congenial adults and architecture students. One of the advantages of such a specialized tour, we would soon find out, is a commonality of interest that guarantees that everyone will stop and listen as the leader holds forth and that conversations afterward will be spirited.

Our first stop was Troy, scene of Homer’s “Iliad.” Now an oversize wooden Trojan horse guards the gate, a hokey modern tourist attraction that can be entered via a steep flight of steps. But it is Homer’s ghost that really hovers over the place, imbuing its stones and dust (and it is dusty) with special meaning.

Discovering Troy

There were, all told, nine Troys, each new city built over the ruins of the other in an ever-growing mound through which archeologists have cut to reveal walls of houses, palaces, and defenses. The top layer is Roman, and the bottom dates all the way back to 3000 BC. In his zeal to find the Troy of the “Iliad,” the renowned German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who began his excavations here in the 1870s, dug right past the level he was looking for, mistaking a burned layer underneath for the city of Homer’s description. The scene of Schliemann’s labors survives today, a broad, deep gulch, where red poppies were blooming among the stone foundations of houses when we lingered there.

Off the Beaten Path: Chryse

Soon we were to discover the second advantage of a specialized tour, the opportunity it presents to get off the beaten track. This was true of our second site, the small town of Chryse. There, the ruins of the Greek Sanctuary of Apollo Smintheus, the Mouse God, lay in weedy disarray, tucked behind sleepy whitewashed houses and pomegranate trees in full, fiery orange bloom. Our challenge was to divorce the temple from its 20th-Century context and in our minds re-erect its fallen columns to envision it in all its former glory.

Assos: A City Atop a Mountain

Our third site, Assos, where ruins of a Greek city dating from the 7th Century BC lie atop a mountain, was particularly enchanting. “Spoiled,” said one guidebook of the surroundings, but perhaps because we were traveling in June, in advance of tourist hordes, we found the place practically deserted and very charming. We were let out of the bus halfway down the steep slope, so that we might walk to Assos’ ancient harbor, where the stone buildings of a little fishing village have been converted into accommodations for foreign visitors. It was noon, the sun was hot, and our thirst sticky—but we were quickly diverted by the sight of the large Greek island of Lesbos rising from the azure Aegean off to the left and of pink hollyhocks, which grow wild in Turkey, thrusting up on either side of the narrow road.

Pergamum: City of Invention

Our next big site, on the fourth day of our journey, was Pergamum, the city that invented parchment, or pergamena in Latin, and hence the book. In its Hellenistic heyday, it had more than 100,000 inhabitants. We spent a morning poking around its lower portion, the Asclepion, the medical center named for the god who was so skilled at healing he could revive the dead. The ill came to this spa from all over the ancient world. Treatments included mud baths, massages, herbal medicines, colonic irrigations, drinks from the sacred spring, and abstinence from wine and rich food.

Clarus and Priene

Clarus was once a much-revered cult center, known throughout the Mediterranean region for its oracle, who delivered her prophecies in a dark room under the Temple of Apollo. Above ground, neat rows of names of the countless ancient visitors are carved on columns, steps, and even on a curving marble bench.

Our visit to Priene, a Greek city never tainted by a Roman overlay, was a highlight. The acropolis soared above a broad valley that was once an inlet of the sea. An enormous stone-faced mountain reared directly behind Priene forming a strong backdrop for several Ionic columns reerected in a solemn row.

The Greatest Site: Aphrodisias

The greatest archeological site of all, Vann had saved for last: Aphrodisias, named for the goddess of love. Excavations began in the 1960s when an earthquake destroyed the Turkish village that had grown up over the ruins. Aphrodisias flourished as a center of Roman marble-carving and sculpture, sending its statues and artists all over the empire. The archeologists’ spades did not have to plunge deep before statues began appearing.

Among Aphrodisias’ many thrilling sights are the stadium and the theater. The stadium, which is 860 feet long and held 30,000 spectators, is not only the largest to have survived from ancient times but also one of the best preserved.

The Closeness of the Ancients

Leaving the stadium behind, we strolled into the 7,000-seat theater and climbed to its highest level, there to sit in the shade of a wall and take in the view of the distant mountains. I turned around to look behind me, where at some point part of the wall had given way. I spotted a bone poking up from the earth. I pulled at it, and it came away easily. Then I saw a tooth. I picked it out and showed it to Vann on the palm of my hand. Was it human? Yes, he said matter-of-factly. Tooth and bone, he suggested, might well have belonged to a Roman killed in an early earthquake. Gently I poked both back into their resting places. Never did the ancients seem closer—or time more fragile.

For a lover of archeology, a tour of western Turkey’s treasure of Greek and Roman ruins is beyond imagination.

Story and Photos by Dale Brown
Los Angeles Times
February 1995

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Brown, Based in Virginia, is editor of Time-Life Books’ archeological adventure series, “Lost Civilizations.”