On the Shores of the Mediterranean (28 page)

‘I am grateful to Hasan Ediz for his helps of translation into Enlglish,’ Mr Sevil wrote in his introduction. ‘What is coin: it is a kind of metallic money, using easily, that is guaranteed preciously by the government’s official coinage.’

We were grateful to discover that one of our coins might, with a great stretching of the imagination, have had a representation of Dionysos on one side of it.

‘Dionysos,’ said a footnote to Mr Sevil’s book, ‘was the son of Semele who was daughter of Zeus and Kadmo, king of Thebai. According to legend of birth, Semele copulated with Zeus but she didn’t believe the strength of that god whom made love and so, she was smitted by thunderbold and died. Zeus took the seven-months baby from her womb and pit his calf until the second birth.’ Which last, like so much of Greek mythology, was enough to obliterate thoughts of breakfast.

After this we dismissed our taximan and sent him, and his too-much-loved taxi, back to Istanbul, and continued our journey through the Troad by bus.

The bus, painted to resemble some rare and exotic insect, was packed with country people returning to their villages from the market at Canakkale. All were heavily laden with shopping and one or two had wicker baskets containing chickens that had failed to get sold. The birds looked despondent, as if they knew they had let their owners down.

All the ladies on board were dressed in their best for this outing but their clothes were a bit disappointing for romantic travellers with their feet only recently planted on the shores of Asia: pale, drab, factory-made gabardine topcoats that looked as if they had all come off the same production line, long, baggy Muslim bloomers made of nylon, or else frumpy skirts worn with grey lisle stockings and clumpy shoes, which, apart from the bloomers, was until recently the sort of uniform English nannies used to be dressed in. A few of the young ones used make-up but they could all have done with a bit. The matrons were mostly pear-shaped, and when one of them got off at a request stop she backed down
the aisle in order to save her shopping from being squashed, sweeping everything, hens and baskets and any people who happened to be in the way before her with a rock-hard, corseted bottom. When writers describe, as some do, a town as being ‘bustling’, what now springs to mind is a village in the Troad with pear-shaped ladies backing into one another and rebounding like dodgem cars in a fun-fair.

The men, who were mostly slimmer, not having been subjected to yearly pregnancies, all wore the shiny black suits and peaked caps, decreed by Kemal Atatürk, the great soldier, hero of Gallipoli and founder of the Turkish Republic in 1923, as part of his programme of westernization, a uniform still worn by the majority of the male working population in rural areas of Turkey.

Everyone was very friendly. Porcelain faces, which Genghiz Khan would have found unremarkable, cracked into smiles when we boarded the vehicle at Troy. There was none of the hurried veiling and twittering among the ladies which always puts the male, non-Muslim traveller in Muslim countries in the difficultto-refute position of being thought to be excited by ladies dressed in grey gabardine topcoats, lisle stockings and clumpy shoes.

Instead they asked shyly but eagerly after our health and where we came from, and when we answered,
‘Ben Ingilizce, Londonen
,’ which was as near as we could get with our midget phrase book to ‘I am English, from London,’ those nearest answered,
‘Allah razi olah!’
(‘Praise be to God!’) and budged up a bit to give us more room on the seat we were sitting on and were lucky to get, which was the worst one, over the back axle.

Soon this piece of intelligence worked its way up the bus and some sixty heads swivelled round to get a look at these outlandish beings. In spite of being the centre of interest it was more fun than being locked up in the back of a Bel-Air taxi in solitary splendour with a house-proud driver in charge.

It was when we were asked where we were going and said, ‘Alexandria Troas,
Inshallah!’
(‘if God wills!’) that we ran into difficulty, as none of them had apparently ever heard of it, that is with the exception of the driver up front who had already sold us tickets to go there (and he was keeping the information about its whereabouts to himself), and one old man wearing what looked like a sawn-off fez with the remains of what had once been a green chiffon turban wrapped around it, giving him a holy air. ‘What they mean,’ the old man said eventually to the rest of the passengers in a loud voice, for by this time the bus was in an uproar with conflicting theories about our ultimate destination being bandied about, ‘is Harabeler, Eski Stambul, not this Greek-sounding place at all.’ ‘Aha!
Harabeler! Eski Stambul!’
they said, nodding their heads; and from now on they looked at us with the slightly incredulous air with which country people everywhere who live surrounded by ruins, which to them are nothing more than stone-ridden obstacles in the way of cultivation, or at the best afford temporary shelter to themselves and their animals from rain and sun, tend to regard those who have made what to them are unimaginably long, pointless and costly journeys in order to view them. In other words, they thought we were barmy.

After this painless inquisition we were allowed to relax and look out of one of the open windows of the bus – open because there was no longer any glass in it – as it roared down the winding road through the varied landscapes of the Troad, scrubby wilderness with pines growing in it, fields interspersed with valonia oaks in which the same sort of people as those on the bus, who had been working in them since first light, had taken refuge for a rest beneath their carts or in the inkpots of shadow beneath the trees. For by now it was a fine, warm morning without a cloud in the sky. Then we crossed the River Scamander, in which a number of saucy-looking laundresses were walloping clothes on stones under
the willow trees and shouting to one another with cheerful, coarse voices, just as the Trojan women must have done.

All the other passengers with the exception of ourselves got down at a small place called Geyikli with cries of
‘Allahah ismarladik!’
(‘Goodbye!’) and
‘Selam aleikum!’
(‘Prosperity and Peace attend you!’) to which we replied correctly, as the persons staying on the bus, not getting down from it, forewarned by our phrase book,
‘Güle, Güle!’
(‘Goodbye!’) and
‘Aleikum selam!’
We too would have liked to disembark. We were hungry and thirsty.

Finally, the bus ground to a halt at a place called Odunluk Iskelesi, stopped sufficiently long for us to get down, then vanished in the direction of Geyikli. This was the end of the road. Beyond it was a jetty, jutting into Besika Bay in the Aegean, and a few miles beyond that was Tenedos, a boring-looking island even from a distance (which often lends enchantment to the view of otherwise boring-looking islands).

Odunluk Iskelesi was not exactly a feast for the eye, either. Apart from the jetty, from which the ferry, presumably disregarding the bus connection, had just left for Tenedos, it consisted of some dusty-looking trees, a couple of tea houses, neither of which apparently served tea or anything else at this particular time of day, except bottled water which, in Turkey, often means water bottled by an old man sitting in the middle of nowhere by a tap. Outside tourist resorts there was no coffee to be had in Turkey at this time because of a lack of foreign currency with which to buy it.

The only other source of refreshment was down on the shore in the direction of what had been the port of Alexandria Troas, a decrepit restaurant with an unshaven owner and nothing to eat in it except a long dead fish in a fridge.

Topped up with bottled water, still breakfastless apart from some stale bread and slightly queasy from what we had seen in
the refrigerator – we had been looking forward to a degustation of freshly landed fish, not a visit to a fish mortuary – we set off inland for the city of Alexandria Troas.

Soon we found ourselves imbrangled and lost, as had innumerable travellers before us, in what had once been a dense forest of valonia oaks and was now a series of groves so extensive, without being particularly lofty, that although the city was said to have walls six miles long and itself covered 1000 acres it was perfectly possible, as we now demonstrated, to walk into it through one of the now enormous gaps in the walls and walk out through a similar gap on the far side, without, apart from tripping over some low-lying remains or else bumping into something shrouded in vegetation which loomed unidentifiable overhead, seeing much of Alexandria Troas at all.

It was Antigonus the One-Eyed, one of Alexander’s commanders, who named it Antigonia. He became Satrap, governor, of Phrygia and, after Alexander’s death in 323 BC, commander of the army in Asia. A very able general and ruler, he was eventually defeated by a coalition of what had been his fellow generals, consisting of Cassander in Macedonia, Ptolemy in Egypt, Lysimachus in Thrace and Seleucus in Babylonia, at the battle of Ipsus in Phrygia in 301 BC. In 299 BC, twenty-four years after his death, to honour the memory of Alexander, Lysimachus, his former companion in arms and successor, re-named Antigonia Alexandria Troas.

It was not always so impenetrable. Seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century visitors record that they found themselves perambulating on a relatively open site, one that rose gently inland from the shore of Besika Bay, where the remains of the ancient harbour walls could be seen, interspersed with cornfields, vineyards, olive groves and orchards of fruit trees, above which rose the still colossal ruins, all soon to be more or less hidden by the all-embracing vegetation and the oak woods: the walls with turrets
disposed at intervals along them, the innumerable temples, the great aqueduct which terminated at the Baths of Herodes Atticus, and the theatre which overlooked the sea and Tenedos, so that at evening the spectators seated in it would have been bathed in the rays of the setting sun.

But even as these intrepid visitors looked out over this magnificent, if melancholy, spectacle, braving the robbers who infested it and the feverish agues of the plain of the Troad, every hour of daylight, every day, at the same time as it was disappearing from view, it was also diminishing, however imperceptibly, in size.

Of all the cities of classical times on the shores of Turkey, Alexandria Troas, because of its convenient situation – an easy journey by sea to Constantinople – was perhaps the most pillaged. All the others were ruined and thrown down by barbarians and natural cataclysms, but in most of them the stones remained more or less where they fell, principally because, apart from those precious objects removed by discerning individuals such as Clarke himself (who sent the lower part of a marble pillar with an inscription in Greek to England from the vicinity of Callifat in much the same way as today one would send a picture postcard), the distances that separated these sites from the great cities of the Mediterranean that were still, as it were, on their feet, made it impractical to transport them thither.

If only it could have been so at Alexandria Troas! If only it had never had to merit its nickname, Eski (Old) Stambul. Early in the seventeenth century the English travellers George Sandys
¹
and the wonderfully eccentric Thomas Coryate,
²
on his way to India, both witnessed the wholesale plundering of the city for stone.

This shipping away of marble to Constantinople, some of the columns and pillars to be incorporated more or less intact in the
fabric of mosques, themselves often noble works of art, was not the only traffic. At the same time as it was going on, the complete destruction of these great, some of them enormous, pieces of marble had also been taking place in order to turn them into cannon-balls, an industry brought to a fine art in the latter half of the eighteenth century by Kaptan Paşa Hasan, whose cannonball manufactory, using stone and marble columns for the larger projectiles, sarcophagi for the smaller bores, accelerated the consumption of these artefacts. They had been used for this purpose for centuries, probably since the siege and fall of Constantinople.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu saw enormous cannon-balls being cut at Alexandria Troas in 1718, and they were still being made there as late as 1833, by which time only very few columns remained intact, and then only because of their great size or the remoteness of their situation.

One such projectile, fired across the Narrows of the Dardanelles in 1769, weighed 1100 pounds, while the prototype made in Edirne in January 1453 for the siege of Constantinople by the Hungarian gunsmith Urban weighed 600 pounds and was fired a distance of a mile from a bronze cannon with a barrel twenty-six feet long, at which point it buried itself six feet in the ground.

The last of the great edifices still to be seen in Alexandria Troas at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Baths of Herodes Atticus – still to this day the only structure of really imposing proportions remaining – was badly damaged by an earthquake in the winter of 1809–10. The Great Aqueduct of Herodes fell or was otherwise destroyed before 1812, probably by the same earthquake.

Before this earthquake the truly enormous wreckage of the Baths was used as a seamark by unnumbered generations of seafaring men who referred to it as the Palace of Priam. ‘Vulgarly
termed it
The Palace of Priam,’
Clarke wrote severely, ‘from an erroneous notion, prevalent in the writings of early travellers … [taking the opportunity to name a number of these offenders] that
Alexandria Troas
was the
Ilium
of
Homer.’

One who fell into this grievous, almost unforgivable error, another eccentric of similar stamp to Thomas Coryate, was William Lithgow, who had himself recorded by an artist back at home in England for the frontispiece of his splendid book
The Totall Discourse, of the Rare Adventures, and painfull Peregrinations of long nineteene yeares travayles, from Scotland to the most famous kingdomes in Europe, Asia and Africa etc
. (1632), and for posterity, standing in the midst of the ruins of Alexandria Troas, as imagined by the artist, and calling them ‘The Ruins of Ilium with the Tombs of Priam and Hecuba’. This was in 1610 or 1611.