On the Shores of the Mediterranean (29 page)

Even Robert Wood, a very learned traveller indeed, who visited the city in 1750 and left a delightful record of this haunting, haunted place in his
Diaries
and in an essay identified it with Troy, was, as an unfriendly critic wrote, ‘… quite bewildered with Troy; converting the whole into a mass of confusion’.

As a result Wood got a terrible ticking off from Gibbon, who described him in a memorable footnote to Chapter XVII of
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, as ‘an author who in general seems to have disappointed the expectation of the public as a critic, and still more as a traveller. He had visited the banks of the Hellespont; he had read Strabo; he ought to have consulted the Roman itineraries; how was it possible for him to confound Ilium and Alexandria Troas, two cities which were sixteen miles distant from one another?’
³

All that warm afternoon, assailed by hunger, but with no means of satisfying it, we wandered beneath the trees among what was
left of Alexandria Troas, much of it hidden by long, dry grass. It was an eerie place. Not a bird sang and there was no sound apart from the droning of what would become in a few weeks a hell of superabundant insect life. We met no one except a young man herding goats who gave us a drink of water from a greasy-looking bottle, but was disinclined for conversation, as well he might be, apparently doomed to herd goats for the rest of his life in the shadow of the valonia oaks.

Fortunately, there were none of the savage dogs which Richard Chandler, in his
Travels in Asia Minor
, described as attacking his guides when he visited the place in August 1765; no wandering Turcomans with their black tents pitched among the ruins; no foxes, no partridges, no bats in the vaults below the Baths (a vignette of which adorns Edward Clarke’s
Travels
) because there were no vaults any more, and for the same reason no more of the bandits who used to share them with the bats.

We never found the remains of the Great Theatre – it sounds as if we were not really trying – the diameter of which was 252 feet, where we would have found enough subterranean vaults, apparently, and bats inhabiting them, to satisfy the most romantic tastes; neither did we see the great columns, twenty-seven feet in length and more than four feet in diameter, which Chandler saw somewhere to the north-west of the Baths, nor the numerous sarcophagi to the north-west of it, one of which he measured and found to be eleven feet long and six feet wide.

‘Mottraye,’ he wrote, ‘when on the spot, caused one of these tombs to be opened; and found in it two sculls, which crumbled to dust on being touched.’

Nor did we discover, outside the walls but reached by a paved way, ‘the largest granite pillar in the world, excepting the famous Column of
Alexandria
in
Egypt
, which it much resembles,’ described by Clarke.

It was to this column that Clarke’s Greek servant, ‘laughing immoderately’, led him with the words, ‘As you are pleased with the sight of columns, here is one large enough to gratify your utmost expectations.’ It was a single shaft fashioned from one entire stone, without base or capital, and it was thirty-seven feet eight inches long, five feet three inches in diameter at the base and four feet five inches at the summit. No nineteenth- or twentieth-century traveller refers to this colossal column, so one must assume that it attracted the attention of the Kaptan Paşa, or some other cannonball fancier. It can scarcely have disintegrated completely although Clarke himself was far from sanguine about the lasting qualities of granite, some of that which he had seen exhibiting a very advanced state of decomposition. All we saw remaining of what must have been one of the larger repositories of columns in the Mediterranean was a number of huge, broken monoliths at what had been the port of the city down by the shore, shattered, presumably, in the attempt to transport them to Constantinople.

It was not until after we returned to England and I read about Alexandria Troas that I realized something that all travellers on the shores of the Mediterranean eventually recognize, how much we had missed simply by being unobservant and how much more by being born 150 years or so too late.

From Alexandria Troas we continued southwards along the Aegean shores of the Mediterranean. Great tracts of the coast of Turkey between the Dardanelles and Antalya on the southern Mediterranean coast are in much the same condition as the French and Italian Rivieras must have been before the coming of the railway and the Grand Hotel, a state of affairs that will not endure much longer now that a newly-completed coast road makes it possible to drive uninterruptedly all the way along it to Antakya (Antioch) near the Syrian border.

Here, in early spring, we had the feeling that what we saw was for our pleasure alone. There were no guides to expound and interpret or shoo us back on board a coach so that we could get on to the next place, because at this season there were no coaches. Even the custodians, that is if there were any, had only recently emerged from winter torpor and went home before sunset, leaving us to contemplate their mostly unlockable ruins in company with the bats and owls. Visiting the ruins, which are almost too abundant, time ceased to have any meaning.

After the difficulties we had experienced looking down into the various levels of Troy from Troy I to VIIA we ceased to care what epoch any particular remain dated from. Faced with Assos, for example, a ruined city on the southern shores of the Troad, overlooking Lesbos to the south of it, it was impossible to know what one was looking at. Assos is believed to be Padasos, a city founded during the Trojan Wars and sacked by Achilles. In 1000 BC it was colonized by Aeolians from Lesbos – who themselves came from Boeotia in central Greece – and was successively occupied or dominated by Lydians, Persians, Greeks, Persians again – Alexander of Macedon delivered it – Romans, Byzantines, Muslims, Crusaders, Muslims again.

The acropolis is crowned with the ruins of a Greek temple and an Ottoman mosque which has a gateway that once formed part of a Byzantine church which was itself constructed with bits of a Greek temple. The city is surrounded by medieval curtain walls and towers built with stones originally hewn by Greeks, some of which resemble huge bolsters. Roman tomb chests lie around in picturesque disorder. It was visited by St Paul and St Luke and the people became Christians. Yet according to the author of the locally published guide book, ‘during its long existence it never played an important political role in history’. In such circumstances perhaps the visitor may be excused for satisfying what Rose
Macaulay described as
Ruinenlust
by enjoying them simply as a highly romantic spectacle.

In search of ruins on these Aegean and Mediterranean shores, many of them far more ruinous and inaccessible than Assos, we fought our way through jungles of vegetation, thickets of thorn and laurel, dense groves of evergreen oaks and, more pleasurably, wandered among endless beds of pink oleanders which, as the weather grew warmer as we moved south, were everywhere in bloom, and we were attacked by hornets and visited ruins built among Chinese-type boulders which rise above the olive groves, where storks and herons drift across reedy inlets and stone sarcophagi lie on the dazzling shingle at the water’s edge like stranded white, dug-out boats.

We lingered by green watermeadows in which anemones and giant white daisies grew and drifted through fields of fennel, which goes well with ruins, to find, somewhere east of Antalya, a solitary archway, so fragile and so close to collapse after a couple of thousand years or more that one was tempted to stay on there and be present at the moment of its fall. Everything we saw was broken, but beautiful or memorable in some way or other because it was of stone or marble, not cement or reinforced concrete. We saw shattered aqueducts, forests of columns thrown down as if a whirlwind had roared through a fossil forest, and buildings already damaged by some cataclysm being crushed still more by giant growths of ivy, as if they were being squeezed by boa-constrictors. We saw stadiums and theatres, some of them filled with fragments of friezes and statuary, the rubble left by earthquakes and Goths and other producers of ruins and rejected by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gentlemen, down here on a visit, as being too ruinous to be crated up and sent home. We saw bath houses hewn from single blocks of stone and a vast necropolis in which tomb chests, some of them eleven feet long, stove in and with their lids
left askew by grave robbers, looked as if some giant had gone berserk among them.

As we travelled through these realms of the now ancient dead, our pockets began to silt up with the debris of their various civilizations – shards, bits of bone, splinters of marble statuary on which parts of the folds of a garment could be seen, fragments of iridescent glass, nothing ever whole, not even a coin. The bone was probably part of a sheep. In this endless quest one of us turned over a marble paving stone which showed every sign of having lain where it was for centuries. Under it, where there was no apparent exit or entrance, was a green and orange, diamond-patterned toad.

Sometimes small boys or shepherds wearing thick, rigid cloaks of whitish felt which had shoulders two feet wide, designed to protect them against the winter blasts, cloaks that made them look as if they had taken up residence in a sarcophagus, would appear from nowhere and hiss
‘Kainz, Kainz!’
at us in a conspiratorial manner, the traffic in any sort of antiquity being illegal. Sometimes they were erratically-shaped Byzantine coins, most of them defaced, some of them beautiful, silver-coloured, with bearded gods or rulers on them. ‘Copies,’ we used to say at first, trying to look severe and knowledgeable.
‘Karpiz, Karpiz
,’ they all replied, the shepherds revealing awful teeth, not understanding but happy to agree with anything. But they were not copies. If they had been, they would have had to ask more for them. It was a pity that neither of us was mad about coins.

The best ruins were those in which archaeologists, those great ruiners of ruins, had either delved briefly without success or appeared not to have delved at all. Among those presumably too uninteresting to suffer their attentions are the remains of a temple dedicated to Vulcan which stands high above the sea north-east of the Lycian Olympus which, submerged in greenery at the mouth
of a rocky gorge on the Mediterranean shore, is perhaps the most romantically situated of all the ruined cities. There on the mountainside burn the fires of Chimaera in an area of calcinated limestone, sixteen of them in all, fuelled by natural gas, overlooking the distant sea from which they can still be seen at night, just as they were by fishermen in the time of Homer and Strabo.

The Mediterranean coast of Turkey is very long, and as it is five hundred miles by road from Antalya to Antakya (Antioch), on the Syrian border, we decided to go part of the way from Antalya by ship. This was on a Saturday in February, what passes for winter on these shores. Flowers were beginning to bloom everywhere. Spring was in the air and we had already seen a pair of heavily-armed soldiers whose job it was to protect a nearby ruined city from the locals who augment their slender incomes by digging up the past and selling it in season to the carriage trade, drifting happily among the remains hand in hand with freshly plucked wild anemones between their teeth.

It took almost an entire Saturday morning in Antalya to book
a double-berth cabin for Monday with Turkish Maritime Lines who operate a service from Istanbul to Mersin on the coast west of Adana which stops at various places on the way. But it was not until we came to pay for the tickets that we found that they had been made out not for the following Monday, two days hence, but for a Monday in June when the first sailing of the year from Antalya would take place, which was in approximately four months’ time.

In view of this we decided not to wait, but to continue by car, although we had enjoyed hanging about in Antalya.

On the travertine cliffs on which the town stands there is an enormous Roman tower that resembles the Mausoleum of Hadrian, which has nothing to do with the fact that it was Hadrian who strengthened the walls in AD 130 while on a visit commemorated by a triumphal gateway, and in the museum there are some fine sarcophagi and the jaw bone of St Nicholas, otherwise Santa Claus. There are many mosques constructed by the Seljuk Turks who took Antalya from the Byzantines in 1207, one of them with a fluted minaret, and an equally old
hamam
which is still functioning, some fine old wooden houses, a nice bazaar (or as nice as bazaars now can be in an age of mass production), and on the other side of the main road from it there is a restaurant which has on its menu the sort of items that make travel fun: ‘Crem of Eggolant, Fried Shrips with Spectral Sauce, Viol Rip Shop and Rose Bif’, followed by ‘Sweat and Firutes’, all washed down with ‘Bear’ if so desired. And it has a very picturesque port off which until recently ships used to lie loading timber and cotton. Now they load it at a newly-built port five miles away to the west at the end of a much photographed beach beyond which rise the mountains which form the south-western extremity of the Taurus range.

Having visited the ruined cities in the Pamphylian Plain, of which Antalya had been one of the seaports, and as a result having
contracted a bad attack of ruin indigestion – for which an effective cure would be twenty-four hours in New York – we found ourselves confronted on our way east by yet more ruins, the whole of this coast being an extended scrap-heap full of the inexhaustible debris of the past with more ancient remains than Britain has filling stations.

Long before we reached Okukcular, a hamlet on the shore just west of Alanya, some sixty miles east of Antalya, the weather had broken. Rain had fallen in torrents accompanied by thunder and lightning. By now it was late afternoon and although the rain had stopped the sky was still as black as night. Occasionally flashes of lightning illuminated the scene, accompanied by thunder. Six miles inshore from Okukcular was Alarahan.

Abandoned, dilapidated but not ruined even after the passage of some 750 years – its construction had taken place in the illustrious reign of the Seljuk Sultan Alaeddin Keykubad – the
han
, a caravanserai on what had been an important caravan route, stood high on the left bank of the Alara River, which was now roaring seawards in spate. A masterpiece of the stonemason’s art, like all Seljuk
hans
it was a fortification as well as being a caravanserai. Its walls, which were twenty feet high, enclosed a courtyard in which camels and other beasts of burden could be accommodated, entered by a magnificent gateway from which the gates had long since disappeared. Around this courtyard there was a dark warren of storerooms and cells for the accommodation of the drivers and what had been a mosque in which they could perform their devotions, all either flooded, or deep in mud, and tenanted by bats.

This was one of a chain of
hans
which awaited the caravans at the end of each day’s march on the seven-day journey from the Seljuk capital at Konya on the Anatolian Plateau to Alanya, the Seljuk port on the Mediterranean, which followed a spectacular route across the Taurus range, each one of them a minor
masterpiece of Seljuk architecture. The roof was flat, grass-grown and riddled with gaping holes, what had once been primitive chimneys to let smoke out, through which it was only too easy to fall into the depths below.

The Seljuks, pre-Ottoman Turks, were originally nomads from central Asia. They first set up a Sultanate in Persia whose rule extended as far eastwards as Herat. In the latter part of the eleventh century they established themselves briefly in western Anatolia, to the north of Cappadocia, but were defeated there in 1097 during the First Crusade by the Crusaders, who gave back the territory they had taken to the Byzantine Emperor, Alexius I Comnenus. Later, in the twelfth century, the Seljuks made Konya their capital, and there they set up what was called the Sultanate of Rum, which endured until 1242 or 1243, when they were overrun by the Mongols who had arrived in eastern Anatolia two years previously, after which they became, nominally at least, their vassals, although their Sultans continued to rule until 1308.

The Seljuk period sounds as if it might have been slightly more agreeable to live in than most other periods of Muslim occupation of the eastern Mediterranean lands. Although Muslims, they were tolerant of other religions and their own women went unveiled in public. Mysticism flourished and Konya became the seat of the
Mevlevi tarikat
, otherwise the Whirling Dervishes, whose founder was Celahedin Rumi, one of the great Muslim mystics.

The Seljuks were remarkable builders: of mosques, religious colleges,
hamams
, the cylindrical tombs with pointed roofs called
türbe
, and of roads and
hans
. And they were the first to introduce glazed tiles into Anatolia.

At Alanya, their port on the Mediterranean, which Sultan Keykubad, who had taken it from the Armenians, also used as his winter quarters instead of freezing in Konya up on the plateau,
he employed a Syrian military engineer, Ali Bey of Aleppo, to make the fortress rock, which is nearly 800 feet above the sea, impregnable. Ali Bey also built the shipyards and arsenal (known as the
tersane
) in tunnels running nearly a hundred yards into the base of the rock, and an enormous octagonal red tower, the Kizil Kule, to defend the outer harbour. As at Antalya, their other seaport, they carried on an extensive trade with the Aegean Islands, the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and with Alexandria.

The view from the roof was memorable. Immediately beyond the
han
, where all that remained of a Seljuk bridge that had once spanned the river was a single abutment, the road ended at the foot of the Taurus Mountains which here rose from the coastal plain in what would have been an unbroken wall if the river had not chosen this particular spot to break through it in a deep gorge, with the caravan route to Konya running along the mountainside above it. Rising in the mouth of this gorge was an immense rock many hundreds of feet high with a castle on its summit, to which a series of curtain walls wriggled their way up over the bare rock like giant, fossilized snakes. There was no visible means of getting to this castle – no gateway, no staircases, not even a footpath.

Down near the river bank opposite the
han
a goatherd had built himself a hut and by doing so had become, simply because he was there, whether officially appointed or not,
de facto
guardian of both the
han
and the castle.

We sat outside his hut in a freezing wind that had now begun to blow, together with a Turkish gentleman who had also come here to see the
han
and who spoke excellent French, drinking sweet tea and eating honey mixed with raisins, an unimaginably delicious dish concocted by Yürüks (the word means wanderer), nomads and semi-nomads of Turkoman ancestry whose women, some of them astonishingly beautiful, are renowned weavers of rugs and saddlebags. The Yürüks, of whom there are large numbers
throughout Asia Minor, spend the winter in the plains, when possible the plains near the Mediterranean, and in summer migrate with their herds and flocks to the
yaylas
, their camps in the high mountain pastures, where they live in goat-hair tents.

‘He says that will be 800 Turkish liras,’ the Turkish gentleman said when we had finished eating the mixture and were feeling slightly sick.

‘Isn’t that rather a lot?’

‘It is a lot. It is much too much. It is disgraceful. I shall tell him so.’

A prolonged conversation ensued.

‘He is a Yürük, although he no longer wanders. He now says he is ashamed of having asked so much. He now says he wants nothing at all, and will also take us to the castle. I think we should give him 400 liras for the tea and the mixture, which is also too much, and another 400 liras and some cigarettes for the castle, which is about right. He says we should leave immediately as it is going to snow and if it freezes it is a dangerous route. He also hopes that we have a torch as part of the way to it is very dark.’

The part of the way to it which was very dark was a steep tunnel, in parts nearly vertical, impenetrably black and with hundreds of steps cut in it which the heavy rain had turned into a series of waterfalls that made us extremely wet. Eventually we emerged from it into what had been the lower ward of the castle, where there were some water cisterns cut in the rock. Here, we were already several hundred feet above the river. From it what was left of a track, after innumerable rock falls had obliterated entire sections of it, led to the foot of the final pyramid on which the castle stood.

The last part was a rock face up which we hauled ourselves with the aid of spiky bushes. As the Yürük said, it would have been no place to be if it became glazed with ice.

At the top we had expected to find a walled courtyard with living accommodation leading off it, similar to the
han
, but there was no room for anything like that. The mountain simply ended in a sharp point like a pencil with a sort of guard house and a tiny domed building stuck on top of it.

Up here in the clouds, with the snowflakes already beginning to whirl about it, it was difficult to imagine the determination that must have been required by the Seljuks not only to build such a fortress in such a place but to build this little building at the top. What was it for, this once elegant little building, with a dome, the inside of which had originally been a brilliant cobalt blue, as minute fragments of colour which we found among the plaster on the floor testified, and so small that it could not have held more than three people at any one time with any degree of comfort? Had it been a miniature mosque, a shrine to some saint, or had it once been a pleasure dome to which the commandant of the castle retired with a couple of companions when things got too much for him in the lower ward of the castle far below? The Turkish gentleman didn’t know, no one in the Tourist Office at Alanya knew when we asked there subsequently, the Yürük didn’t know, or care, and the only guide book which specifically mentioned Alarahan got all mixed up about it.

East and west of Alanya sand beaches stretch away to what looks like infinity; but much of the coast immediately behind them has been ruined for ever by ribbon development. If such indiscriminate building continues, it will soon be impossible for the traveller to see the Mediterranean at all on the entire seventy miles or so of coast between Antalya and Alanya, just as it has been impossible to see it on great tracts of the French and Italian Rivieras since long before the First World War.

Eastwards of Alanya, at the far end of one of the long beaches,
the plain ended at the foot of some outliers of the Taurus and the road climbed above the coast which is steep and rocky. We were now in Cilicia. On these mountainsides goats whose luxuriant coats have from time immemorial provided the hair used to weave the tents of the Yürüks eked out a living. In this region, the inhabitants, who are very poor, live in low, single-storey cabins, and here they cut terraces one above the other in the cliff-sides, which they use not – as they do in some other parts of the Mediterranean, such as the Cinque Terre, on the Ligurian coast of Italy – for cultivating the vine, but for growing bananas which must be, with the spume of winter gales drenching them, a salt-cured variety. Here at Selinus, now the fishing village of Gazipaşa, in AD 117, the Emperor Trajan died while returning to Rome, having quelled a revolt in southern Mesopotamia and after an expedition against the Parthians in Armenia, a year of ferment in the Empire when the Jews rebelled everywhere on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, in Cyrene, in what is now Libya, in Egypt, in Cyprus, in the Levant and in the Holy Land.

Further on, near Silifke, in 1190, the Emperor Barbarossa was drowned in the gorge of the Calycadnus River, now called the Goksü, while on his way to the Third Crusade. Unpickled, his corpse was carried on to Antioch by the Duke of Swabia, to be interred in the cathedral there. His death so upset some of the German knights that many of them turned back and the Crusade fizzled out.

By now it was snowing hard, but fortunately here on the coast it didn’t settle. Meanwhile up in the mountains and beyond them on the Anatolian Plateau the temperature fell to –6°C, into the –30°s in the Palandoken Mountains up in northern Anatolia around Erzurum where the bears live and the wolves come down from the mountains in search of sustenance. Here on the coast we visited a café built on stilts over the water in which young
male Turks, identically moustached, sat gloomily listening to the booming of the surf beneath it which threatened to wash it away, at the same time watching a powerful waterspout which had appeared offshore, spinning out their glasses of tea and talking about Germany. What with snow, thunder and lightning and now a waterspout, 1983 looked as if it was going to be an
annus mirabilis
.