The Gold of Thrace (4 page)

Chatham threw fifty leva into the front seat, grabbed his suitcase and bolted from the taxi. He searched for building numbers and finally found blue metal markers attached to the corner of each building just above the ground floor windows. He looked for Building 4, Entrance G. That must be gamma in Cyrillic, he thought, gamma. He ran inside and reached for the banister. It pulled from the wall into his hand.

He sprinted up the stairs to the first landing, reached for the button to light the stairwell. It didn’t work. He dashed up another flight. This time when he pushed the button, a weak light flickered in the hallway. He ran up to the third floor landing and looked for apartment 26 in the dim light. He made his way down the hall, past doorway after doorway, 20, 22, and finally 26. He could just make out a strip of cardboard in the wavering light with the name Konstantinov in Cyrillic and Latin script taped on the door. He pushed the bell.

The man from the railway station in Istanbul opened the door.

Chapter Six

Ephesus, Turkey, August 8, 1990

“Terrible thing about Binali,” Kosay was saying.

They were standing in the peristyle of an ancient Roman villa, surrounded by columns and a portico. The courtyard, open to the sky in the center of the house, gave light to all the rooms. They stood next to a shallow rectangular basin, an
impluvium
, built to catch water that ran off the roof to provide water for household tasks.

Tamar, Orman, and Mustafa had clambered up the stairs with Kosay along the narrow lanes that separated the villas, above the remains of shops and taverns on the lowest level, to the slope above the Street of the Curetes so that Kosay could check the work on the restoration of one of the villas in the part of the city where prosperous Ephesians lived.

“It’s for tourism, you know,” Kosay told them. “To make it authentic as possible to show life in Ephesus in the Late Roman period during the heyday of Ephesus when Artemis still ruled. Before she was replaced by Christianity.”

On the way up, they had paused once to take a picture of a manhole that gave access to sewer pipes that led from the houses and was stamped with SPQR, the logo of the Roman Empire.

Earlier that day, they had visited the house of the Virgin Mary on a wooded knoll on Bülbül Daği, the Mountain of the Nightingales, above the Magnesia Gate.

Kosay had swept his arm in the direction of Ephesus and said, “You can just make it out from here, the road from the old harbor. Today, the harbor is three miles away,” Kosay said. “Once, the road from the harbor was lined with shops and grand public buildings.” He shook his head. “No more.”

For a moment Tamar visualized him standing on the hilltop in the twilight after the tourists had left, presiding over Ephesus while the ghosts of the past whispered and whipped like wind through the grand boulevards and broken temples of the Ephesians. She almost expected him to say, “Mine, all mine, as far as the eye can see.”

Instead, he said, “During the vernal equinox, pilgrims would crowd into Ephesus from all parts of the empire for the weeklong festival in honor of the goddess, pouring through the city gates and along the broad avenues. They shopped in the market stalls, bargaining for jewelry and small statues of the goddess, some of silver, some of gold and ivory with onyx hands and faces. They patronized the brothels, the baths. They used the public toilets.

“In those days Ephesus was crammed with pilgrims from all over the Roman world. They came in the spring for the Vernal Festival to honor the beautiful Artemis, the Virgin Mother of the Gods, to walk along the Street of the Curetes, to marvel at the fountains and the grandeur of the temples, most of all the Temple of Artemis.”

He paused. “It was burnt by the Goths,” he said.

“The Ephesians were clever, you know. After Constantine, when the pilgrims stopped coming, all was not lost for the enterprising Ephesians. St. John, author of the Revelations, spent the last years of his life in Ephesus and is buried on the hill up there.”

He pointed toward a hill in Selçuk that overlooked Ephesus. “His tomb became a place of pilgrimage.

“Soon they began to circulate rumors that Mary had come to visit John and spent her last years here. And that’s not all,” he went on. “In the nineteenth century an Austrian nun had a dream in which she saw the house of the Virgin Mary, located up there. When the Austrian archaeologists came to dig, they found the house exactly where the nun said it would be, exactly how she described it.”

He looked over at them with a smile. “It was built in the sixth century. Mary must have lived a miraculously long and sanctified life.” He lifted a quizzical eyebrow. “In the twentieth century, the popes declared the house a place of pilgrimage.”

He gestured toward the trees surrounding the house, strung with prayers left by visitors to the holy site.

“They say that Mary not only spent her last days here, she is also buried here.”

“She’s buried in Jerusalem, in the Kidron Valley, across from St. Stephan’s Gate,” Tamar said.

“Mary is buried in many places. She died well, and she died often, and according to the Italians, she never died at all, but went straight to heaven with her shoes on.”

He paused a moment for an expressive shrug. “Christians outside of Ephesus knew nothing about this before the Council of Ephesus. Early travelers such as the Bordeaux Pilgrim and Egeria, a pilgrim from Aquitaine, visited Ephesus but never alluded to Mary in connection with the city.”

They drove down the hill, stopping once at a souvenir kiosk, where Tamar bought a guidebook, a set of slides for lectures, and a statuette of Diana of Ephesus to put on the dashboard of her car, and then continued on to the main part of the site where Kosay was supervising the reconstruction of one of the Roman villas on the slope.

***

Kosay inspected the remains of a fountain on the north side of the peristyle in the Roman house on the slope before he spoke again.

“Binali called me from Kilis, you know,” he said. “He was upset, said something was very wrong, that he had to see me.”

“Did he tell you what upset him?” Mustafa asked.

“He didn’t want to say over the phone. I told him to come ahead.”

“And then?” Orman asked.

Kosay shrugged and sighed. “He was killed before I could see him.”

“And the Kybele,” Orman said. “It was stolen the same day?”

“Appalling. There’s a rash of thefts. The Kybele, the mosaic from your site.”

“If you’re not careful,” Orman said, “they’ll steal your streets.”

“It’s not a joke, Orman. I take my job as a custodian of the past seriously.”

“As we all do,” Orman said.

Kosay led them through the Roman house from room to room, all lit by an eerie light that filtered through splintered roofs. He pointed out frescoes of muses and patterned mosaic floors, water closets and fountains, as if he were a real estate agent showing an extravagant house in a California suburb.

“They lived in luxury with kitchens and baths, central heating and running water,” he told them.

“The best of everything,” Mustafa said, with a touch of envy and maybe a tinge of disapproval for their dissolute ways.

Tamar had heard somewhere that Mustafa came from the mountains of Kurdistan, where even running water was a luxury.

When Kosay finished, he led them down to the Street of the Curetes, named for the priests of the terrible Anatolian goddess Kybele.

“This is where Binali was killed,” he said, pausing for a moment, pointing to a spot on the ground where the soil between the tesserae had darkened, and then went on down the street.

In front of the arched entrance to Hadrian’s Temple, a young Brit had climbed on a plinth to strike a heroic pose, his backpack on the sidewalk, while his friend fidgeted with a camera. A woman with a minicam on her shoulder shouted to them, “Out of the way, out of the way.” She turned to Tamar and said, “
Schrecklich
. They are everywhere,” before Tamar moved on to join the others as they took a dogleg onto the Marble Road.

Kosay stopped at the corner of the Street of the Curetes and Marble Street next to a footstep incised in the pavement.

“This is the brothel, once filled with laughter. Now only silence,” he said. “Under the sand in there, there’s a mosaic floor with portraits of the women of the brothel.”

He crossed into the brothel and took a whiskbroom from his back pocket. He brushed away the sand that covered the floor to reveal a mosaic portrait of a young woman with a long, melancholy face and dark-rimmed eyes, then he sighed and covered her again and led them further up the street.

They passed the many-columned
agora
and continued on, stopping in front of the theatre.

“This is where bulls and manhood were sacrificed for the glory of Artemis,” Kosay said. “And where the Ephesians attacked St. Paul. He stood there, ranting at them, and for three hours they attacked and harassed him, shouting, ‘Great is the Artemis of the Ephesians. Great is the Artemis of the Ephesians.’ They stoned him, almost killed him, your St. Paul.”

He nodded toward Tamar, as if she had sole proprietorship of St. Paul. The accusation made her feel responsible for the decline of Ephesus, made her feel that if it weren’t for her, Artemis would still be alive and well, receiving the bloody testicles of bulls and supervising the castration of priests.

They walked a little way along Arcadia Street, the broad colonnaded road paved with marble that once led to the harbor, to the parking lot and got into the van, and started up the road toward Selçuk.

He drove a little way, stopped, and pointed to the ruins of a Byzantine church. “The Church of the Virgin Mary,” he said. “It was once a basilica near the port, a commercial exchange in the heyday of Ephesus. They converted it into this church in her honor. They hosted the third Ecumenical Council here at this church and had Mary declared a virgin, the Virgin Mother of God, just as Artemis was the Virgin Mother of the Gods.”

“Ephesus,” Orman said, “the city of virgins.”

They rode past the remains of the stadium, the Byzantine walls, Kosay shaking his head all the while.

At the Selçuk road, he turned, drove up toward the Basilica of St. John, and stopped again.

“The Temple of Artemis,” Kosay said, gesturing to a forlorn column standing in a shallow pool of water on their left. “One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the largest building in the Greek world.”

Ducks in the pool sailed past the column and ruffled the surface of the water.

“It was long and narrow, made of marble, surmounted by a pitched roof and pediment with three openings where Artemis would appear suddenly during the festival, awe inspiring and bloody, and lit by the evening sun.”

The Mosque of Isa Bey and the ruins of the Basilica of St. John the Apostle loomed on the hill beyond the temple. Overhead, a stork soared, lit on top of the column of the Temple of Artemis, and fluttered her wings.

“Ephesus had always been protected from harm by the gods,” Kosay said. “But after Constantine, after the black-robed priests came, nothing was the same. The city never recovered.”

“The temple was destroyed by Goths,” Orman said.

Kosay pointed a reproachful finger at him. “But never rebuilt. The harbor silted up, earthquakes and fires destroyed much of the grandeur of the city. The Artemesion was deserted. The library of Celsus burnt and stood on the main street of the city as an abandoned shell. The houses on the hill turned into a slum. The magnificent villas were divided and subdivided into tiny hovels with little light and air, the frescoes painted over or broken by partition walls.”

Once again, he looked accusingly at Tamar and she shriveled.

“And now we have only ruins,” he said.

They had reached the museum by now. He rushed them through the first room filled with findings from the houses: table legs and toys, statuettes and busts, fresco fragments and gods.

Tamar paused, agape at a statue of a male with grotesquely enlarged genitals.

“Priapos,” Orman told her. “He was the god of fertility. He stood out in the vineyards like a scarecrow to protect the vines.”

“He looks like a disease,” Tamar said.

“But he sure scared the crows.”

Kosay said, “According to Plutarch, the Ephesians worshipped fecundity,” and hustled them through the next hall, filled with gods and carvings from the many fountains of Ephesus. Mustafa lingered behind.

They entered a hall displaying small finds: coins and jewelry, portrait heads and panels.

“The Kybele was stolen from a case in this room,” Kosay said.

“Not from the excavation?” Orman asked.

“It was on loan.”

“From which site?”

“From a private collector. Anonymous.”

“It was insured?”

“That’s not the point,” Kosay said. “I am responsible for protecting the past, and I failed.”

“It was in a locked case?” Mustafa asked.

Kosay shook his head, and made a negative tick with his tongue. “From a case like the one over there.”

He gestured toward a case with Plexiglas sides and a waist-high stand that held a single object lit from above.

“It’s open on top,” Mustafa said.

“You would have to be three meters tall to reach inside,” Kosay answered.

“You have a guard?” Mustafa asked.

Kosay indicated an empty chair near the door. “He’s from Kusadasi. Sometimes he’s late. But he’s honest.”

“Of course he is,” Mustafa said. He walked around the case, eyed the perimeter of the room, tested the resilience of the floor. “No sensors?” he asked.

Kosay shook his head.

“It would take less than a minute to step onto the chair to reach an object in the case,” Mustafa said. “You have improved your security since? Put on an extra guard? You will install sensors?”

Kosay looked sheepish. “Not enough money.”

“Then what do you expect?” Mustafa asked.

Kosay gave him an injured look and led them out of the room.

They stopped for a moment in the garden and looked at sarcophagi and parapets, sundials and column fragments, and continued through a hall with findings from graves, with Mycenaean pottery and tomb stele, then into the hall of Artemis.

Here he paused in front of a statue of the Great Artemis with a turreted crown, superhuman in form, adorned with fruits and animals and other symbols of fertility, arms outstretched for giving and receiving.

The two statues of Artemis stood at opposite ends of the hall. The Great Artemis wore a crown with three tiers of city walls topped with the representation of a temple. Her legs were encased in a tight skirt decorated with lions, bulls, goats. Her outstretched arms were missing. And an array of bull’s testicles adorned her many-breasted chest.

“Our Artemis is no ordinary Artemis, eternally hovering between girlhood and womanhood,” Kosay said. “Nor is she entirely the enthroned Kybele, mother of the gods and goddesses, of mountains, caverns, and beasts. She is like no other goddess. She is Mother Nature herself, the Great Virgin Mother of the Gods.”

He pointed to her crown and the animals on her skirt. “Those are her attributes,” he said. “The lions and the crown on her head, the
polis
.”