South from Ephesus

Travels through Aegean Turkey

Brian Sewell

• Publisher: Tauris Parke Paperbacks
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781780761206
• eBook ISBN: 9780857731449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Persönliche Entwicklung
• Subtopic: Kunst Allgemein

South from Ephesus focuses on Brian Sewell's winter journey from Ephesus to Side. Weary of what he called the "tyranny" of western art, Brian Sewell first visited Turkey - a country that had captivated him since he was a boy - in 1975. He thought that there, anything he found would have no relevance to the European art that he had so compulsively "stitched into the dense fabric of my art-historical memory" and that he could therefore enjoy the art for its own sake. But Turkey surprised him. Sewell delighted in the unexpected wealth of Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Islamic cultures there, and he returned three or four times a year until 1990. With typically acerbic commentary, Sewell describes (not always favourably) the archaeological and historical sites he comes across, the landscapes that so clearly thrilled him, the encounters he had along the way and the fractious, though wonderfully funny, relationship he forms with Ayhan, his driver. South from Ephesus is an incomparable portrait of Turkey and its artistic heritage - a book that could only have been written by Sewell and which has become a quirky classic of travel literature.

XI
Cyaneae ^* Myra ^* Phaselis

High above the main road to the east of Kaş lies Cyaneae, signposted (if you are quick enough to see it) Kyenea; a very handsome temple tomb cut in the sheer rock face that forms the skyline gives warning of it, and with field glasses and foreknowledge it is possible to identify a well-camouflaged cluster of rocks as house tombs. The guardian of the site, leaning against the yellow signpost, obscuring it, was surprised to have winter visitors and scurried into his house to search for the peaked cap of office that would convert him from peasant to proprietor. For some eight hundred feet we followed him up the cliff-side, twisting and turning on the fragmentary cut steps of the ancient approach as the view of the distant Mediterranean drew its tight curved horizon line, broken only by Kerkova Island lying like a crusty meringue offshore. Ayhan, puffing and purpling, gave up after ten minutes and returned to the car; Petter stripped off all the many layers with which Norwegians invariably protect their bodies from the winter elements, and climbed naked to the waist with vest, shirt, woollies and anorak insecurely tied about him looking as though real flesh had burst from the body of a scarecrow; I plodded, keeping pace with the guardian and attempting to place my feet where he had placed his. Europeans have a tendency to skip and trip and leap on rough tracks, compelled to treat them as stepping-stones over water, always sticking to the high points and the clear surfaces of rocks – it makes for irregular progress and irregular breathing, worsened on a steep climb; our guardian strode up the cliff like a camel, his large feet in large misshapen shoes with broken laces always placed wherever they happened to be at the end of a natural stride, the ankles seeming to swivel to accommodate whatever irregularities and gradients lay beneath them. A heavy man, his unhurried progress eventually outpaced us, and all the time he smoked without puffing.

Towards the top, the first tombs appeared small and tumbled, often carved with heads, swags and figures, nice enough but unremarkable, flanking the rising steps and framing the always-changing view; overhanging the cliff at one point a rock outcrop has been sculptured to form a house tomb complete with fixed lid, hollowed through a hole in the western end to accommodate the bodies. The great surprise is the wall that surrounds three sides of the city – the fourth, the south, ends at the cliff face and required no protection; its lower registers are decent ashlar, more or less regular, and bossed, but late rebuilding shows all the signs of panic or wanton purpose, for fallen masonry has been re-used higgledy-piggledy, and supplemented by column drums and Lycian tombs turned on their sides – an engineering feat of some wonder, for a by no means large Lycian tomb recently removed from Cyaneae to the museum in Antalya weighed some eighteen tons; this late rebuilding was probably a Byzantine defence against the Arab invasions – the city was a Bishopric under the neighbouring Metropolitan of Myra. The Lycians, who lived at ease with their dead, lining the streets with their tombs – and the main street in Cyaneae, running from the theatre to the acropolis, handsomely wide, is almost awesome in their number and scale – would not have so abused them. The guardian blamed the Arabs, but could offer no authority for his assertion.

Within the wall is chaos. The site is densely overgrown and confused, and the foundations of many buildings are full of earth and trees – nothing stands to any height. The column drums in the wall suggest that there were handsome classical buildings here, but no temple foundations have been identified, and even the so-called baths seem doubtful – an arched subterranean chamber, very long, and with only one chamber off one side, and that too small – this is not the pattern of the five chambers of apodypterium or changing-room, frigidarium, tepidarium, caldarium and sudatorium. The site is littered with bell cisterns, and there is also a large vaulted reservoir; a similar structure cannot be a reservoir, for it has a passage cut through the wall near its base, leading to a steep stair out and down the hillside – a granary perhaps. Below the acropolis, on another, lower hill, stands the theatre, small and very ruined, but recently cleared of rubble and undergrowth; nothing is left of the stage building.

The early history of the city is better known than the late, but there is little of either. Its name is Greek for the blue of lapis lazuli, but I saw no sign of the stone that was until post-Renaissance times precious to painters – perhaps it was a reference to the colour of the sea on the southern horizon. The few coins found on the site date from the period of the Lycian League after perhaps 150 BC (the cities of Lycia formed a number of federations – in Strabo’s day twenty-three were in the League), and from the time of Gordion III, Emperor for the six years AD 238–44. Murdered on the Euphrates at the age of only nineteen by treacherous soldiers campaigning against the Persians who preferred an adult man as their leader (a sad and brutal end to ‘a light-hearted lad, handsome, winning, agreeable, merry, and distinguished in letters’, who had already proved himself capable of resisting Shapur I of Persia, King of Kings, and his incursions into the Roman Empire as far as Antioch), it is unthinkable that Gordion ever visited Cyaneae, but possible that he paused somewhere in Lycia on his way to Antioch, and that coins spent then in Kaş or Myra found their way to the city on the cliff-top. The Lycian League was of ancient standing, but came to prominence when the Roman Senate declared Lycia a free country in 167 BC; more than a millennium earlier they had fought for the Trojans in the great war; seven centuries after the Trojan War they were defeated by Harpagus, and when Xerxes invaded Greece they fought for him; with Athenian victory then, they paid tribute to Athens; with Athenian defeat by Sparta they once again became Persian; with Alexander the Great they became Greek; with Alexander’s death they joined Ptolemy and his new dynasty in Egypt for a hundred years, and then in rapid succession passed to Antiochus of Syria and to the Rhodians as a gift from Rome. What is given can be taken away, and when Roman friendship with Rhodes grew cold, and the Lycians sent ambassadors to Rome complaining of Rhodian oppression, the Senate declared them free once more. According to Strabo, in the time of Augustus, the twenty-three cities that were voting members of the League held their meetings in whichever of them had been chosen for each congress, electing a leader whom they called the Lyciarch for their system of democratically representative government; Pliny, a century later, observed that thirty-six cities then functioned in Lycia, but that there had formerly been seventy. At least forty cities are identifiable still from their remains, and other smaller sites may perhaps be added to the list, but of the remainder there is not the smallest relic.

Cyaneae’s earliest monument is the handsome temple tomb that can be seen from the road far below. My 1975 photographs seem less concerned with it than with the road, a track littered with large shards of the red rock through which it had recently been widened, and which, in the mere hundred kilometres between Antalya and Myra, had starred my windscreen and shattered my exhaust. There was no question then of reaching the tomb or the city, dismissed by my comprehensive guide-book with two lines and only a probable identification; the tomb is still inaccessible directly from the road, but it is easy enough to scramble down a steep path from the city and enter the Ionic façade of a pediment on three supports. I can understand that an early Italian Renaissance architect, discarding his Gothic roots, might make the mistake of plonking a column in the middle of an entrance – Alberti misunderstood the Roman coffering of ceilings and vaults, and made the opposite error of failing to centre his coffers – but that a Lycian of the third century BC, capable of producing correct Ionic capitals and evidently aware of Greek exemplars (the inscription is in Greek), should place them on two pilasters and one column far too widely spaced, is a minor mystery. It is a very large tomb, with the sarcophagus of the owner and his wife installed above the pediment, and the rest of the space reserved for their family. The Lycians were prickly about grave-robbers, though the penalty was only a fine, payable to the city treasury until Roman times, when it became payable to the Imperial Treasury – the city was then responsible for the care and maintenance of tombs (for similar penalties at Termessos, see p. 227).

The view from Cyaneae over the valley of Yavu, is, as it were, the view of the kitchen garden – a long wide bowl of flat fertile land contained on all sides by mountains, well watered – that must always have provisioned the city. Here they still plough the small fields with yoked oxen and ploughs made of bifurcated tree-trunks fitted with iron shoes, unchanged since the early years of the Byzantines (and before), when a pair of oxen was a unit of tax assessment. The camel may be the ship of the desert, but here it is the personal transport of the older peasants – the younger have motorcycles that may cut a dash with the girls, but the camel’s inexorable capacity to cross rough country unhindered, whatever the load it carries, its limbs hidden by the low walls and the tall wheat, demonstrates its resemblance to a ship in full sail seeming to breast the land instead of the sea. The tree-trunk plough is not the only recollection of ancient Byzantium – Strabo wrote of olive plantations, but here occasional olive trees are mixed with random fruit trees, almonds and walnuts, with crops of winter wheat or barley grown among their trunks, and green vegetables and pulses grown in small open fields; this may seem unremarkable, but it conforms to patterns of agriculture suggested in Byzantine texts that enshrine the practices of the early Eastern Empire much more than a thousand years ago.

Myra, or Demre, was a scruffy little town when I first saw it in the midday heat ten years ago. We were parched and filthy with the dust from the road, and deafened by what seemed the total destruction of the car’s exhaust system. I did not care a damn about tombs, theatres or Father Christmas (see below) – I just wanted the unbearable noise to stop. Demre is too small to have a street devoted to the repair and maintenance of decrepit cars, and we stopped in the centre of the little town to ask where we should seek a workshop. The first man asked a second, and the second a third – or so I thought, until small boys were sent running and returned with a fourth; he said he would repair it within an hour. ‘How much?’ ‘That’s up to you.’ I hate this response and don’t know how to deal with it even in my own country; I produced the equivalent of £3.50 as the base-line of my bargaining, and to my surprise the mechanic snatched it from me, threw the notes on the ground, spat on them, and slapped my hand with a resounding thwack. I had no idea what it meant, and Michael’s assertion that it was an old Greek custom for cementing a bargain seemed unlikely – but he may well have been right, for the mechanic then got into the car and drove off with everything we possessed. I made at once for the barber’s shop, had my hair washed, was shaved, massaged about the temples and given tea. I can think of no other country in which I would, as a stranger, give the charge of all I had to a man whose name and address I did not know, and expect to see him again an hour later – but such follies in Turkey involve no risk.

In the warm sunshine of January 1986 the town seemed much rebuilt and refurbished, and no longer the sort of village where the mechanic would collect and deliver; I experienced acutely the very opposite of déjà vu – much more the feeling of the old woman in the children’s tale who woke to find that an unfriendly pedlar had stolen her skirt, leaving her legs quite bare, and cried out at the unaccustomed sight, ‘Lawks a mercy, this is none of I.’ Even the church of St Nicholas, Santa Claus, Father Christmas or Noel Baba had had a wash and brush up, with a new garden of that municipal type in which a floral clock may be expected, and a new over-life-size bronze statue of the saint in hooded gown, with a robin on his shoulder and a clutch of children about his skirts, with that heroic air favoured by revolutionary sculptors whose work exhorts a groaning populace to greater efforts and the acceptance of greater suffering. Inside, the church was much its old self, and, lying as it does many feet below present ground level, it was flooded – the reflections dappled the winter sunshine onto its shadowed walls and up into its roof like a Canaletto drawing of the underside of London Bridge, and we spent many idle minutes tossing pebbles into the shallow water and watching the light ripple into new recesses.

It is, no doubt, a very old foundation, but what can now be seen is largely the work of 1043 or thereabouts, with some mid-nineteenth-century restoration by the Russians (St Nicholas is their patron saint) and an even more modern upper storey and campanile. A large late classical sarcophagus is quite certainly not his tomb, in spite of the enormous hole in its long side through which his bones are now supposed to have been retrieved by merchants from Bari when Myra was occupied by Saracens in the tenth century – by which time the cult of Nicholas was wide-spread throughout Europe and the Near East. All that is known of him is legendary, and not even that he was Bishop of Myra in the time of Diocletian (and thus almost certainly a martyr) can be confirmed historically. Diocletian was Emperor from 284 to 305, and spent most of his time in Asia Minor and thereabouts, having ingeniously devised a Tetrarchy of a secondary Caesar and a pair of Augusti to safeguard the imperial borders in the West, with himself in sole charge of the East – he visited Rome for the first time in AD 303, after reigning for nearly twenty years. If Nicholas was indeed then Bishop of Myra and an active worker of miracles, then it is not surprising that the legend records his persecution, torture and imprisonment, for both Caesars and both Augusti agreed upon a savage persecution of Christians in 303. When Constantine the Great became Emperor in 306 he was too much engaged in battles on the Rhine and in Italy itself to pay much heed to a tiresome Bishop imprisoned in Lycia, but when he decided that Rome was no longer central enough for the proper management of an Empire that spread from the Rhine to the Euphrates, and established in 324–30 a new capital in the ancient Greek city of Byzantium, Asia Minor became a Christian land along with the rest of the Empire. AD 311 must be assumed to be the year of Nicholas’ release, for the Edict of Serdica then issued by Constantine and his co-rulers Galerius and Licinius guaranteed freedom of worship to all Christians. Nicholas is supposed to have been present at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 – that august occasion when Constantine is reputed to have banged the Bishops’ heads together in order to establish the beliefs of the Church and enshrine them once and for all in the Nicaean Creed – but St Athanasius (who was not, as might be supposed, the author of the Athanasian Creed – that was probably written a century later by St~Hilary of Aries), who was the Sydney Smith of his day and knew all the bishops and their bruised heads, never once mentions a Nicholas of Myra.

The legends are Grimm and pretty tales, beginning well enough with his own late birth to ageing and fruitless parents, whom he immediately amazed by standing up in the bath in which the blood and confusion of birth were being sponged from him to give thanks to God. He refused his mother’s nipples on Wednesdays and Fridays, and constantly uttered words of profound theological wisdom. His parents relinquished him to the priesthood, and then died, leaving him wealthy – which led directly to the most important of the myths surrounding him; like Mr Gladstone he took to prowling the streets by night, and discovered three pretty young sisters whose impoverished father could give no dowry, and who were thus destined for a life of prostitution; on three successive nights Nicholas tossed a bag of gold through the window to provide each with the dowry that would make them respectably marriageable, and in so doing he established the notion of Santa Claus as the secret and surreptitious visitor with presents, and the three golden balls of the pawnbroker. When famine overwhelmed his see Nicholas stole a hundred hogsheads of corn from every grain ship that called at the ports of Lycia, yet miraculously their tallies stayed correct and the thefts were never noticed. Three handsome lads, the sons of a widow unable to feed them during the famine, set out to make their fortune abroad, and spent their first night away from home in the company of a wily butcher, who slit their throats and put down their tender bodies in a barrel of brine; but their guardian angel was watching, and winged his way to report this predecessor of Sweeney Todd to Nicholas, who promptly invited himself to dinner and was given a roast leg that, at the sign of the cross, rose from the platter and danced its way to the barrel in the cellar, so that the saint might restore the other bits and pieces to life and send them all back to their mother with a fine tale to tell. Perhaps one of these lads in gratitude relinquished profane life for the church and himself became a bishop – in medieval England the feast of St Nicholas on 6 December was marked by the election of boy-bishops who performed all the rites and offices except Mass, accoutred with mitre, cope and crozier, and whose authority lasted until Holy Innocents’ Day on 28 December. Henry VIII put an end to it in 1542, Mary revived it ten years later, and the Great Eliza finally abolished it, rendering the Church of England joyless for ever. The reversal of the roles of choirboys, bishops and clergy was the ecclesiastical counterpart of the secular revelry of the Lords of Misrule which finds some reflection still in the Christmas traditions of army officers waiting on soldiers, prison officers on their charges, and the Royal Family on their servants (though this last may now be legend). Other aspects of the Christmas celebrations we would now find deeply shocking – the Mass of the Ass whose manger the infant Christ usurped ended not with the priest uttering Ite missa est and the congregation responding Deo Gratias, but with an exchange of three Hee-Haws apiece; on the Feast of the Circumcision, vespers was sung falsetto, suggesting a slip of the knife, the preceptor was drenched with water, and the adolescent sub-deacons celebrated a mock Mass with obscene songs and dances, and indecent shenanagans with sausages that were then eaten on the altar.

Nicholas also saved from execution three unjustly condemned men, and from drowning three sailors off the Turkish coast – three girls, three boys, three prisoners, three sailors, three balls. He became the saintly vade-mecum of children, sailors, scholars, merchants and barrel-makers, but not of butchers; he was invoked by travellers as a protection against robbers and a support for St Christopher; his cult almost usurped the Feast of the Nativity; yet the only early foundation recognizing him seems to have been the Church of Sts Priscus and Nicholas built in Constantinople by the Emperor Justinian, AD 527–65, two centuries late and far away from Myra. Priscus is not much help in this context – an obscure worthy of Besançon, martyred during the persecution of Aurelian in 272 or thereabouts. It is as foolish to ignore early traditions as it is to place credence on their late accretions, but Justinian would surely not have yoked to Nicholas a minor martyr from far-distant Doubs if Nicholas had been quite so distinguished as legend suggests – but most of that legend dates from a fictitious biography written by Methodius in the first half of the ninth century, when Myra was occupied by the Saracens. Methodius, a Balkan saint, spread the tales of Nicholas westward – including the slightly discreditable story of the saint’s appearance to a group of Saracens who wanted to destroy his tomb, ensuring that they destroyed another (perhaps the damaged sarcophagus still in the church); in both Bari and Venice merchants realized that his bones must have great thaumaturgical value – but the boys from Bari got there first, in April 1087 (that is, more than fifty years after the departure of the Saracens and the restoration of the church), dug up the newly-paved floor of the church, discovered a marble sarcophagus, smashed the lid, were overwhelmed by the smell of myrrh, found the bones and stole them. The Byzantine historian Nicephorus Callistus, writing more than two centuries later (but an insistent user of early sources), gives a graphic account of the Greek clergy rending their vestments in grief and causing such a hullabaloo that the Italians had to tie them up and gag them before they could go about their business. As for the myrrh in which the bones were said to be submerged, the Greek clergy had made from this much profit selling phials of the liquid straight from the tomb, claiming that no matter how much they took from it, Nicholas always generated more; the cynic might suppose that their distress was at least as much at the loss of their cottage industry as from the loss of the relics.

Myrrh is a gum resin used in the manufacture of perfumes, incense and ointments; a Byzantine romantic called Constantine Porphyrogenitus seems to have been responsible for the assumption that myrrh is the eponym for Myra (or the other way about), but no earlier source mentions the city as an important source of unguents, and the connection is quite certainly false. When the Venetians eventually arrived, they carried off other bones, the Russians others still, and in the Museum in Antalya is a pathetic handful of bones attributed to Nicholas but never known to have had thaumaturgical effect (they were useless on the elbow that I had cracked at Pinara). According to the sailors from Bari whose ship the merchants had hired, Nicholas appeared to them in rough weather and promised a safe journey of twenty days, setting the seal of his approval on the theft.

The only other event of note in medieval times was the brief appointment of Eustathius as Bishop in 1174, one of the clergy of Hagia Sophia and a teacher of rhetoric in Constantinople; too brilliant a scholar to stay in Myra long, within a year he was to become Archbishop of Thessaloniki. He made critical compilations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, wrote commentaries on a text by Dionysius Periegetes in which otherwise lost material by Arrian and Stephanus of Byzantium is preserved, a life of Pindar, an account of the Olympic Games, and The Reform of Monastic Life – a near diatribe that astonishingly anticipates most of Luther’s denunciations. Had he not been elevated to the see of Thessaloniki we would have been deprived of a most entertaining account of the pillage, rape and torture that characterized the Christian Normans’ capture of that most Christian city in 1185.

We lunched in a bleak lokanta crowded with men who gave the impression of having worked themselves to exhaustion – that hollow-eyed drawn state in which the body demands food and drink before it will respond to any stimulus. Kebabs slid off their skewers into envelopes of hot unleavened bread and we ate them without cutlery – easy enough, but the onions were not; these were small and in their blackened skins straight from the grill, scalding hot; if we peeled them we burned our fingertips, and if we squeezed them, then they shot from their skins like scalding cannon-balls and we lost them among the table legs; those that we managed to control were crunchy and sweet and delicious in a way ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• List of Maps
• List of Illustrations
• I: First Steps
• II: Ephesus
• III: Priene* Miletus* Didyma
• IV: Heracleia* Milas
• V: Bodrum
• VI: Cnidus* Caunus
• VII: Fethiye* Hierapolis
• VIII: Aphrodisias
• IX: Tlos * Kaş
• X: Xanthus * Latona
• XI: Cyaneae * Myra * Phaselis
• XII: Antalya * Side
• XIII: Seleucia * Etenna * Termessos
• XIV: Aspendos * Perge * Side
• Coda
• Bibliography
• Glossary of Site Names, Ancient and Modern
• Brief Glossary of Architectural Terms