Children of Achilles

The Greeks in Asia Minor since the Days of Troy

John Freely

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781845119416
• eBook ISBN: 9780857736307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Since the days of Troy historic lands of Asia Minor have been home to Greeks. They are steeped in a rich fusion of Greek and Turkish culture and the histories of both are irrevocably entwined, fatefully connected. "Children of Achilles" tells the epic and ultimately tragic story of the Greek presence in Anatolia, beginning with the Trojan War and culminating in 1923 with the devastating population exchange that followed the Turkish War of Independence. The once magnificent, now ruined, cities that cluster along the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts of Turkey are reminders of a civilization that produced the first Hellenic enlightenment, giving birth to Homer, Herodotus and the first philosophers of nature. For more three millennia the Anatolian Greeks preserved their identity and culture as the tides of history washed over them, enduring conflicts that historians since Herodotus have seen as an unending clash of civilizations between East and West.
Today, the memory of the Greek diaspora from Asia Minor lives on in the music of rebetika, the threnodies known as amanadas, and the poetry of Seferis, and even now the descendants of those exiles speak with nostalgia of 'i kath'imas Anatoli' - our own Anatolia, their lost homeland. This, told for the first time, is their story, from glorious beginnings to a bitter end, a story that continues to echo through the ages and across continents.

1

The Achaeans in Anatolia

It was the opinion of Thucydides that the Greeks first acted together as a people in the Trojan War, when they besieged the great city of Troy in the north-western corner of Anatolia, as Asia Minor is more generally known today. He writes in Book I of his History of the Peloponnesian War that ‘we have no record of any action taken by Hellas as a whole before the Trojan War. Indeed my view is that at this time the whole country was not even called “Hellas”...it took a long time before the name ousted all the other names.’ He then quotes Homer in support of his argument:

The best evidence for this can be found in Homer, who, though he was born much later than the time of the Trojan War, nowhere uses the name ‘Hellenic’ for the whole force. Instead he keeps this name for the followers of Achilles who came from Phthioti and were in fact the original Hellenes. For the rest in his poems he uses the words ‘Danaans’, ‘Argives’, and ‘Achaeans’...because in his time the Hellenes were not yet known by one name, and so marked off as something separate from the outside world.

And so the history of the Greeks as a people can be said to begin not in Greece itself but in Anatolia, where the birth of their literature comes with Homer’s description of the Trojan War.

Anatolia is the Asian part of Turkey, where 93 per cent of the country’s land-mass is located, while the European part – Thrace – forms the south-easternmost extension of Europe. The two continents are separated within north-western Turkey by what Petrus Gyllius called the ‘strait that surpasses all straits’ – the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles – which link the Aegean with the Black Sea. The word ‘anatoli’ means ‘east’ in Greek, more literally ‘the land of sunrise’. The name ‘Asia’ may have had the same meaning as this in both the Indo-European and Semitic families of languages, while ‘Europe’ may have meant ‘sunset’ or the ‘land of darkness’. The distinction would have been evident to the first Greek mariners making their way through the Hellespont from the Aegean, with Asia to the East and Europe to the West, the deep waters of the strait clearly dividing the ‘land of sunrise’ from the ‘land of darkness’.

The greater part of the interior of Anatolia is a vast plateau, ascending eastward from 750 to 1,500 metres in elevation, comprising the regions known in antiquity as Phrygia and Cappadocia. The northern and southern rims of the plateau, which rise to peaks of 2,700 and 3,000 metres respectively, consist of a series of ridges with only a few difficult passes between the interior and the low-lying coastlands along the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The southern mountain chains – the Taurus and Anti-Taurus – curve inland in south-eastern Anatolia to make way for the Syrian plateau and the great Mesopotomian plain, the easiest pass being the famous Cilician Gates. The northern rim of the plateau is formed by the Pontic range, which runs on into the still higher mountains in north-eastern Anatolia, culminating in Mount Ararat (Turkish Ağrı Dağ), 5,172 metres above sea-level, by far the highest peak in Turkey.

The Mediterranean coast of Anatolia has four distinct regions, which from west to east were known to the Greeks as Caria, Lycia, Pamphylia and Cilicia. The interior mountains descend steeply into the sea in Caria and Lycia, but in Pamphylia they retreat inland to leave a narrow coastal plain, bounded to the north by the highlands of Pisidia. The mountains come down to the sea again in western Cilicia, but in the eastern part of that region they curve sharply inland, leaving a vast alluvial plain created by the silt of the ‘Rivers of Paradise’, the Sarus and Pyramus (Seyhan and Ceyhan).

The Anatolian coast of the Black Sea, the Greek Pontus Euxinos, is fringed by a narrow coastal strip below the Pontic range. The coastal strip extends outward at its centre in the deltas of two great rivers, the Halys (Kızıl Irmak) and the Iris (Yeşil Irmak), which flow down from the central plateau. The Black Sea coast and highlands are divided into three regions, with Pontus to the east, Paphlagonia in the centre and Bithynia to the west, the latter bounded on its west by the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara, the Propontis of antiquity. The region south-west of Bithynia was called Mysia, which extends from the Marmara to the Aegean around the Troad, the country of Troy, which forms the north-western corner of Anatolia. The region south of Mysia was called Lydia, which to its east gives way to Phrygia and on its south to Caria, whose coast curves around from the Aegean to the Mediterranean at the south-west corner of Anatolia.

At its western end the Anatolian plateau descends in what the geographer Max Cary called a veritable ‘staircase’ that leads ‘down to a piedmont country with river valleys shelving gently down to sea level’. The most important of these rivers are, from north to south, the Caicus (Bakır Çayı), the Hermus (Gediz Çayı), the Cayster (Küçük Menderes) and the Maeander (Büyük Menderes), whose valleys have always been the principal corridors between the Aegean coast and the Anatolian plateau.

The chronology of prehistoric Anatolia is divided into periods named for the materials used in tools and weapons, beginning with the Stone Age, further divided into the Old (Palaeolithic) and New (Neolithic) periods, followed by the Copper (Chalcolithic) period and the Bronze Age.

The Neolithic period (7000–5500 BC) saw the beginning of agriculture in Anatolia, as evidenced by the excavations at Hacılar, Can Hasan, Çatal Hüyük and Mersin, the earliest-known towns in what is now Turkey. The Neolithic town of Çatal Hüyük is the most extensive site of its period thus found in the Near East, covering an area of 32 acres, the excavations revealing twelve successive levels of occupation ranging from before 7000 BC until after 5600 BC. The mud-brick dwellings were laid out carefully in grouped blocks around central communal courtyards. Each house had a cult area or shrine with wall-paintings of hunting and religious scenes, including lively depictions of musicians, dancers and acrobats. All of the shrines were decorated with bull heads, the symbol of male procreative power, either carved in relief or sculptured in the round. The cult areas also had figurines of the deity who has come to be known as the Great Mother-Goddess of Anatolia, with the earliest ones representing her as a gross seated figure with huge breasts and thighs, usually in the process of giving birth, sometimes flanked by guardian lions or leopards. The goddess became more slender and virginal in successive cultures, changing in turn to the Phrygian Kubaba, the Lydian Cybele, the Greek Artemis, the Roman Diana, and eventually the Christian Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, all of whom are represented in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara.

The sites at Can Hasan and Mersin continued to be occupied into the Chalcolithic period (5500–3000 BC), when copper first came into general use in Anatolia to make simple implements. Excavations have revealed other Chalcolithic settlements at Alacahüyük and Alişar, both of which continued in existence into the Bronze Age (3000–1200 BC). Finds from the early Bronze Age at Alacahüyük come principally from a group of thirteen royal graves that belonged to the rulers of the Hatti, the people who dominated north-central Anatolia in the second half of the third millennium BC.

The Hattians are believed to have been the immediate predecessors of the Hittites, an Indo-European people who established themselves in central Anatolia beginning ca. 1700 BC, with their capital at Hattusa (Boğazkale), in the bend of the Halys river. Later Hittite rulers traced their lineage back to the first king of Hattusa – Labarnas – who died ca. 1650 BC. He was succeeded by his son Labarnas II, who changed his name to Hattusilis, ‘the Man from Hattusa’. Thus began the period that historians call that of the Old kingdom, when the Hittites expanded to the south and east, capturing Aleppo and Babylon early in the sixteenth century BC. Later in that century an outbreak of civil war caused the Hittites to lose much of the territory they had conquered. Stability was restored when Telipinus came to the throne in 1525 BC, after which he recovered the lost dominions of his ancestors. When he died in 1500 BC, which historians mark as the end of the Old kingdom, the Hittites were the dominant power in Anatolia.

A period of unrest and anarchy followed, until Tudhaliyas II came to the throne in 1560 BC, beginning the dynasty that created the Hittite Empire. This empire reached its greatest extent during the reigns of Suppiluliumas I (r. ca. 1380–1324 BC) and Mursilis II (r. ca. 1323–1295 BC) when it stretched from the Aegean to beyond the Tigris and from the Black Sea to Palestine.

There are several references in Hittite texts to the Land of Assuva, which was probably the region in western Asia Minor known to the Greeks as Lydia. It is generally agreed that the Greek word Asia derives from the Hittite Assuva. The earliest Greek reference to Asia is in Book II of the Iliad, where the poet writes of ‘the Asian meadow beside the Kaystrian waters...’, referring to the river Cayster, which flows from Lydia into Ionia. The Hittites penetrated through Lydia into Ionia, as evidenced by rock-carvings, the most notable of which is in the Karabel pass, some 25 kilometres east of Izmir, Greek Smyrna. The Karabel carving is a relief about 2.5 metres tall showing a figure known in Turkish as Eti Baba, or Father Hittite. The relief represents a marching warrior wearing a short tunic or kilt, a short-sleeved vest and a conical headdress, holding a spear in his right hand and in his left hand a bow. There is also a faint hieroglyphic inscription that has been identified as Hittite. The carving is similar to reliefs found in and around Hattusa and may represent the Hittite weather god Teshuba; it is thought to date from the period ca. 1500–1200 BC. The Karabel relief is of particular interest because it is described by Herodotus, who thought it represented the Egyptian pharaoh Sosistris. It has been suggested that the early Greeks in Ionia thought that this kilted figure was an Amazon queen, which gave rise to the legend that some of the cities along the Aegean coast were founded by these mythical women warriors.

Hittite texts mention two place-names – Taruisa and Wilusa – which are believed to be Troy and Ilium, the two names which Homer uses interchangeably in referring to the Trojan capital. Mention is also made of a people called Dardany, which may refer to the Dardanians, the Trojans who were led by Aeneas, the name coming from Dardanos, the legendary ancestor of the Trojan kings. Several references are made to Arzawa, an aggressive independent state that seems to have controlled north-western Anatolia. The most intriguing references are those to the Ahhijava, who have been identified as Achaeans, or Mycenaean Greeks, whom Homer mentions in the first lines of the Iliad: ‘Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus/and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians...’

According to the Hattusa archives, the Ahhijava were a powerful seafaring people whose princes corresponded with the Hittite rulers from a western Anatolian coastal city named Millawanda. Millawanda has been tentatively identified as Miletus, on the Aegean coast at the mouth of the Maeander river.

Miletus apparently was first settled ca. 1600 by mariners from Minoan Crete, another of the great civilisations of the Bronze Age, which Thucydides called a thalassocracy, or ‘empire of the sea’. The Minoan Empire came to an end ca. 1450 BC, when the Mycenaeans took control of Crete. At the end of the fourteenth century the Mycenaeans occupied Miletus and surrounded it with a powerful defence wall. The Miletians traded with cities in Mycenaean Greece and were ruled by an Achaean prince, who in time became a vassal of the Hittite emperor.

The late Bronze Age city at Troy was apparently destroyed around the same time as Hattusa, though the three archaeologists who succeeded Schliemann in excavating the Hisarlık mound differed in their numbering of the layer involved and consequently its date. Wilhelm Dörpfeld believed that Troy VI was the Homeric city, but he was not able to give a precise date since the chronology of Mycenaean pottery was not well established at that time. Carl Blegen believed that the first sub-layer above this, which he called Troy VIIa, represented the city that had been destroyed in the Trojan War, as he wrote in 1963: ‘It is Settlement VIIa, then, that must be recognised as the actual Troy, the ill-fated stronghold, the siege and capture of which caught the fancy and imagination of contemporary troubadours and bards who transmitted orally to their successors their songs about the heroes who fought in the war.’

A new excavation project was begun in 1982 by a team from the University of Tübingen under Manfred Korfmann, who in annual campaigns over the next five years excavated sites around Beşika Bay, some eight kilometres south of Kum Kale. Their finds indicated that the ancient harbour of Troy was there rather than at the end of the Hellespont, as previously believed. They also found a Mycenaean burial site dating to the thirteenth century BC, which suggests that this was where the Achaians buried their fallen warriors during the siege of Troy. As Korfmann wrote: ‘I can only express an intuitive impression, a feeling I have, that the cemetery we have just laid bare at the harbour of Troy should belong to the very time when the Trojan War ought to have occurred.’

Then in 1988 Korfmann headed an international team of archaeologists who began excavating Troy and the surrounding area, a project that continues to the present day. The layer of the late Bronze Age settlement that might be the Homeric city was labelled by Korfmann as Troy VIIa, dated ca. 1250–1180 BC, evidently destroyed by fire. The later sublevels of Troy VII indicate that this settlement continued in existence up until ca. 1040 BC.

The site was then only sparsely inhabited until shortly before 700 BC, when it was resettled by Aeolian Greeks. The city they founded, identified as Troy VIII (ca. 700–85 BC) was known in Greek as Ilion and in Latin as Ilium. This is the city visited by the Persian king Xerxes before his invasion of Greece and by Alexander the Great when he began his invasion of Asia. Troy IX (ca. 85 BC–AD 500) is identified as the Roman city, visited by Julius Caesar, and which was completely rebuilt during the reign of Augustus (r. 27 BC–AD 14). The emperor Constantine the Great considered making Ilium the new capital of his empire before deciding on Byzantium on the Bosphorus, which in AD 330 was renamed Constantinople. A series of devastating earthquakes ca. AD 500 destroyed the city and led to its virtual abandonment.

Much of Book II of the Iliad is taken up by the Catalogue of Ships, a list of the contingents in Agamemnon’s expedition against Troy. The catalogue gives a total of 178 places, including Mycenae, ‘the strong-founded citadel’, one of a group of ten cities that together sent a hundred ships led by ‘powerful Agamemnon’. As Michael Wood points out, of the nearly one hundred identifiable places named in the catalogue, ‘all those excavated have revealed Mycenaean occupation...’

The Greeks first appear as a people in what is now Greece around the beginning of the second millennium BC. They would come to call themselves Hellenes and the land in which they lived Hellas. (The word ‘Greek’ comes from the Roman ‘Graeci’, stemming from a tribe in Epirus.) Their mythical eponymous ancestor was Hellen, father of Doris, Aeolus and Xuthus, whose sons were Ion and Aechaeus, thus giving a common ancestry to the Dorians, Ionians, Aeolians and Achaeans, the principal ethnic groups of Greeks toward the end of the Bronze Age. Homer refers to Hellas, the Hellenes and the Achaeans in the Catalogue of Ships, where he writes of the contingent led by Achilles:

Now all those who dwelt about Pelasgian Argos,
those who lived by Alos and Alope and at Trachis,
those who held Phthia and Hellas the land of fair women,
who were called Myrmidons and Hellenes and Achaians,
of all these and their fifty ship the lord was Achilleus.

The Mycenaean period began about 1550 BC, taking its name from the Bronze Age city of Mycenae in the Argolid. Mycenaean pottery similar to that unearthed at Troy has been found at twenty-four other sites along the Aegean coast of Anatolia or its immediate hinterland. There were Mycenaean coastal settlements at Miletus and Iasus, as well as on the nearby islands of Chios, Samos, Kos and Rhodes, and there is some evidence that the Greeks traded up the two main rivers flowing down from the Anatolian plateau, the Hermus and the Maeander. Mycenaean pottery has also been found at Clazomenae, Ephesus and Sardis, and a Mycenaean burial ground has been unearthed near Bodrum, Greek Halicarnassus.

A few Mycenaean finds have been made on the upper Maeander valley at Beycesultan, where a late Bronze Age palace may have been a centre of the state of Mira, a Hittite ally. Among the Hittite texts mentioning the Ahhijava, or Achaeans, there is one, apparently from a king of Hatti, that refers to ‘the towns of the king of the land of Mira’. This and the other Hittite texts mentioning the Achaeans date from the reign of Suppiluliumas (ca. 1380–1324 BC) to that of Arnuvandas III (ca. 1220–1190 BC), the latter being within the period of Troy VII.

The Catalogue of Ships is followed by the Trojan Catalogue, a list of the places that sent contingents to fight in the defence of Troy, each commanded by its own leader The catalogue includes groups from five geographical areas, beginning with the Troad, represented by the Trojans, led by ‘Tall Hektor of the shining helm’, along with the Dardanians, Zelians and Pelasgians. The second group was made up of three peoples from across the Hellespont, from Thr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Dedication page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Prologue – The Trojan Plain
• 1 The Achaeans in Anatolia
• 2 The Great Migration
• 3 The Archaic Renaissance
• 4 The Persian Wars
• 5 Between East and West
• 6 Alexander’s Dream
• 7 Alexander’s Successors
• 8 Roman Rule and Revelation
• 9 New Rome
• 10 The Age of Justinian
• 11 Medieval Byzantium
• 12 Seljuk Turks and Crusaders
• 13 The Latin Occupation
• 14 The Sons of Osman
• 15 The Fall of Byzantium
• 16 The Tide of Conquest Turns
• 17 Tourkokrateia and the Rhomaioi
• 18 Megali Idea and Catastrophia
• 19 Exodus and Diaspora
• 20 Ionian Elegy
• Source Notes
• Bibliography
• Plates