More Turkey

March 4, 2007

Selcuk, Turkey

Yesterday we spent at Aphrodisias, which like many of the sites in Turkey contained the remains of a Roman town and grid plan, multiple agoras, a theater, and a very interesting stadium. We woke up today at this lovely quaint hotel with dark wood, intricate carpeting and a large amount of lace doilies. It is a very nice small hotel, and the free internet connection makes it all worthwhile.

Arriving on the site, we walked to a long collonded building with a stoa-like appearance that was framed with a temple on one end. The white marble of the columns stood in stark contrast to the green grass and dark earth below, and the place was hushed in the early morning light. We stood at the top of a set of stairs and looked down over the parallel rows of white pillars, framed behind by these long spindly grey trees. Dr Krentz lectured for a little while on the site, pointing out that although most of the city was laid out in a grid plan, this was the one structure that violated it, laying at a slight angle to the clean orthogonal lines of the rest of the grid, which is now mostly buried under the covering of land and grass and progressing civilization. At the very end of this long stoa space we spied the architrave of a building—the spouts were moulded into the grotesque masks of men with their mouths gaping open, spewing the water inside them onto the grass below. Although this was probably originally on the roofs of the building, here it has been removed and propped up on a much lower level, the original building is dead and gone.

The site is rather complex, and after going to the stoa like structure we moved on to the bath complex, and the palaestra, which was situated behind the skene structure of the grand theater, set into the hillside in the typical greek fashion but closed off at the end as the Romans liked to do. We walked in the lower entrance of the theater and scrambled up the stone seating to survey the theater from above. This theater obviously had Greek origin, but had been modified in Roman times with a sunken orchestra, a complex skene structre and a big retaining wall at the bottom. The theater is in a remarkable state of preservation, and we walked all around the building, moving to the outside of the paradoi to examine some inscriptions in Greek that proclaimed the magnificence of the city and its residents. We walked behind the main stage building to see the bath facilites, and walked among the brick arches and circular rooms and watching as the bricks melted into the grey of the sky. On some small fallen stone cryptic designs appeared; small game boards for some long forgotten and unknown game, that now exists only in the pattern of the playing field. Imagine if someone had found scrabble or something with no directions and all of the tiles missing and what would he make of it? Was it a ritual game or a design? Signs of some sacred language? Who knows? The designs we saw in the stones here were equally incomprehensible, and just as interesting. And anyone that took the time and effort to incise a playing board into a block of marble must have done it for something important. Marble is not easily carved.

We passed the rest of the bath facilities and moved on to the Odeion, a smaller version of the Greek theater that was built up for poetic and musical performances, a steep flight of semi circular steps enclosed in a square space, with a brightly colored block of squares for the floor. Continuing on, we moved to a temple that had been converted into a Christian church.

This temple was originally a hexastyle of the Ionic order and contained a long cella and like always an entrance on the east end. The Christians, however, completely gutted the building and flipped it inside out in order to convert it into a church, moving the walls of the cella to outside of the collonade, and then adding an apse to the eastern end and closing the entrance there, and carving a new entrance on the western end where it should be for a Christian church. The columns at the end were added to the sides, lengthening and widening the original temple structure to its present flipped-out state. Generally, this is the way that temples are preserved, but I don’t think that many of them get completely gutted in the way that this temple was, although it does allow many of the columns to remiain standing and in roughly the same places. No good building should go to waste, I guess.

Exiting the temple we made our way to the stadium, which was one of the longest ones in ancient times. In comparison to the stadium at Olympia which is measured at about 192 m, this one was well over 200 meters, and had a curved portion at both ends. On the end that we entered, the sphendome area looked to have been converted into a gladiator arena with the addition of a retaining wall and a few post and lintel gateways that framed niches that I presumed to have been used for the storage of animals. At each end the stadium could be entered through a massive arched vault that sloped up and out of the stadium walls. The seats were very well preserved, including the spaces for the judges seating at either end of the center of the stadium, and the straight parts of the stadium seats actually bowed slightly inwards to allow for unobstructed views of the racing track. The top of one of the sides of the stadium has been incorporated into the walls of the city and contains a series of arches and columns made out of the characteristic Roman brick. This stadium seems closer to the modern conception of an arena, with specific entry and exit ways, and an enclosed space that was situated to allow for proper sight lines of the activity all along the inside of the stadium. The use of arches seems to be a distinctly Roman addition, and continue to be used even up to the present. The old baseball arenas such as the one in Baltimore at the Orioles stadium seems to echo this tendency, even down to incorporating other structures into its façade. In the Orioles case it was a railway station, but here it was the later addition of a wall. At Didyma which we visited today the sides of the huge Ionic temple were used for stadium seating—the confluence of religious and atheletic facilites seems to be an essential part of Greek and Roman athletics, which can be paralleled with the worship of the industrial age in the early development of the United States.

The last place we visited yesterday was a huge propylon gate, with a Roman broken cornice at the top, the center part recessed a bit to add a sense of depth and variety to the building face. This, combined with the rich floral decoration and the remains of wild sculptural decoration gave the whole structure a sense of Baroque opulence that is completely absent from the earlier austere Doric structures that you see on the Acropolis at Athens, for example. The sun came out and slanted at the building at the precise angle to give it a magnificent play of dark and light, a warmth and coolness that brought out all of the variation in the building’s façade. The white and blue sky was moving rapidly across the backdrop of the columns and cornices and the whole scene was quite beautiful. I sat and watched for a while, and then we loaded the bus for our return to the hotel.

Arriving at the hotel, we were greeted by a warm three course meal that consisted of a very nice soup, a spinach dish, and a beef and eggplant and rice main course, and a type of fried yogurt tasting thing for dessert. It was all very tasty, and we ate more than our fills, greatly appreciating the generosity of Turkish dinners. I was almost comatose from fullness by the time it finished.

The rest of the night was spent madly trying to catch up on reading. At the end of the night I had to relinquish the computer to Stewart, so Chris Vincoli and Katie and I and Jess Bradshaw watched some of the Birdcage, which is one of the funniest movies I have seen in a while. It’s not particularly quotable, but Robin Williams and his sidekick did an excellent job of playing these gay club owners in south beach. It was like Meet the Fockers with an even greater degree of rediculousness, and watching Calista Flockhart try to play an 18 year old was pretty entertaining. Not a bad way to conclude an evening.

However, right when I was about to go to bed, we walked up to the roof of the hotel to check out the laundry line and were confronted with a magnificent astrological occurrence—a lunar eclipse. The moon was slowly being overshadowed by us, and we stood and shivered and stared at the sky late into the night and watched as the moon got slowly dark and then burned a bright shade of red. Although I was not the most well-rested person today, I loved to see such an unusual occurrence, and getting to witness it in Turkey made it even better. I went to bed happy.

Today we got to sleep in all of the way until 7 am, which was a welcome refresher from the very early wake up calls that we have been having recently. And I slept all of the way through and to the alarm, which made it even better. We had a nice breakfast of yogurt and dried apricots and meusli before boarding the bus for our next few sites. The first of these was Miletus.

For all of the talk about how important Miletus is, the site is not all that impressive. The best part of the site was the first place we visited, a Greco-Roman theater that had the unusual features of a number of vaulted arches in the diazoma and along the top of the ridge. We scrambled up to the second level of seating to survey the place, which like the other Greco-Roman theater we saw at Aphrodisias, contained a sunken semi circular orchestra and the remains of an elaborate stage building which was originally three stories tall, but had fallen down in antiquity. We walked up to the second level of the stage and walked down the whole length of the dark and spooky vaulted passage, which was broken and tumbled in some areas to open to a grey-blue sky. Walking around the entire perimeter to the edge of the theater, the vaulted passage opened into a steep staircase moving down to the exterior of the theater, and then making a turn to the right and around again, up a narrow passage to the third area of seating, which contained another vaulted passage around the very top of the theater. Walking along this passage was like playing peekaboo with the stage, every few feet I would encounter either an intentional doorway or places where the Roman brick had fallen in, opening the passage up to the sky. It was windy up here, and I held tightly onto my newly purchased AEK hat to keep it from blowing all over the hillside. I came back down the seating area to meet up with the group and continue our explorations of the vicinity.

Miletus it turns out was originally a harbor city with as many as 4 ports in antiquity. However, the shoreline of Turkey has shifted significantly since ancient times, and the location of the harbor is now a flat plain for the cultivation of sheep. We descended from the slope of the theater and onto the harbor itself, our feet kind of sticking in the mud as we descended. We walked all of the way to the entrance of the harbor, a place that is called the Lion’s Gate, where two lumps of indistinguishable grey colored rock indicated the place of a large statue that guarded the entrance. Our tour guide had made friends wiht a local guy clad in baggy denim colored trousers tucked into tall rain boots that eagerly led us from site to site. He bounded from the opening at the Lion’s Gate to the supposed place at the other side of the harbor to show us the narrow passage. We continued walking along the low lying marshy land until we approached some more substantial buildings, a monument dedicated to Pompey which was now reduced to a simple tall base and the remains of some relief carving.

We finally reached the areas of the baths and the Delphinion, a temple to Apollo the protector of ships which was now reduced to simple foundations and the tumblings of some much eroded drums, half embedded in the muddy ground. The farther we walked, the muddier it got, and there were places that we simply could not walk because it was just too marshy. We passed the remains of an old fountain house, dedicated by Trajan’s father, which had the remains of a complicated and multiniched edifice that at one point towered up to three stories, although only one still remains. The last part of Miletus that we visited were the baths of Faustina, the wife of Marcus Aurelius, and some of the best preserved ruins of the site, besides the amazing theater. These stood isolated on the ground plain of the harbor, and were composed, as most Roman buildings were, of solid brick arches, with tumbled down marble all around indicating the presence of important officals and other people in the Roman world. Inscriptions seem to be a big part of the archaeological processes here, and Dr Krentz pointed out that the inscriptions could even be dated by the shapes of the letters, something which made sense to me, but I could not personally decipher when I examined the inscriptions myself. I cannot read Greek, ancient or modern, and the shapes and names of the letters are only known to me though some minor expeiences in some math classes. I really regret not being versed in Greek or Latin, being able to read first hands the indecipherable stone slabs I think would give me a greater impression of unlocking the mysteries of these ancient places. As it is, I can only look and listen as others decipher it for me.

We exited the site VERY hungry and were pleased to be taken to a lunch buffet that served a wonderful fare of fresh cucumbers and tomatoes (I am definitely eating more of these in the US, I had no idea how good they were just plain unti this trip) and spinach and leeks and eggs. We stuffed ourselves, and boarded the bus for the next stop.

Didyma was the last place we visited that day, and the experience was rather like taking any of the temples we had seen so far in our travels and placing it under a huge magnifying class. The temple we saw was positively monumental, even with only a few columns standing, and stood on a massive platform 14 steps up from the ground level. In addition, it contained an inordinate number of columns, three rows of 10 in the front and two rows of 21 on the sides, with the addition of a mini peristyle hall of 12 on the front porch of the building. Krentz sat us down and gave us a short lecture on the building history of the temple, which like the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens comprised some hundreds and hundreds of years, and the different types of carvings on the column capitals and bases attest to changing styles of inscription and ornamentation. Krentz told us that instead of giving us the floor plan of the temple, we could partner up and try to draw one up ourselves. This was right up my alley, solving a problem of space and trying ot put what I saw on paper was something that I always have enjoyed. So, pen in hand, I started my explorations.

To report, this temple is unlike any temple I have seen before in my life and am likely to see again. First, as one looks from the east end of the temple toward the west, one can see the levels of the floor dramatically rise and fall. The porch area is located, as I said before, about 13 steps up from the floor. Then, after one passes through the forest of columns that are located between the antae of the front porch, one realizes that the usual central procession through the temple space is blocked. The doorway is monumental, but the level of the door is like an elevator stuck in between floors—the bottom of the next floor is about waist high, way too tall to simply walk up. Instead, two arched vaulted passages of a steep slope flank the massive and non functional doorway, leading down past this raised platform and into the cella, called an adyton, which is sunken down, probably to the original minus thirteen steps outside. Facing the rear of the temple are rows of square engaged columns that begin about halfway up the wall. However, when one turns to face the front of the temple, looking back at the small doorway that has just been exited, there is a massive flight of stone steps leading up to that inaccessible raised doorway that was insurmountable from the other directions. Two large columns frame the staircase, and this tall platform has one door on each side with yet another staircase leading to perhaps a second story. The temple is like a split level home on steroids.

But even this is not the end of it, for at the western end of the adyton are the remains of a second, smaller temple looking structure, nestled like a Russian doll right inside the first. Not only does this temple contain way more levels than it should, it also has a second temple within it, which, unlike the outer temple, looks to have been roofed. The inside of the adyton also contains the remains of a spring, which may have been the reason for the whole structure in the first place, to house the sacred waters and to deliver oracular pronouncements.

After puzzling out this complicated floor plan we returned to the group and reported what we saw, continuing to walk around the temple and inspect the complicated carvings on the bases of the capitals, admiring the huge size of the tumbled drums around us, and generally gawking at the huge size.

Right before we left the facility, our tour guide also pointed out to us that the long side of the temple may have also been used as a stadium facility. The spectators would have sat on the stone steps leading up to the temple and watched the competitors run along its side. The temple was certainly long enough; at 118 meters long it would have been greater than the size of a football field. Poking around in the grass near the corner of the temple I spotted some blocks that looked like the remains of a starting mechanism, but the grass was too high and the site too overgrown to be sure. Still, this is an indication of the direct association of athletics and religious festivity, even going as far as to merge the temple platform with the stadium seating. Very economical, and very telling of how these Greeks viewed athletics—obviously with a very strong connection to religion.

We loaded the bus as the sun was setting and returned to the hotel to enjoy another excellent three course meal that concluded with a very nice dessert of more yogurty stuff. Then we had a discussion on a play we read by Plautus called Major Blowhard, which is about this pompous general who is tricked by his servants into losing his lover (who he stole) through a series of deceptions and debauchery. I was actually surprised as to how much I enjoyed it. The self absorbed character of the Major and the conniving servant that fools him are the types of characters that we still see today. My how things change, how they stay the same...Then I did some reading, chatted for a while with Katie and Jess, and wandered up to the roof of the hotel to hang out with some members of the group. The night was perfectly clear and it was quite enjoyable to sit outside and talk, although it got cold quickly, and I retreated back to the warmth of the lobby fire to finish my work and then sleep.