Pergamon and Assos

TO CONTINUE… we woke up and had a nice breakfast at the hotel while hearing Ambrice’s story about the crazy guy at the hotel. I hope that type of thing does not happen ever again… we drove to a place called Pergamon, another area with tons of Roman and Hellenistic buildings and most famous for the Altar of Pergamon, which now stands in the Pegamon Museum in Berlin. This massive altar has a pie shape with the long arms extending forward toward the viewer, with the lower reaches of it covered with massive deep and exuberant relief sculptures, with the characteristic Hellenistic style. The upper part is colonnaded all of the way around. However, when we got to Pergamon we saw none of this, only the footprint of the Altar etched into the ground on the slope of the hillside. Nothing remains. Its really rather sad, imagine the Acropolis without the Parthonon—not just the Elgin Marbles, which is bad enough, but the entire Parthenon. What a different profile the city would have! I have no doubt that the Germans probably have a good deal more money to take care of the piece, and that more people are willing to journey to Berlin than to the far reaches of Turkey to see it, but something about the forlornness of the site lacking the most famous building makes me sad.

In any event, Pergamon was quite a big site and Dr Krentz allowed us to explore freely, starting with the upper city, which contained a good deal of low lying ruins except for the massive white ornamented remains of the Trajaneum, a Roman period Corinthian buildings absolutely covered with flowery ornamentation, standing with one pediment at floor level and a few columns on the other side still in place, surrounded on three sides by a huge collonade. From the outer edge of the building we could look out over the small city of Pergamon spread out in the valley below. From this height we could even hear the drums of some kind of military maneuvering going on below—the booming of drums in a rhythm that made me think of an army on the march. But who knows, it could have been anything.

We walked all around the complex, back toward the top of the mountain to examine the foundations of the palace structures and through a chink of the wall and past the branches of a tree with very delicate pink flowers we could see the other side of the mountain, green hills fading into blues at the top and into the distance where it merged with the sky. It was breathtaking. We walked back toward the Pergamon altar and down a steep slope to the theater at Pergamon, a theater which is set directly into the mountainside and that can only be accessed through a very steep entrance tunnel that spit us out into the top levels of the theater where we could see the stage some 38 m below us. Jess and I carefully picked our way down the slope to the bottom, and went around the side to the Altar level to survey the view and enjoy the sun before we met up with the group and were taken to the lower city.

The lower city at Pergamon is a big chaotic mess of baths, multiple gymnasiums and columns and a number of temples and other buildings that had unknown function. We walked around and around the site, but we were not given very much information about these buildings so there is not much that I can say to you except that the upper gymnasium has a massive colonnaded palaestra area with Corinthian columns, and the corner columns are grossly done in a Roman fashion where the columns look like they have been merged together like a child has been playing with play doh and decided it would be a good idea to have a corner column that looks like two columns merging together. We all looked at it and shuddered. The Romans have some good ideas, but merging corner columns together is not one of them. We kept on walking down to the lower gymnasium and still lower, passing the ruins all around us. We had now been at the site for a good few hours and everyone was getting really antsy, but we soldiered on, past more and more tumbled down rocks, until we could finally load the bus and move on to our next destination.

Turns out our next destination was just another part of Pergamon located only slightly farther away—the Asklepieon in Pegamon was one of the three most prominent ones in the Greek world, the other two being at Kos and at Epidauros which we had seen earlier. The site was really very interesting though, entering the site we could see on the right hand site a small theater or odeion set into a hillside and flanked by a huge Ionic collonade that stretched on either side of it. In the distance I could see the remains of some brownish colored pillars and a bit of an entablature up in the distance, and before us and to the left were the remains of some round arched vaulted buildings, one of which was the actually modeled on the Pantheon in Rome. But first we walked and came to a vaulted passage with steep steps leading down into the ground. A small chute on one side allowed for a stream of water to follow us down the passage and into the long tunnel, the gloom of the darkness alleviated by a series of skylights set into the roof. We walked down the passage to emerge in a space shaped like a torus, with arches spaced at intervals that crumbled open to the sky. In between were a series of staircases that at one point must have led to an upper level, but now they just opened to a vast empty space.

Ambrice and I circled the while building before heading back above ground and wandering over to the small theater and collonade complex, and in the distance the brown stoa like building beckoned. I climbed the steps up to the building and walked along its remains, all of the way down to where the tumbled down columns disappeared into the grass. Turning back, I descended the steps and walked along the massive collonade that flanked the theater, and finally met up with the group before hitting the road again for Assos.

The town of Assos scrapes out its living on the steep sides of a high hill, the houses are made of a brownish brick with bright terracotta roofs and our bus labored to climb the slopes and navigate the very narrow streets. We ascended all of the way up to the temple on the acropolis, an archaic temple with a wonderful view of the lower city and the sea below. We parked the bus below and climbed the steep cobblestone streets, passing street vendors that called out our names and gestured wildly at their wares, a variety of brightly colored scarves and evil eyes and fabulous rugs all spread out on tables or clotheslines or whatever happened to be available. The colors of this country are astounding.

We reached the Temple of Athena, which has a few columns still standing, all made of this dark porous stone, and the columns are very characteristic of the archaic type, with large squished echinus’s (echini?) on the column capitals. Krentz once again called upon us to figure out the plan of the temple, which we concluded was a 6x13 temple of the Doric order that faced to the east. Unusually, however, this temple in addition to the Doric’s usual triglyph and metope entablature, also contained a running ionic frieze, little of which is still remaining, and none of which is visible from the site, being sequestered away in some museum that we were unable to gain access to for some reason. By this time it was nearing five o clock, and we were so ready to get to the hotel that the last few minutes atop the rather picturesque spot was spent wishing to be in bed.

But we had to soldier on, so we climbed back down the steep winding cobblestone road, past the vendors and back to the bus, where we could see the rest of Assos, which did not contain much except for a theater set into the hillside, and some very well preserved fortification walls of the 4th century. They were made of very thick walls of cut stone, with a bastion flanking the gate through which we walked to explore. Some of us even climbed up the walls to perch a top some of the rougher edges of the wall on the top where it had fallen in. I myself preferred to stay thoroughly grounded, and watched from below before FINALLY getting on the bus and heading to the hotel.

Getting to the hotel, however, turned out to be a lot harder than we had planned. We took the bus out of the city and down toward the harbor area at Assos, which from above contained a cute little jetty reaching out into the ocean with a bunch of brightly colored ships bobbing up and down in the harbor. However, the streets here were even more unnavigable than the ones above, so we loaded our big bag into a van that the hotel had provided and truged our way, backpacks and purses and all, down the the harbor and the hotel. I think I would have enjoyed the walk considerably more if I had not been turned into a human pack animal, but the sight of the sun getting low in the sky on the edges of the cliffs and the cute little stone buildings were almost enough to distract me from the complaints of my back and my arms, which were objecting to the strain.

Upon reaching the hotel, we were immediately confronted with a blaze of color and sound—the building was very rustic looking inside with stuccoed walls and dark wood staircases and we rushed upstairs to put our stuff down before walking around the city. First we went out to the harbor, which was really very small, the ferry that we had taken to Athens would probably have been bigger than the entire harbor area. We picked our way around brigh tly colored fishing nets and the little boats that sat tied up all in a row until we reached the end, where we could clamber out into the rocks and watch the sun get lower and lower over the water. I was feeling antsy, and I stayed only for a little bit before deciding to see the rest of this lower part of the town. I grabbed Ambrice and we ventured out, but were very disappointed to find that the only things in this part of the city were hotels and restaurants. And considering that we were getting food at the hotel we were already booked at, there was not much to see. We did a quick lap around the area before returning to watch the sunset, which brought the whole sky into a wash of purple and gold before darkening the cliffs beyond us and bringing on the night and the cold.

I bought a bottle of wine named after the town, Assos, some dry white, and ventured upstairs to do some reading. Then it was dinner, another awesome three course meal of salad, some wonderful toasted brown bread, another appetizer, and some meatballs on a skewer, and a dessert of the honey-fried-bread stuff that is so good. Feeling the wine a bit, I did some uninspired reading before discovering that the hotel had an indoor swimming pool, and immediately changing into my bathing suit before jumping into the hot tub with Ambrice, Jess , Sam and Anne. Much fun, and even better because we had all planned on watching Gladiator afterward, which was a movie I had brought along after writing my paper because I was so jazzed about all of the spectacle and sport and athletics and glory I was reading about and thought that it was only appropriate for a classics trip. So Ambrice, Jess, Sam, Chris Vincoli and I snuggled up in one big bed and with my computer watched about half of a movie, before we ALL fell asleep, woke up again and decided to go to bed. After getting up, however, I discovered that I really wasn’t that tired after all and stayed up and caught up on my reading before turning in.