History,
as I have remarked before, is a fascinating subject, rather less certain in its
account of events than ordinary citizens may be generally aware. One of the
reasons for starting this blog was my discovery, after coming to live in
Turkey, that the version of affairs in this part of the world that I had grown
up with did not always accord with the way people around here viewed them.
Another
example of this came to my attention as I paid my annual visit to the Aegean
town of Selçuk to visit two English friends. Selçuk has long been a popular
base for tourists visiting the sites of cities and temples important in the
ancient classical world: Ephesus, Miletos, Didyma, Priene and more. Recently it
seems to have become increasingly popular with Christians flocking to see the
actual locations of events seminal to the establishment of their own religion.
In
spite of their reputation in the Western world, Muslims have never had major objections
to Christians practising that religion. Arabs and Turks may have conquered and
occupied the ‘Holy Lands’ for around 1,200 years, but they were fairly tolerant
of pilgrims from Christendom wishing to visit. Unlike their Christian
contemporaries, who couldn’t even get on with each other, Ottoman Sultans ruled
a vast Empire that included all shades of Muslims and Christians, and offered
sanctuary to Jews fleeing persecution by European overlords.
All
the guidebooks will tell you that the population of modern Turkey is
ninety-nine percent Muslim – yet ironically many locations mentioned in the
Bible’s Old and New Testaments lie within its borders. Especially targeted by
Catholic tourists is the house said to have been the residence of Mary, the
mother of Jesus, who is believed to have come to the city of Ephesus after her
son’s crucifixion. On the citadel hill of Selçuk itself are the remains of a
huge basilica church, erected by the Roman/Byzantine/Greek Emperor Justinian in
the 6th century over a grave supposed to be last resting place of
Jesus’s favourite disciple John.
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| Description of John and his basilica church |
It
is a credit to the people and government of Turkey that, not only do they respect
these sites of enormous significance to Christian history, but they also allow
foreign Christian organisations to restore and maintain them, and even display
their own descriptions and commentaries. A text to be seen at the entrance to
the basilica site is credited to the American Society of
Ephesus,
whose HQ, apparently, is in Lima, Ohio. The text provides details of the life
of John, with Biblical references, and the history of the church itself. One
sentence in particular caught my eye because some words had been scratched out.
‘Prior to the invasion by the
Seldjuk Turks, the town of Selcuk was known as Ayasoluk, meaning ‘Devine Theologian’
in honor of St John.’ Leaving aside the minor errors in the sentence, the
interesting thing for me was that beneath the scratched-out section was the hand-written,
barely legible word ‘conquest’. It
may be a small amendment, but is nonetheless indicative of a slightly different
take on the history of Asia Minor – a part of the world that has had countless
conquerors over many millennia.
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| Enlarged section of text with deleted 'invasion' |
Well,
one consequence of that Turkish invasion, or conquest, was perhaps that less
value was given to the temples, churches and artwork of their predecessors, the
Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines. There’s nothing unusual in that, of course.
When the Roman Empire turned to Christianity, pagan temples were destroyed,
mined for their stonework, or converted to new uses such as churches. Statues
celebrating the naked human body had breasts and genitalia chiselled off. Interest
in Classical civilisations and their artifacts is a relatively recent
development in Western Europe, accelerating from the later years of the 18th
century.
One
result was a rising popularity in exploring the cities and temples of
antiquity, and whisking away statuary and other relics to private collections. The
building of public museums really began with the British Museum in 1759, and
blossomed into the ‘Museum Age’ in the USA in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. Consequently, in the 19th century
the removal of ancient treasures became more organised, professional, and at
least more for the benefit of a wider public. There is much debate these days
on the subject of archeological finds displayed in museums around the world.
However, it was only in the early years of the 20th century that
stricter controls were placed on the removal of ancient artifacts, so it is
difficult to make a strong case for the return of pieces taken prior to that.
Nevertheless, there is an argument that major relics such as the so-called Elgin Marbles would be better displayed in Athens than their present location in
London WC1.
During
my brief stay in the town of Selçuk, I visited again the remains of the ancient
city Magnesia-on-Meander. I was fortunate to have two
knowledgeable guides in my friends Robert and Adrian, without whom much of the
richness of the city would have remained unknown to me. The site is located
some 30 km south of the better-known city of Ephesus and the two seem to have
been of a similar size, which makes Magnesia very attractive to archeologists.
The
first of these to begin serious exploration was a French team around 1840. They
were particularly interested in a large temple dedicated to the goddess Artemis,
a major deity in this part of the world, and worshipped in Magnesia as Artemis Leukophryene, she of the white
eyebrows. It was said that the goddess
had appeared to the inhabitants of the city prior to construction of the temple,
and the building was ingeniously designed so that, at certain times of the
year, the light of a full moon would shine through an opening above the main
entrance, progressively illuminating the statue of Artemis inside, recreating
the epiphany to the wonderment of assembled worshippers.
The Magnesia
Artemesion may not have been as grand as its counterpart in Ephesus, renowned
as one of the Wonders of the Ancient World – but still it was one of the larger
Hellenistic temples, built around 200 BCE, architecturally innovative and
boasting a 175 metre-long frieze depicting the mythological war between the
Greeks and the Amazons. A forty-metre section of the magnificent frieze
subsequently found its way to the Louvre Museum in Paris where it may still be
seen. A further twenty metres, along with many other finds were later relocated
to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin after a German team of archeologists carried
out excavations in the 1890s.
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| Scylla and the sailors - minus stolen heads |
A
more famous case involves the unearthing of a stash of treasure known as the Lydian or Croesan Hoard. Croesus, proverbially one of the
richest rulers in the ancient world, was king of the Kingdom of Lydia in the 6th
century BCE, with his capital at Sardis in Western Turkey. The site was
illegally excavated in the 1960s, a small hoard of buried treasure found, and
the loot sold off, again, to persons unknown. Eventually some of the items turned up at
an exhibition in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, resulting in an
expensive six-year legal battle initiated by the Turkish Government.
After
the court case, the artifacts were returned to Turkey where they went on
display in the Uşak Archeological Museum, but in 2006 it was discovered, due to
an anonymous tip-off, that some of the pieces were fake. An investigation
revealed that a gang which included the Director of the Museum had been selling
them off and substituting imitations in their place. Following negotiations
with officials of a museum in Germany, a golden brooch in the shape of a winged
seahorse, identified as part of the missing hoard, was returned to Turkey.
Just
this week, another similar theft came to light. In 2000, excavations at the
site of the ancient city of Akmonya, also in the Uşak Province, brought to
light a floor mosaic from the classical Roman period depicting the goddess Tyche/Fortuna.
Shortly after being unearthed, the mosaic, measuring 75 cm by 150 cm, was
stolen from the site. As a result of investigations by Interpol and a special
branch of the Turkish Police with responsibilities for artifact smuggling, a
gang of eight persons were apprehended with the mosaic in their possession.
After thirteen years they were in the process of spiriting the goddess out of
the country – an indication of how valuable the trade is, how organised the
criminals are, and how difficult it is to catch them.
To
conclude this discussion, and to illustrate the extent to which millennia of
civilisations overlap in this remarkable country, as well as to indicate how
that history continues to influence, for better or worse, events of the
present, I would like to take you back to the site of ancient
Magnesia-on-Meander. Not far from the Artemesion temple is the shell of a
medium-sized mosque dating from the Beylik period in the early 15th
century – a kind of intervening age of smaller fiefdoms or principalities
following the collapse of the Seljuk Turkish Empire, and before the rise of the
Ottomans. Interestingly, however, the mosque is known by the name of Çerkez Musa, or Moses the Circassian.
Apparently a group of refugees from the Caucasus area established a village
here in the 18th century after fleeing from Russian imperial
expansion – the beginnings of a programme of Russification and ethnic cleansing
of Muslims that continued for two centuries and is still causing problems
today.
One
of these problems is centred on the city preparing to host the 2014 Winter
Olympics. Sochi lies in the eastern Black Sea region beside the Caucasus
Mountains, and word has it that it will host the most expensive games ever, winter or summer! The estimated
price tag of $50 billion is said to have been substantially inflated by
extensive bribery and corruption. Who can know? But one thing seems certain:
the local and international Circassian community will be using the occasion to
publicise their claims of atrocities, expulsion and
genocide
that allegedly took place after the Russian military machine completed its
conquest of the territory in 1864. I guess we can be equally confident that the
Russian state will be doing its best to ensure that high volume celebrations of
Olympic competition and togetherness drown out whatever message the Circassians
try to convey to the outside world.
Which
brings me back to our starting point – my constant rediscovering, in this quarter
of the planet, that many of the historical ‘facts’
I thought I knew, turn out, at the very least, to be highly debatable. There
are two sides to almost every story, and in the interests of fair play, we
should maintain an open mind to the possibility of alternative versions.
