Street Life

The great heat of July is upon us; it is the price we pay  for the glorious months of sunny, warm weather in the spring and autumn. July is the hottest month: the heat of August is always tempered by strong winds blowing from the north –‘Ayvalik air-conditioning’ – but in July, when the temperature is often in the high thirties, and occasionally the low forties, there is little relief from the  heat unless you sit by the sea, or climb up the hill to the woods, in both of which places you can generally find a cooling breeze.

In the old town of Ayvalik, many of the residents are quite poor, and air conditioning units are unusual.  Most of my neighbours simply have to endure the stifling heat , and during the summer months a large part of their time is spent outside, in gardens, on roof terraces and balconies, but also in the cobbled streets in front of their houses.

Many of the people here are recent migrants from villages in the east of Turkey; although now living in the town, they manage an approximation of the village life they left behind, often keeping chickens or, on the higher ground up near to the woods, a few sheep or goats.

The companionable evenings spent sitting outside on the street are a relic of village life and, as the weather gets warmer, pieces of furniture begin to creep outside to make this outdoor living more comfortable. When Freddie and I climb up the hill at 6.30 a.m to walk in the comparative cool of the very early morning, the sofas and chairs lie empty, and look a little incongruous:

In the heat of the afternoon the streets are quiet, as it is simply too hot to be outside, but with the approach of  evening, as the shadows lengthen and the heat begins to abate, people start to emerge from their houses.

Soon the cobbled streets burst into life again, with children playing energetic games to work off the energy accumulated whilst cooped up inside for the afternoon;  their parents, meanwhile,  sit outside their houses and chat with their neighbours.

Children here spend far more time outside and have infinitely more freedom than in England; whenever I feel slightly irritated at the foghorn cries of the little boys who play football in my street, I remind myself that this is what little boys are meant to do.

Hilary Clinton’s dictum that ‘It takes a village’ to raise a child  can be seen in action here: even very small children play outside in the streets unsupervised, as there is always a neighbour around to watch out for them, and few strangers wander around in the cobbled streets and alleys that wind their way up the hill in the old town.

By the time Freddie and I return from our evening, walk, around sunset, the sofas and the front doorsteps are fully occupied:

 

When you walk a dog every day along a regular route, you become part of people’s mental furniture. They look out for you,  exchange greetings, express concern if you have failed to appear for a few days and gradually, although you don’t really know each other, you become friends of a kind.

The woman in the photograph above is called Sardya, although I'm not sure if that's exactly how you spell it. She sits outside her house every evening in the spring and summer, when the weather is good.  Freddie and I have to climb up a very long, very steep flight of steps to get up to the street where she lives, which leads straight up the hill into the woods. One day, seeing me breathless after the climb, Sardya motioned to me sit down and catch my breath, and we talked for a while.

Now we have become friends, across the gulf of culture, language, age and experience that separates us. Sardya has a kind of tranquil beauty which quite transcends age.  I don’t know her life story yet, except that she was born in the house where she lives, and has lived there her whole life.  Her calm gaze seems to be that of a woman who has seen a lot, and come though unscathed. She always looks out for me and Freddie, and I like her very much.

A City on a Hill

‘ You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.’  Matthew 5:14

On the day that I first stepped into the camel barn and instantly decided that it would become the library of my dreams, I was  unaware that the ruins one of the greatest libraries of the ancient world were situated only a few miles away from Ayvalik, at Pergamon. Pergamon was the literal embodiment of the biblical metaphor of the city on a hill, standing high on a rocky bluff 16 miles inland from the Aegean, about 1,000 feet above the surrounding plain.  Its ruins still stand there, looking down on the modern Turkish city of Bergama.

Pergamon  -   mentioned in the book of Revelation, which accuses it of housing the ‘Throne of Satan’ - became important during the Hellenistic period  (the centuries following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC ) when colonists established Greek cities and kingdoms in  Asia and Africa. Under the Attalid kings, the Kingdom of Pergamon controlled a large part of western Asia Minor (i.e. most of the western half of  present day Turkey).

The last Attalid king, dying without an heir, bequeathed his lands to the Romans in 133 BC, and Pergamon became  the capital of the Asian province of the Roman Empire,  continuing to be a  commercial and cultural centre of major importance, with a population of 150,000.

Pergamon’s decline began when the Goths arrived in 262AD, after which it was ruled by a series of other invaders before, eventually, being abandoned and falling into ruins. This city on a hill was not hidden, but simply forgotten for over a thousand years until 1871, when a German railway engineer bought some old mosaics from local farmers, and later came back to excavate the site.  Much of what was excavated, including the enormous altar of the Temple of Zeus,  was taken to Germany,  where it is displayed in the Pergamon Museum , part of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Nevertheless the ruined buildings which remain – like the partly reconstructed Temple of Zeus, below - testify to Pergamon’s lost magnificence,

while the drawing below gives some idea of what the city would have looked like in its prime.

It was during the reign of  the Attalid king Eumenes II (197-159 BC) that most of the major buildings of Pergamon were erected, including its  famous library. Eumenes II wished to make  Pergamon  a major cultural and artistic centre, and built a theatre seating 10,000 (the steepest  theatre in the ancient world), a library, a large gymnasium complex, and a number of temples and altars.

In order to establish his new library as an important centre of learning which could rival Alexandria,  the greatest library of the ancient world, Eumenes II recruited Crates of Mallus, a Stoic philosopher – now best known for having constructed the earliest known globe representing the Earth - as its resident scholar.

According to the Greek historian Plutarch, the Pergamon library contained about 200,000 volumes: not, of course, books in the form we have them today, but manuscripts written on to parchment, and then rolled into scrolls. One of the legends of Pergamum, related in Pliny the Elder’s ‘Natural History’ , is that parchment was invented there: previously, all books were written on papyrus, produced only in Egypt. The story goes that  King Ptolemy, ruler of Egypt, feared the library at Alexandria might lose its pre-eminence to Pergamon. He therefore banned further exports of papyrus to Pergamon, to prevent the library from increasing its holdings.

Pergamon responded by beginning to produce its manuscripts on parchment – thinly stretched sheep or goat skin – thus breaking the stranglehold the Egyptians had over the dissemination of information , with the result that, as Pliny puts it -

‘ afterwards the material on which the immorality of humans depends spread indiscriminately.’

- a sentiment frequently echoed today in relation to the ubiquity of  pornography since the invention of the internet.

Since  parchment was used in Asia Minor well before the time of the Pergamum library, this story would not seem to be entirely true, but it is an appealing one, nevertheless. So, too,  is the other great legend of the Pergamon library, which concerns Antony and Cleopatra. Plutarch relates that when in 35 BC the Roman general Mark Antony married Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemaic pharaohs (the dynasty descended from one of  Alexander the Great's generals who had seized control over Egypt after Alexander's death) , he gave her the entire contents of the Pergamon library as a wedding present, to replace volumes lost in fires at the Alexandria library,  and thus brought to a sudden end Pergamon’s days as a major centre of learning.

Scholars disagree as whether or not this story is true, but when you visit Pergamon, and wander around the ruins trying to find the location of the library, it doesn’t seem to matter very much exactly how things ended. The library has been gone for 2,000 years, and very little of its structure remains. It’s also quite hard to find, but I persevered, since my first visit to Pergamon was by way of being a pilgrimage,  to pay homage to one of the legendary libraries of history before beginning to create my own, rather smaller, version.

Eventually I found the site of the library, but there was little to see: the outline of the building, and a few stones. There was something nearby, however, that was a rather more arresting sight:

This monumental headless torso, part of a statue of the Emperor Trajan, immediately brought to mind Shelley’s  Ozymandias, King of Kings, of whom all that is left are ‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone’
standing in the desert.

Here, I thought, was Ozymandias’ missing trunk at last.

And then it occurred to me that if, like Shelley’s traveller in an antique land, one were to travel round Turkey and explore more of the many ruined ancient cities of  Asia Minor, it would be quite possible to assemble a complete Ozymandias from the countless pieces of statuary scattered across the landscape.

A head, perhaps, from amongst those frozen deities that stand for all eternity on the peak of Mount Nemrut, built 2,000 years ago for the eternal glory of  King Antiochus I Theos of Commagene:

We might also add  the 5 foot long right arm of  the Roman Emperor and stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius,  bearing a globe,  recently discovered in the ruins of Sagalassos, high in the western Toros mountains, which  was destroyed by an earthquake between 540AD and 620AD:

I could go on. 

Asia Minor is, quite literally, littered with innumerable  pieces of stone left by the astonishing array of  civilisations that have emerged from, or moved into, this part of the world: the Hattis, Hittites and Hourrites, the Uruartians, Phrygians and Lydians, the Assyrians,  Persians,  Greeks and the Trojans, the Romans, Byzantines, Selcuks and Ottomans. That is only a partial list: there are many more.

This land wears empires lightly, though.

Nowhere else demonstrates quite like Asia Minor the vanity of human wishes, as all those broken memorials to long-forgotten kings and emperors bear witness:

‘And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

Where the bodies are buried

 

There’s a place up in the woods where my dog always goes quite crazy.

One moment Freddie is bounding along happily, his ears and tail flapping in the breeze, full of doggy joy at being out in the woods and running free. Then, always in exactly the same place, he suddenly stops dead and starts snarling and growling, running round in ever decreasing circles, snapping and lunging, as if facing up to some unseen enemy. But of course there is nothing, and no-one, there.

I often wonder if this might be where some of the bodies are buried.

My last post described how in September 1922 The Orthodox Greek Christian population of Ayvalik was expelled by the  Turkish army: 3,000 able-bodied males over the age of 18 were sent on forced marches to work camps in the Anatolian interior – from which only 23 ever returned -  whilst women, children and the elderly were evacuated onto boats which took them to Greece.

Not everyone left, though.

Ayvalik and its neighbouring island of Cunda constituted an important centre for Orthodox Greek Christianity. There were nearly 50 churches and monasteries in the area, including the  Taksiyarhis Cathedral on Cunda (seen in the photo below as it is today, empty and unrestored) , seat of the local bishop, Gregorias Orologas.

 

 

The Greeks of Ayvalik, and their clergy, had traditionally enjoyed good relations with the Ottoman authorities. In 1770 an Ottoman admiral, Cezayirli Gazi Hasan Pasha, commanded  an Ottoman fleet heavily defeated by the Russians in the Battle of Chesma, a  short way down the coast from Ayvalik. As they escaped,  the admiral and some of his men  were given shelter in Ayvalik by a Greek priest  unaware of who they were.

When Hasan Pasha later became Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, he showed his gratitude by granting Ayvalik virtual autonomy as a Greek enclave within the Ottoman domains, with self-government and exemption from many taxes. Ayvalik prospered, and went on to become the second most important Greek commercial and cultural centre on the Aegean coast, after Smyrna. The town’s prosperity was derived principally from the olive oil industry, and its wealth was evident  not only in the grand neo-classical stone mansions of  wealthy merchants, but also in the magnificent churches of Ayvalik and Cunda.

The Asia Minor Greeks, it should be remembered, did not disappear from Anatolia overnight: it was a long, slow, agonising process bracketed at one end by the start of  the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire in 1821, leading to  the creation of the Greek Republic in 1832, and at the other end by the Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey under the Treaty of Lausanne, in 1923.

Thus by the time the last of the Ayvalik Greeks were evacuated in 1922, the people of Ayvalik had already been affected by the gradual  worsening of relations between Muslims and Christians within the Ottoman Empire from Anatolia to the Balkans, and in particular had suffered a great deal during the Turkish War of Independence, when they were accused of collaborating with the invading Greek Army.

Nevertheless, even with the Greek army  defeated, Smyrna burned to the ground, and the victorious Turkish army approaching Ayvalik, it was impossible for the inhabitants to believe that Ayvalik’s 300 year  history as an Asia Minor Greek town was over.  At this point, the local authorities made a huge error: they docked  all the boats to prevent people from leaving, in the hope that this demonstration of good faith to the Turks would lead to the  safety of the townspeople, and in time a return to Ayvalik’s previous well-ordered existence.

The chairman of the meeting which made this decision was Bishop Gregorios Orologas, and he was also at the head of the deputation welcoming the Turkish cavalry when they rode into town on September 19th, 1922. Unfortunately this warm welcome for the Turks, which also included an entertainment  with music and dancing, made no difference at all to the fate of the Ayvalik Greeks, who were shortly afterwards dispersed as described above.

And the ones who didn’t leave?

The following passage is  from 'Twice A Stranger',  Bruce Clark’s fascinating, and definitive, book about the Population Exchange, which has a chapter entitled ‘Ayvalik and its ghosts’* :

‘Gregorios and all the other clergy of the town were taken to a lonely spot outside the town and killed: the bishop is said to have died of a heart attack shortly before an attempt to bury him alive. Ironically some of those who died were choristers and vergers who donned clerical clothes in the belief that they would be treated with greater respect.’

In that place up in the woods, the lonely place high above the sea where Freddie always goes crazy, the ground undulates strangely, in a way quite atypical of the local landscape. The rest of the hilltop  is flat, but in this one area there is a series of low mounds and hollows, as if the earth was disturbed there a long, long time ago.

And every time Freddie’s hackles rise, and he starts growling and yapping and chasing things that aren’t there, I wonder if this place might be where some of those bodies are buried.

 

 

* My posts about the Population Exchange draw heavily on this book, which is by far the best English language source on the subject.