The bus takes us through the Turkish province of Aydin. All around are rocky slopes covered with Mediterranean plants and deserted areas under the morning sun. We are actually passing through ancient Caria, a land colonized by the Greeks and then subdued and annexed by the mighty Rome.
At the Turkish village of Geyre, the bus will turn into a parking lot behind which is the entrance to the capital of the Roman province of Caria. The name of the country is preserved in the name of the Turkish village. The town was founded around a rural sanctuary dedicated to the Greek goddess of beauty, love and lust, Aphrodite.
The city enjoyed privileges because in the Mithridatic Wars, in which the Pontic king Mithridates the Great challenged Roman supremacy in Asia Minor, they timely opted for the winner – for Rome. In addition, in the civil war within Rome, they again wisely bet on the winner – on the emperor Augustus. He knew how to appreciate that.
At the entrance, near the museum, which is closed because the recent earthquake may have disrupted the statics, there is a row of sarcophagi. They feature the head of Medusa, which protects the deceased from evil.
By the way, Greek myth tells us about the once beautiful girl Medusa who was loved by Poseidon – some say that she agreed to this love, others that everything happened against her will. The goddess Athena, to whom Medusa vowed her innocence, turned her into a monster as punishment. Snakes in her hair, a terrible look that turns everyone to stone. Medusa was killed by Perseus and her head brought to Athena.
Over time, Medusa's heads became the main guardians of the deceased from evil. Thus, they were carved into stone here by craftsmen from ancient Aphrodisias.
CITY OF MASTERS
In ancient times, there were quarries around the city, large deposits of marble. This made the city famous and – rich. Statues from Aphrodisias were bought even in the distant provinces of the empire. If we add to this the production of wool and cotton, we can already imagine life on the street we are walking on: from the workshops come the sharp pecking of chisels and the blows of hammers. Marble dust mixes with the smell of urine used for tanning leather. In front of the shops are carpets and fabrics. The metropolis is alive.
The city's inhabitants at the time would probably have been very surprised to see a white wall with recognizable faces with different expressions. The archaeologists have actually carefully stacked frieze upon frieze. Originally, these marble strips were on the colonnades of Ionic columns that surrounded the main squares. Stacked like this, connected by decorative garlands, these figures look like a bizarre gallery with different masks and characters.
We stand for a while before these two-millennium-old faces. It is frightening and moving to recognize in their features the emotions of contemporaries. The hand that carved them has long since turned to dust. But the expression frozen in the marble reaches us through time. And we understand the message.
Tourists around the world sooner or later come across a photo of Ephesus in brochures advertising Turkey. This archaeological site is in the shadow of that main attraction. But the hundred-kilometer journey from the Aegean Sea to Anatolia is definitely worth it. Because the geographical remoteness of the ancient city has contributed to its excellent preservation of its ruins.
This impression is reinforced when one approaches a building standing in the middle of the meadow. It is a gate called a tetrapylon in Roman architecture. Through it one could reach the main sanctuary, the temple of Aphrodite.
When visitors admire this building, they usually do not pay attention to the modest grave nearby. Professor Kenan Tevfik Erim is buried here. He was born in 1929 in Istanbul and died in 1990 in Ankara. His life's work is not written in parentheses around those numbers, but he is surrounded by them. The son of a Turkish diplomat who studied in Switzerland and the United States, he has been in charge of archaeological excavations in Aphrodisias since 1961. Just a year after the death of the professor who had invested three decades of his life in the reconstruction of the monumental buildings here, the restoration of this monumental gate has also been completed.
Professor Erim's last wish was to be buried in Aphrodisias. His wish was fulfilled. It is a rare example of this kind of afterlife justice – an archaeologist has an eternal home in the midst of his life's work.
The next building we will visit was dedicated to the cult of the body. It was a stadium.
Its dimensions really surprised us. 60 meters wide, 270 meters long, with thirty rows of seats, it could accommodate 30 people. Athletic competitions were extremely important in the ancient world. I climb to the last row to take in the entire structure. The same feeling as in today's great sports arenas of the world. Only this one is two millennia old.
The stadium is one of the best preserved in the former Roman Empire. With your eyes closed, you can hear the roar of the crowd, the shouts of the competitors. But it's just the shouting of a Turkish guide calling members of a German tourist group to move on.
TEMPLE AND THEATRE
Unlike Ephesus, the cult site of Artemis, Aphrodisias was founded around the cult of Aphrodite. The city's main temple was dedicated to her, towards whose remains we walk through the hot Anatolian day.
The cult of Aphrodite is of obscure origin. There are several interpretations of her name and origin. Some see her rising from the Phoenician east, others see her emerging from the sea foam off Cyprus. This second story, which we owe to Hesiod, has its own cruel twist. Uranus was castrated by his son Cronus and his penis was thrown over his head into the sea. It foamed up and gave birth to Aphrodite, the goddess of sensual desire, beauty, and carnal love.
In the early 1st century BC, construction of the temple began. Historical sources state that an older temple existed on the same site. The new temple formed the core around which the city settlement developed. It was built entirely of marble. Only fifteen Ionic columns have been preserved. Hardly damaged by earthquakes, the ravages of time and neglect, they deteriorated until the 2004s, when they were reinforced with iron supports. But time began to erode them too, so in XNUMX all the supports were restored.
It should be said that the victory of Christianity in the Roman Empire also meant the establishment of an intolerant attitude towards pagan deities. The temple was converted into a basilica.
The city even had two agoras – the main market squares. The Roman baths named after Emperor Hadrian were also a must-see. The longer we stayed here, the more we admired the city’s former splendor. But there was also a sense of dread that even such human works could collapse, that life could disappear from them.
We headed right past the remains of the temple and up a hill. At its top, a beautiful sight presented itself to the eye. A city like this could not be without a theater.
The guide explains where the honorary box was, where the actors waited for the performance, and how the audience entered the theater. Behind the theater, there was another Roman bath.
I am fascinated by the thought that at the time this structure was built, 18 centuries ago, the same law, the same culture, the same way of life ruled from here to Lisbon, almost 5 kilometers overland. It is no wonder that the empire fell apart, but it is a wonder that it lasted so long.
THROUGH STEEP LAND
Just behind the theater is the Sebastion, a magnificent building dedicated to Emperor Augustus. Special ties with distant Rome were very important to the city's inhabitants.
Before leaving the archaeological complex, we stopped by a photo exhibition by one of the most important Turkish photographers of the last century, who died in 2018 at the age of ninety, and whose name was Ara Guler.
He photographed the village of Geyre before it was once again one of Turkey's most important archaeological sites. The scenes of peasants sitting among the ancient ruins, smoking or grazing their cattle, seem unreal compared to today's situation.
We leave Aphrodisias with the impression that we have been to an important place in the ancient world. It has been abandoned since the 7th century, earthquakes and invaders have taken their toll. There was no return to its former glory. We drive towards Bodrum, the former Halicarnassus of Caria, where Herodotus, the father of history, is said to have been born. There once stood the tomb of King Mausolus, after whom all later monumental tombs were named – mausoleums. Behind the bus window, Caria passes by – its name means “steep land”.
I remember that in the city whose stone shadow we had just visited was born Alexander of Aphrodisias, a philosopher who rose to become the head of the Peripatetic philosophical school in Athens. He was called the Exegete, because he knew the work of Aristotle in detail. Here, among these hills, on these streets, his thought about the “active mind”, as the philosopher, for the first time in history, called the Creator, began. Everything we think and write, everything we say, even these words, is transformed into concepts when our natural mind absorbs forms from the divine active mind. I like that thought. Then this journey, only after I have recorded something about it, becomes part of the overall active mind.
Bonus video:
