There it was : Antioch on the Orontes. No, the city I was seeing was not going to be the city of my fantasies. Yet here was Mount Silpius protecting it on the east (see photo above). The main street of the left bank still followed the line of the great colonnaded street (which lies 6 metres below current street level and has not been excavated since the early 1960’s).
Here in the Old Quarter, narrow streets still turned off the main artery to trace a maze down to the Orontes or up towards the mountain (photo, right). There is still a trace of the old Antioch. Multiple cultures may have disappeared, but I discovered that Arabic could be heard in the streets as much as Turkish. On the Old Quarter’s main artery, there were more churches and synagogues than mosques.

On the morning of my arrival, I set out wanting to see St Peter’s church built into the rock of Mt Silpius and the giant face sculpted in Seleucid times, but the heat was so intense (40 Celsius) that after 30 mn I turned around and went back to my lodgings, comfortably air-conditioned !

After lunch and a nap, I headed for the museum of mosaics on the right bank, just a 15-mn walk away. It had been a particularly dry year this year. Still, the state of the Orontes did more to disillusion me than the cars on the roads (left). I don’t doubt that in Antiquity, the streets and river must have collected everyone’s rubbish. Seeing it now, though, did sadden me. Didn’t people love Antioch anymore ?

The museum sits just on the right bank of the Orontes. The second one walks into the first room, one must fall to one’s knees in stupor. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling : mosaics are everywhere.
A pang of regret invaded my soul, in spite of better sense. When did we moderns lose our taste for splendour ? I could only wander through the museum in a daze. 99 percent of the mosaics are damaged. Nonethless, they continue to tell the story of a taste for non-utilitarian beauty at arm’s reach.

Only one of the rooms had a stairway allowing the visitor to look at an 80-square-metre floor mosaic at almost ceiling height. The stairway also allowed a close-up view of a wall mosaic (see photo above).

Towards the end of the day, I headed towards the Gate of Issos where, sometime during the 70’s, a mayor of Antakya proud of the city’s Graeco-Roman past erected a replica of the ancient Tychè in the centre of a roundabout (photo). No facile symbolism, please : Antioch is not the epicentre around which the rest of the world goes around in a circle. Much of Antioch’s most ancient past lies forgotten underfoot. Will Tychè one day inspire others to uncover more treasures of the city that Libanios so sweetly described ?

The Dardanelles, July 2008

My friends, of course, were right. The semi-deserted sun-scorched island between the mouth of the Dardanelles and the isle of Samothrace (Greece) remains uncorrupted by mass tourism. Our pensyon was a 10-minute walk from a beach which we did indeed have to ourselves for a couple of hours.

Barely 30 km from east to west, and 13 north-south, punctuated with many hills rising up to 800 metres above sea level, the island provided us with an ideal setting for peace and quiet. We were never very far from any of the old villages still inhabited by ethnic Greeks, though largely abandoned and in ruins ; one of them – Bedemli – counts 5 families during the winter months, 100 in summer. Goats, chickens and donkeys walk the streets and empty houses. The villagers live a very tranquil life, as did we for the 5 nights that we stayed. [above right, the cloud-capped isle of Samothrace]

One of our most amusing visits was to the salt lake in the SW of the island, it too virtually a secret. One section of the lake is actually a bed of salt and sulphur-filled mud, so we treated ourselves to a joyous bath, caking our bodies with the muck. [Attention : the man in the photo is not me !] We then walked over a dune to the sea where it washed off easily. It was my very first mud-bath experience. Afterwards, my skin felt like it had never felt before – softer than a baby's bottom ! Sensationnel.

Curiously, there are no known ancient Greek sites on the island. My passion for Antiquity was not to be bridled for much longer though ; soon after returning to Istanbul, I was set for another first-time visit : to the eastern extremity of the Mediterranean – Seleucia Pieria !

Carved ivory mammoth, circa 35000 years old.

One part of the ground floor is filled with white plaster moulds of famous statues found in other museums, mostly the Louvre in Paris and the Capitolini in Rome. But the smaller pieces are what make the museum well worth the meagre two hours I spent there. And apart from two university students assiduously copying some Greek statuary, I had the whole place to myself ! Something like a dream come true.
It was a very good side trip.

I have so much to learn about the Phoenicians ; apart from the usual clichés, I know next to nothing about them. This exhibit started with the alphabet ; they apparently taught the Greeks an alphabet which has become our own. The explanatory panels were very interesting. But I could not carry away a souvenir. A museum guardian stopped me just as I was about to take a photograph. «Not even the written explanations ?» I asked. He replied that if I wanted to learn about the Phoenician alphabet, I could no doubt find something on the internet !

A mysterious and paradoxal people, the Phoenicians. They invented an alphabet (a sound alphabet - figures for sounds - as opposed to a syllabic one), yet very few Phoenician inscriptions have been found - a fraction of the amount for ancient Assyria, Egypt or Greece. They established many cities from one end of the Mediterranean to the other - Arwad (Syria), Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, Kition (Cyprus), Utica, Carthage, Motya (Sicily), Tharros (Sardinia), Cadix (Spain) - yet they apparently did not consider themselves one people, one «nation» much less an empire. Even the name «Phoenician» was coined by the Greeks.

As far as what moderns consider art is concerned, the Phoenicians borrowed freely from Assyrian, Egyptian and Greek themes and styles. It wasn't copying - Ernest Renan called it imitation - more like taking a cue from those cultures. A good example is this sarcophagus (right). The resemblance to Egyptian mummy cases is striking ; but so is the difference.

They invented glass, created fine alabaster vases, purple dye obtained from the murex ; they carved exquisite figures out of sea shells - yet they were the object of almost universal disdain. Homer himself dismissed them more than once as cruel pirates, others called them traders in junk. In spite of that, their works were sought by the wealthiest houses of every civilisation.

I found the painted ostrich eggs (left) fascinating, in part because I had never seen any before. They weren't painted just for fun, they served as funereal symbols, perhaps had some magical function ; they were placed in tombs (Phoenicians practised burial as well as incineration) along with other effects belonging to the deceased. And of course they were used as decorative vases or jars. Imagine receiving exotic perfume in an ostrich egg decorated in gold leaf ! While these eggs may be far more robust than hens’ eggs, I imagine that one would still need to be accustomed to fine manners in order to decorate an empty shell, and understand more than just the pragmatic side of life in order to see a purpose in placing beautiful objects in a sealed tomb.

The largest store of Phoenician luxury items discovered so far was unearthed in Iraq, on the site of Nimrud (near Mosul) : bronze, silver, ivory and gilded plates, cups and bowls of extraordinary finesse, representing stories of a mythological or religious nature. This treasure may have resulted from years of tribute sent from the Syro-Phoenician cities to the Assyrian monarchs, or else from extensive commercial activity. Similar treasures have been found in Cypriot and Etruscan tombs, and as far away as Spain and Iran.

Another prized commodity was cedar wood from Lebanon. The Phoenicians of Byblos and Tyre exported this magnificent wood to all parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. The Bible recounts King Solomon drawing up a contract with the king of Tyre and with Sidonian craftsmen to direct the construction of the Temple of Jerusalem («Command that trees from Lebanon be cut for me») as well as the king’s own palace (called «the Forest of Lebanon») using Lebanese cedar wood (I Kings, chapters 5 -- 8). The alabaster and gypsum carved relief shown below depicts for us today the transport by sea of this world-famous natural resource. It was made for the palace of Sargon in Khorsabad (Iraq) circa 710 B.C.E. It is now in the Louvre Museum in Paris.

click to enlarge

Images :
1. Marble sarcophagus, circa 470 B.C.E., Tartous (Syria), the Louvre, Paris ; 2. Painted ostrich eggs : circa 650 B.C.E., Montaldo di Castro (Italy), Villa Giulia, Rome (top) ; circa 450 B.C.E., Ibiza (Spain), Museo Arqueologico de Ibiza (bottom). All images, including the Khorsabad carved relief, from a special edition of Connaissance des Arts.

There, the door has been opened.