A journey across Roman Asia Minor, from SARDIS to SAGALASSOS, through Ephesus and Aphrodisias with Don McCullin published in Cornucopia magazine, issue no 64, 2022

Earlier in the year, I had unfolded an Ottoman firman, which had allowed free passage to a pair of British travellers. It was in its original wallet, which had pride of place in an early 19th-century saddle bag specially designed to hold maps, sketchbooks and notebooks. It was just the sort of thing which I imagined William Kinglake and Mary Wortley Montagu would have made use of. We have just re-published their travel books, and I have become even more impressed with the freshness and genius of these early writers and disgusted with my own times.

Is it possible that we are reaching the end of the purpose of travel? Blink your eyes after two days of travel and you could be anywhere, with the worldwide proliferation of three lane motorways sweeping past shopping malls filled with chain stores and overlooked by sky-scraper apartment buildings. This international city-scape all bound together by the same cars and omnipresent mobile telephones which have now become a vital tool within airport security procedures.

Such thoughts come easily, especially at dawn when you are leaving a great metropolis in the rain and are being well cared for. Ahmed Komurkiran is at the wheel and Monica Fritz is our modern take on a traditional Dragoman guide, busily plotting routes and unearthing interesting restaurants on her i-phone, while I daydream of mule trains in the past.

One of the refreshing realities about a long road trip across Turkey (searching out Roman ruins) is that there is no such thing as a reliable driver who speaks English. You need a true patriotic Turk, trained by decades of driving lorries across mountain roads, and fuelled on sweet black tea, if you aspire to be driven across the breadth of Anatolia without so much spotting a single yawn, let alone the alarming sight of a driver rubbing his eyes open. Monica Fritz is at least quadrilingual: Turkish, Italian, Manhattan English with some Yemeni Arabic and has a friend in any town that you can name, none of whom seem to mind being called up at the last possible moment, and quizzed as to the best places to stay and eat. Best of all, she is herself a traveller and a photographer, with a passion for the authentic. She possesses an inbuilt tolerance for wilful individuals – perhaps the biproduct of having a radical poet as a mother and a symbolist painter as a father. All four of us had travelled together before.

We stopped to have a coffee in a café that overlooked the crossroads in the village of Sart, stepping over a sleeping dog, making way for a tractor (in which perched a young man proudly driving his white bearded father) while another villager started his motorcycle with one hand, while holding onto his bag of shopping with the other, whilst also smoking a cigarette and then with the machine running, turned around to finish his conversation with his three friends who remained at their table. We were an odd group, one thin Turk from Antakya, one plump English publisher, a Turkish speaking New Yorker and the world’s most famous war photographer, Don McCullin. We occupied the only spare table in this village cafe which had that civilized gift of both acknowledging your existence whilst giving you space. I needed space because I was having trouble with my map and various annotated bookmarks had fallen out of a clutch of battered guidebooks.

It appeared that I must have fallen asleep whilst being efficiently conveyed across western Turkey on modern motorways guided by mobile telephone maps.

Then as I covered the café table with my map and worked out where we had got to, a sense of wonder began to slowly spread through my veins. We were sipping a Turkish coffee outside Sardis. The Persian Royal Road ran east from Sardis for seventeen hundred miles all the way to Susa, a journey of ninety days by foot. Unlike the British, it had not been the style of the Persian Empire to pay any great interest in the coast. Sardis was surrounded by excellent grazing land for the prized cavalry of the Persian Empire and so this is where their Satrap sat watching over the western-most provinces of the Persian Empire. Sardis had served as the marshalling ground for many of their great armies, be it that summoned by Darius and Xerxes or by prince Cyrus whom Xenophon and the ten thousand served. To the north is a plain beside a lake filled with a hundred mounds raised over the burial places of the kings of Lydia, that half historical-half mythical dynasty that bridges the fallen citadels of the Bronze Age (the world of Troy, Hittite Empire and Myceneans) with the anarchy of the Iron Age. History and archaeology is an unplugged black screen for this period. This blank of two hundred years is part filled with legends, wrapped around such real historical characters as King Midas and King Croesus. The latter ruled an Empire from the city of Sardis which once stretched over all of western Anatolia; a political ally to both Sparta and Egypt and a munificent patron to both the oracle at Delphi and the temple of Artemis at Ephesus.

Slowly, like a compass resetting itself, I was given that reward that you can only be acquired through travelling. I was beginning to understand what the world might look like viewed from another omphalos, another centre with a whole different set of horizons, priorities, perspectives and needs. To the left of our café table was the way to Izmir and the Aegean, while to our right the road run pretty much due east to Ankara. Later on I would work out that our café table had stood beside the Persian Royal road: beneath that layer of 1952 tarmac upon which our car was parked, sat an Ottoman road, on top of a Seljuk, on top of a Byzantine, on top of the Roman road which followed the Lydian. We had been sipping coffee beside the first state designed expressway, the world’s first high speed communication system. A cable of one hundred and eleven chapar khaneh (postal station houses) meant that despatch riders, of whom it was said “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” could get a message between Susa and Sardis in nine days.

An i-phone let off a ping to bring me back to the present. The American dig house at Sardis was packing up for the season, but there was an archaeologist on the site, who was prepared to walk us around the temple of Artemis. We took a track that climbed gently uphill beside the Pactolus stream through a hamlet of geese guarded farmhouses to reach the dig house. There has been an American scholarly presence here for over a hundred years.

The Temple of Artemis took our breath away. The ruins were so unexpected, tucked away in an elusive site, caught beneath the folds of a dynamic landscape of eroded volcanic hills, formed from out of razor sharp crests, steep gullies and hidden combs. On one of the more improbable of these summits, perched the remnants of a sliver of an ancient tower, a tiny surviving fraction of the fortifications that once enclosed the whole mountain to form the Acropolis of Sardis. These fallen towers have witnessed half a dozen historical sieges, but now look like an eroded sand-castle that will very soon be swept away by the next wave.

The temple was the fourth largest Ionic temple in the ancient world, but yet seemed almost designed to be hidden, a reclusive holy site, that one instinctively imagined must have originally been screened by the trunks of a sacred grove, so that the forest of marble columns that once surrounded the inner temple, would have stood in the shadow of their even more magnificent live sisters. The fine details of the columns and capitals are magnificent, both in their intricacy and in their proportion – and in terms of craftsmanship are only equalled by what you can find at Didyma. So as a visitor, your eyes are constantly shifting their focus, between the horizon filled with the silhouettes of a dream world of doomed towers perched on eroding escarpments, and then back down to the fine detail of the carved marble - to identify the shadow of a scorpion hiding amongst a wreath of holm-oak draped over the base of a fluted column by a sculptor of subtle genius. It would have all been quarried away but for an earthquake that buried the eastern half of the temple in tons of mountain scree, cascading down from the summits above. The two full height columns have stood for all time.

I would been dazzled by it all, except for the presence of my companion that morning, who had spent decades gently teezing out the curious sequence of events. The first astonishing thing to take on board is that – despite all its magnificence – this was a secondary place of holiness. The city of Sardis had primarily been associated with the sanctuary of Cybele – which has never been found. The next thing that is unusual is that there is (by Anatolian standards) no vast back story of prehistory. A free-standing altar was constructed here around 500 BC, the foundations touching bedrock. This was the time when ancient Sardis had been flattened by the Persian Empire. The Persian Satrap ruled from Sardis, but their actual occupation site has never been identified. It is tempting to see the altar as something constructed by the indigenous Lydians, a safe distance from the ruins of their old city (900 metres uphill from their broken walls). This would certainly help explain why, when the Persian Empire is toppled by Alexander the Great, this altar becomes the central point of reference for a vast new temple. It is also tempting to see the temple is something of a victory monument, both against the Persians but also against a rival Hellenistic dynasty. The temple seems to have been raised by the Seleucid dynasty after they had defeated Lysimachus (in 281 BC). Zeus was worshipped here alongside Artemis. It would have stood as an emphatic statement of power, a great marble shoe box, furnished only with internal columns – which upheld the roof. This remained in full use for a century after which it declines before being wrecked by an earthquake (dated to 17 AD). The temple is then recreated under the Roman Empire. The marble walls of the old Hellenistic sanctuary are now surrounded by a forest of columns (eight at the front and back, and twenty on each side) in addition to those that already stood before the porch. The Romans also subdivide the shrine into two sections, allowing for the worship of the Roman Imperial family to dominate the eastern half. Vast fragments of marble portraiture were found embedded in the floor, bits of Commodus, Marcus Aurelius, Antonius Pius and Faustina. The rather slow rebuilding may well have gone into overdrive during the reign of Hadrian, who passed this way in 123 AD.

I was thrilled to be shown how much structural evidence is still observable on the ground. Such as the protruding stone lifting bosses still left in place (they were designed to be knocked off at a later date) and the centring lines (lightly scored in the foundation stones) are also visible. As are the lewes holes (used by Roman masons to lift stones into place with a cunning hook made from three inter-locking wedges). I was also shown the course of shallow flow trenches scored into the marble which allowed molten lead to be poured in order to seal the clamps in place. It gradually became clear that the temple was always something of a building site, constantly being amended and improved upon. I had to step back from our concept of deadlines and completion dates and begin to imagine masonry as a form of continuous worship. The stones bear witness to this sense of building as a process not an end. I was shown two famous inscriptions, “I am the first of the columns to rise” and another (dated 250-220 BC) records the mortgage obligations of one Mnesimachos. Work continued on the temples right until the end of the 4th century when the Roman Emperors formally closed down all the public pagan temples. A charming little Byzantine chapel was wedged into a corner of the sanctuary in the 5th century. It suggests not so much the triumph of Christianity, but a hermit squatting beneath a still potent shadow.

On our way downhill, a similar sad tale of decline was recorded at the Pactolus North Sector excavation site, with fragments of medieval chapels imposed over a Roman-era villa. But I decided to potter off and have a closer look. This odd patch of excavation, a triangular plot above the river bank, linked me directly to some of the most ancient legends about Sardis: the golden touch of King Midas and the legendary wealth of King Croesus.

An irregular courtyard was excavated. It was surrounded by huts and the saucer-like shapes left behind by ancient open-air furnaces. A small altar to Cybele has been dated to the Lydian kingdom of the early 6th century BC.

The alluvial gravel in the Pactolus stream bed was once famously rich in gold dust, whilst other streams that drained the volcanic hills produced electrum, a natural blend of silver and gold. The very first coins in the world were struck in Lydia and in neighbouring Phrygia from such sources. They are weighed blobs of electrum (that often bear a distinctive strike mark of four impressed squares). But it was difficult to know how much gold and how much silver was present in any electrum buttons. Analysis has confirmed that copper was often added to the gold content to help hide the fact that a quarter of the gold had been extracted.

The Lydian Kings, ruling from Sardis, decided to take their coinage to a whole new area of authority. Their first innovation was to strike their buttons of precious metal with an inscription identifying that they came from Lydia, either (the word Walwet) or the head of a bull being attacked by the head of a lion. This was done in the reign of Alyattes, King of Lydia. His son, King Croesus further accelerated the international respect for Lydian coinage, by ordering his skilled metal smiths to separate electrum into two distinct coinage systems based on pure gold and pure silver. At a stroke he established (bi-metalism) the foundation of all systems of exchange for the next 2,500 years. The rate of exchange between silver and gold would constantly shift to adjust to new mining strikes.

One of the birthplaces of our entire system of world trade stood before me. It was impressively lowkey and the furnaces looked like a village bread oven. This is as it should be, for extracting silver from electrum was not that far removed from bakery. The electrum was ground down into a gritty flour. This was layered between salt and ground pottery dust which was then baked in a cooking pot. A second bake-off (the extract now mixed up with lead) occurred at a higher heat, stoked up by iron blow pipes and bellows. This would eventually produce a cake of slag out of which buttons of pure silver would precipitate. It seems likely that the original shape of a coin was not an aesthetic decision, but just the natural end result of this smelting process. This button could be trimmed to the right weight, then struck, between two bits of iron – a hammer impress set against a baseplate, which had been fixed into a log of wood. And voila, hey presto! the world gets its first unit of internationally respected value: the Lydian stater or the gold Croeseid. A whole heirachy of lesser units would be calibrated off these coins. A ninety-sixth of a stater weighed in at just 0.15 grams but traded in the marketplaces for eight gallons of wheat or a sheep. I have heard that such flakes of gold are now back in use, in nations where hyper-inflation has destroyed all faith in paper currency.

Curiously the great eye-catching centrepiece of ancient Sardis, the vast towering vaults of the Gymnasium complex, did not stir the emotions of my companions at all. In other parts of the world, we have travelled hundreds of miles to track down an edifice constructed by the Severan dynasty at the golden apogee of the Roman Empire. But some critical aesthetic line in the sand had been crossed, between restoration and re-creation. The 1964 Venice Accords have tried to put this into writing, but Don McCullin’s camera bag is like a Geiger counter for these things. Not a buckle was loosened. A pair of cranes was doing something similarly bold to the famous Synagogue of Sardis, which is to be protected with a brand new roof. I had been told about the synagogue, but nothing prepared me for finding it on the ground. I had to banish any thought of a medieval hall squatting on the ruins of antiquity (such as the early Byzantine chapels we had just seen). For this astonishing place shows Judaism co-existing with the Roman classical world with extraordinary self-confidence, not so much a formal religion, but a moral philosophy open to the world. For just like any school of Greek philosophy, the synagogue made use of a stoa, a shaded colonnade. The synagogue at Sardis took over the southern stoa some time in the 3rd century AD, which stands right beside the Palaestra, the open-air courtyard of the gymnasium. So here at Sardis there is not so much a whisper of a reclusive ghetto, or of religion that has become associated with ethnicity, instead you get the impression that having worked out their naked bodies (well-oiled in the sun) the worshippers took a bath, then worked out their minds in the hall of the synagogue. It is a wonderful place, open for the business of reading sacred moral texts and commenting on them, in a basilica like hall (complete with an apse). It co-existed in that fascinating period of the 3rd century, when for a hundred years, the old paganism and Christianity existed together with other moral faiths (such as Judaism and Manicheanism) with no one persecuting one another. Somehow architectural bits of an old temple, possibly from the shrine of Cybele were re-used here.

I found the line of small shops along high street outside the gymnasium-synagogue very intriguing. The modern road lies above the southern colonnade, but half a dozen modest two-room shops have been excavated along the northern colonnade. A stone mortar for grinding pigments seems to have been run by a christian (from the crosses on his water tank), there is also a tavern, a lokanta and premises belonging to Jacob, an elder of the nearby synagogue. Just to the east of this row of shops the highstreet was fronted by a spectacular Roman triumphal arch, which is currently being investigated by archaeologists. It seems to have been toppled by an earthquake in the 7th century, and now sprawls like a childrens’ box of wooden bricks, where it fell. So we now know that this grand Roman arch stood right beside the thick earth ramparts of the ancient Lydian city, once guarded by their own fortress gate. This gate was thoroughly blocked up by the Persians after their conquest, which adds just another question to the many hovering above Sardis. In a similar way, although Sardis is listed in St John’s Book of Revelations as one of the Seven historic Churches in Asian Minor, no physical structure has yet been discovered.

Don McCullin was very keen to visit Ephesus. On our way, I tried to stand in for Kristen Scott Thomas, who (in the film The English Patient) tells us the story of Gyges so brilliantly. It is powerful stuff, the Lydian King so trusting in his friendship with his chief bodyguard that he wants him to understand just how beautiful his wife is when naked, but in so doing so, unleashes dark murderous passions, which will destroy him. Don understood the mood of this tale immediately, but we got distracted from Herodotus, as we argued over a modern moral line in the sand, which was the ethics of accepting an invitation to bathe in a Hot Tub. Gyges will become the founder of the greatest dynasty of Lydian Kings, but with the blood of his master on his hands. Geographically it seemed a splendid place to tell this tale, but my story telling was trumped. Angelina Jolie needed to see Don (about a film project) and was toying with the idea of flying out to Turkey.

EPHESUS is a numinous place. One of the seven wonders of the world stood here, the Temple of Artemis, the backdrop to the “Great is Diana” scene in the Acts of the Apostles. This temple has been swept away by time, but at Ephesus you can yet look on the face of the Great Goddess and feel some of her implacable authority. Ephesus was a pilgrimage destination for at least a thousand years before the birth of Christ, but the cities role as a shrine survived the change in religious beliefs. The tomb-shrine of St John the Evangelist co-existed with the temple for three hundred years. A generation after the great temple had been finally closed down, the Third Council of the Church would be held in the basilica of St Mary at Ephesus, where the Virgin Mary (the mother of Jesus) would be theologically elevated to the Theotokos (the mother of God). Later ages would dream of, then identify her simple house on the hills above the city, as well as the cave of the seven sleepers, the site of a miracle attested to by both the Christian and Muslim faiths. Spiritual traditions are potently intertwined at Ephesus.

I first came here as a young man, travelling with a small backpack and beside a tall independent woman. We arrived well after midnight, dropped off by a bus from Izmir, and so decided to economise on hotels by dozing in the ruins of the church of St John for the half of the night left to us. It was our first night in Anatolia, and so we discovered the vast broken walls of the remnants of an immense cathedral shrine raised by the Emperor Justinian in the subtle light of pre-dawn. Then we watched the old stone walls of Isa Bey mosque and the Byzantine fortress lit up. We found a modest pension and an ample breakfast and later stumbled on the incredible sculptures hidden within the modest looking town museum. Then we walked to the melancholic marshland site where the great temple had once stood: empty apart from a few stones but still broody with the past. That long morning was such an unplanned gift, that the actual archaeological site of Roman Ephesus, with its ticket barrier, midday sun and coach loads of tourits, felt diminished in comparison.

I have however been lucky enough to come back to Ephesus and appreciate the Roman ruins in their own light. On each occasion the city unfolds something other: be it the broken spans of the landward aqueduct, the enclosing circuit of Hellenistic walls, the cave of the seven sleepers or the chance to swim near the old harbour with my daughters. But each visit also has some sort of inevitable friction against mass tourism. You can do two things about this: either embrace the fact that this forgotten city has now been brought bustlingly back into life. Or you can avoid the peak hours of the coach and cruise-ship tours by entering the site after 4pm.

On this visit I was aware that neither would work. My travelling companion needed the morning light, but he is averse to day-glow package tourists, especially when they combine a lack of dress sense with bored-eyes. They broke any numinous spell and would not allow him to be able to practice his magic as a photographer. Worldwide pandemics should never be praised, but that morning we had Ephesus all to ourselves.

Ephesus without tourists was a revelation. Previous visits had allowed me to slowly build up an understanding of bits of the city, but that morning it all came together. How the (political) Agora on the summit of the hill was connected by the high street to the commercial Agora on the shore which also stood beside that opulent, wide central boulevard of Ephesus. How this broad avenue (known as the Arcadiane) led you down towards the harbour, lined with shops that opened off the sun-shaded colonnades. In the cool of the evening this grand marble pavement could all be lit up by lamps at night. Ephesus was one of only three cities in the entire Roman Empire that could afford this sort of extravagance. The grander citizens of Ephesus made use of the hills, their courtyard houses cascading down the slopes on a series of interlinked terraces from where you could smell the sea and look out over the towering public edifices in the centre of the city. These included four distinct Gymnasium complexes (which one guess might have acted like rival football clubs within the city). The public stadium stood in the northern quarter of the city right beside the ever-expanding grandeur of Ephesus’s vast theatre. This immense bowl had originated out of annual festivals of sacred drama held on the slopes of a hill, but which grew into an opulent place of public entertainment with a cultural evolution of its own. The stage grew more opulent in the Roman era as actors eclipsed the chorus but would they eventually be cast into the shadows by the emergence of proto ballet and opera morphing out of the classic repertoire of tragedy and ribald comedy. But the theatre was not just a space for entertainment but could be used as a stage for political debate, for public announcements and executions as well as becoming an annual sacred place at the time of the great festivals. Here also had reigned the satirical poet Hipponax, city of Ephesus’s fiercest homegrown wit.

But that morning in Ephesus I also understood the role of water. How that monument-lined main street of Ephesus became a thoroughfare of public fountains, with the strong light sparkling off marble basins filled with spring water. How the use of fresh water was one of the most consistent themes that underwrote the life of the city. How the first settlement of Ephesus naturally clung to the spring of clear water coming from out of limestone Mount Pion, but as the city grew, it revealed its authority by hauling in more and more water out from the mountainous hinterland. Aqueducts fed the fountains and supplied the great public Baths that in the Roman period emerged as an addition to the life within the Gymnasium. All this was set in an opposite dialogue with the sea, especially once the harbour began to silt up. So the city both climbed uphill and inland towards good clean water and easy drainage, while also chasing the harbour and docks ever further west into the marshy shore.

The harbour had a vital role. The port of Ephesus sits in the centre of the western shore of Anatolia and permitted the city to both participate and yet survive the violent politics of the ancient world. Garrisons and governors were imposed on the city with every shifting change of the imperial wind - which always touched upon Ephesus. We know that the streets of the city have physically been trod by Alexander the Great, by King Mithridates of Pontus, by general Sulla and by Mark Antony. Lysimachus (the Thracian bodyguard of Alexander who founded a Hellenistic monarchy) was one of the greatest builder monarchs of Ephesus. It was during his reign that the splendid circuit of city walls (3rd century BC), still standing in parts, was built. Everything else that you can touch at Ephesus was physically built or remodelled during the Roman Empire when the city not only acted as the provincial capital but boomed as a port. We think its population may have exceeded 200,000. The Emperor Hadrian made three visits to Ephesus (one in the mid-summer 124 AD) but we should also remember another potent shadow from the past. Heraclitus’s over-riding theory about a universe locked into dynamic opposition, “all is flux” is entirely in keeping with the mood of our own time. He was a citizen of Ephesus.

Heraclitus left behind just a single book which surely must have had pride of place in Ephesus’s Celsian library. The library stands at right angle to the handsome triumphal triple archway (dedicated to the Emperor Augustus and Agrippa) that patrolled access to the lower (commercial) Agora from the main street. It’s grand façade, composed of statue niches and three entrance arches, rises above a flight of steps up from the main street. It was constructed at an angle to catch the morning sun as it rises over the mountains to the east. Twelve thousand scrolls were housed in ten rectangular niches within the three-storey, fifty-foot-high central hall of the library. The whole edifice (complete with an endowment fund) was given to the city by the Consul Gaius Julius Aquila in 110 A.D. as a monument to his father who had served at Ephesus as governor of Roman Asia Minor. His tomb was discovered intact by the Austrian archaeologists who restored the library which had neatly fallen in on itself after an earthquake.

To a modern visitor, the site of the ancient temple of Artemis, feels a bizarrely obscure place to build one of the seven wonders of the world, a sunken area of marshland lying beside the road, halfway between the ancient and medieval cities.

It is a struggle to remember it was the temple which came before the city. Time and time the temple saved the lives of the citizens of Ephesus because of the enormous respect most conquerors felt for this sanctuary. For instance when the besieging army of Croesus, King of Lydia, was about to break into the city, the citizens formally attached their towers and gates to the threshold of the Temple with ropes of wool, formally placing themselves under the protection of the Goddess. Alexander the Great was so taken by the place that he offered to pay for the restoration of the Temple which had been burned down the night he was born. Nor did the Romans punish Ephesus for its part in the Asiatic Vespers (the massacre of Italian traders in 88 B.C.) but forgave the city and chose it as their administrative capital.

Archaeologists have discovered half a dozen ancient sanctuaries and open-air altars to the Mother Goddess as well as hundreds of votive objects that date back to the 9th century B.C. Each new shrine was built larger than its predecessor. The archaic temple constructed in 570 BC was already a vast edifice, sixty metres wide, a hundred metres long and supported by hundred and six columns. The great classical temple of Artemis that rose in its stead was supported by a forest of one hundred and twenty-seven columns. In the medieval era the temple ruins were conveniently close to the new hilltop settlement and so were quarried away to provide building stone for churches, mosques and the fortress walls of Seljuk.

We can try and imagine the temples origins. Hundreds of years before the first structure was raised it was a sacred wood, a place set apart, which included a spring. In the centre of this dread forest was an altar which could be observed by a cult statue. This had not been carved by man but was formed from out of the gnarled trunk of an ancient tree which had been touched by lightening and made even more dark, enigmatic and mysterious. There are accounts of how an ancient wooden cult image of the Goddess could be veiled within an oak trunk. The altar could be both drenched in blood by formal sacrifices but also flecked with crimson droplets of living blood from the ritual scourging of youths circling in a war dance. This dance was sometimes performed in full armour with shields, while on other occasions the dancers stooped right down to the ground on their hands, then leapt up to clap, then hopped about like a wounded animal, while on other occasions they were enclosed within a great chanting choir. We also have accounts of a quite separate annual ritual, where the two victims were garlanded with fig necklaces, then whipped to the seashore with rods of fig wood until they collapsed. They were then stoned, their bodies burnt and the ashes offered to the sea. At other shrines to Artemis we know that the male priests were self-recruited, from escaped slaves who won their post by killing their predecessor. In the classical period the male head-priest at Ephesus was a self-castrated stranger, while the priestesses were ranked in three orders (novices, priestesses and elders) but also modelled themselves on the matriarchal Bee hive, ruled by a Queen Bee (Essen) served by female bees (Melissa). There was also a separate college of twenty temple servants who wore high heels. They had some association with the birth of the Goddess and may also have acted as the escort for her processional bier. Even in the classical period the Goddess was a highly visible presence in the city. For her spring festival, the procession of the goddess assembled before dawn, the city gates were thrown open to welcome her into the main street which has been transformed into a sacred way, so that she could be crowned and adored in the theatre before making her way up the hill, to greet and welcome her sister-self (the goddess statue worshipped at Magnesia) at the cities eastern gate. In summer the goddess was paraded down to the harbour for her ritual bath in the sea.

You need to know most of this, when you finally stand before the two statues of the Goddess Artemis, well exhibited in the town museum. Her face is majestic, stern, distant and commanding. There is no movement in her body because she is the centre of the universe, as revealed by the stars and the signs of the zodiac that encircle her body. A curious cascade of pendant shapes falls from her chest, which are at one and the same time both the castrated testicles of men and bulls offered up to her, fecund breasts and fertile eggs. Further down her robe, in rows of three, are aspects of her power in animal forms, typically lions, gryphin and deer. These two statues were carved in the Roman Empire (so at best they are a copy of a copy of a copy) but were then carefully buried (for their protection) beneath the floor of the prytaneion, the administrative town hall of the city of Ephesus.

We spent two nights at an exceptional hotel in the hills above Ephesus, made out of a hamlet of cottages, a tower, woodland pathways and a pair of old konaks all knit together by worn stone pavements and a wonderful commitment to traditional cooking. A farm track can take you (or at very least your luggage) to the hotel which stands above the village of Sirince, but once established there you can make use of woodland paths, some of which can take you down to the compact old village of traditional houses below you, full of animated cafes and shops, selling local wine and local produce.

APHRODISIAS There are a handful of places where people do not just visit the ruins for a day, they fall into a lifelong infatuation with them. Aphrodisias is such a place, to my mind an emotional brood sister to Dougga in Tunisia, Cyrene in Libya, Palmyria in Syria, Tipasa in Algeria and Baalbek in the Lebanon. It is not about size or historical resonance, but about some delicate balance between cultural self-sufficiency and engagement with the wider world.

The ruins of Aphrodisias are still locked into the local environment. Trees have been preserved alongside half a dozen of the buildings of the traditional village which are still shaded by magnificent old poplars beneath which an old Ottoman public fountain still runs. The surrounding area remains a working Arcadia of small farms, orchards and hill grazing, all overlooked by the impressive heights of Baba Dag, “grandfather mountain”. We stayed in a local hotel in the village street of Geyre, happily scented with the smell of cattle with the cockerels calling out before the muezzin.

Aphrodisias also fitted perfectly into our particular mission, for in terms of architecture it is entirely a product of the Roman Empire. It has everything in one place: a moody theatre, baths, bouleterion (local senate house), a pair of agora, basilica (law courts), a temple turned into cathedral and an almost intact stadium subsequently held in the embrace of city walls. It also has one of the fabulous single monuments in Turkey (the tetrapylon – the old gateway to the temple) which when we visited was being used as a backdrop for wedding and engagement photographs. It was built in the heyday of the Empire, in the golden period of the Antonines, when the already magnificent temple seems to have been wrapped up within a grand temenos wall. The tetrapylon now stands like a lone triumphal arch, but for all its magnificence it was a working gatehouse that sat astride a boundary wall, thrown open for the annual festival-processions of the Goddess.

Aphrodisias also has a world-class museum packed full of sculpture, with plans to augment the displays to include some of the inscriptions discovered, with translations that will bring the city streets back to life.

Aphrodisias is special to us, but it was not so in the past. It was just one of the two thousand self-governing cities within the Roman Empire. There is no historical destiny welded to this glen. Aphrodisias sits on no vital trade route, commands no harbour, possesses no mine of precious metals within its territory and guards no frontier. Down the glen the road leads towards the rich, well-watered Meander valley which was studded with bustling cities that got all the historical limelight. Even in terms of its immediate surroundings, Laodikeia and Heirapolis (just the other side of the mountain) were larger. Aphrodisias was a place apart, a small provincial city that stood beside an ancient temple. The highlands of Caria were filled with dozens such places.

Aphrodisias acquired its modern fame because the ruins of the city were not quarried by later ages for there was no medieval fortress or 19th-century railtrack in sudden need of stone. It also escaped the attention of the first two generations of predatory foreign archaeologists. It was Aphrodisias’s happy fate to be discovered by Turks and to be dug by Turks, with no foreign museum hoovering up inscriptions to bolster their sense of scholarship. With the honourable the exception of the two French teams that dug into the theatre 1904 and in 1938 uncovered the Hadrianic Baths.

Modern archaeology at Aphrodisias began by chance. In 1954 when some new water works were dug for the village which accidentally unearthed some very interesting antique carving. In 1974 the celebrated photographer of Istanbul, Ara Guler, took photographs of villages sitting on ancient stones outside the village tea house. These chance images attracted the attention of a New York based Turkish scholar, Kenan Erim who started digging here in the 70’s and continued for the rest of his life. Two pairs of his patched and over-patched jeans, worthy of a wondering Dervish, have been preserved. He is the guardian spirit of the place, buried in the centre of the city beside the temple in 1990. His appointed disciple, Bert Smith, carries on his mission.

The fabric of Aphrodisias might be all Roman, but like Ephesus, it is a temple sanctuary which underwrites the origins of this city. An ancient shrine stood beside a mysterious salt spring that flowed beside a seasonal marsh-lake (filled from spate rivers running off the great mountain to fill this depression. As every herdsman knows, a salt-lick is more effective for controlling a herd than any number of whips. The salt spring attracted all sorts of animals and birds. The holy presence of doves was always part of temple life at Aphrodisias. The Erectheion at Athens, the most ancient sanctuary on the Acropolis also stood beside a salt spring, which also hinted at the great Ocean upon which the earth was believed to float. Excavations into the Pekmez mound (just east of the oldest area of settlement on Aphrodisias’s theatre hill) found evidence of human settlement that took the story rippling back over thousands and thousands of years. The shrine stood on the northern frontiers of Caria, as it abutted Lydia and Phyrgia. It was revered but not politically important or independent. Indeed it seems to have been bound in league with the more numerate city of Plarasa, which stood just fifteen kilometres southwest.

During the Mithridatic Wars, the armies of the King of Pontus (which is north Turkey) and the Roman Republic battled for supremacy over Asia Minor. For some reason or other, probably based on the pattern of existing tribal rivalries within the Carian highlanders, Aphrodisias became an ally of Rome rather than the heroic native ruler King Mithridates. The Roman general Sulla, responding to the advice of an oracle made a public offering to the temple of Aphrodite. He had been instructed, “There is a place where snow covered Taurus climbs up, there is a high Carian city named after Aphrodite, take a double axe there, and you will have vast power.” Sulla made this offering (which was an ancient symbol of authority in Caria) to Carian Aphrodite and Zeus Nineudios. He did subsequently attain vast power. A generation later, another charismatic Roman general, Julius Caesar was campaigning in Asia Minor. Caesar also made a public offering to the shrine. “He saw her in a dream, taking charge at the head of his army, leading men of war, fighting and in full armour’. So he sent a golden statue of Eros to the temple at Aphrodisias. The city backed Julius Caesar in 47 B.C. and after his death openly sided with his heirs against his rivals, which included the Republican general Labienus, who in 41 B.C was a very powerful military figure in Asia Minor. Labienus had been lent an army of Parthian cavalry, which only twelve years before had shown its power by destroying an entire Roman army (led by Crassus) at the battle of Carrhae (in southern Turkey). Aphrodisias was sacked by Labienus, but an extraordinary form of restoration was at hand, by the return of a local boy made good.

C. Julius Zoilos had been born in Aphrodisias and entered the household of Julius Caesar as a slave. He also served Octavian (Caesar’s heir and great nephew) and rose to become one of his trusted freed-man. Zoilos retired from public service around 40 BC (ten years before Octavian’s final victory at Actium) but brought with him an extraordinary basket of privileges for his hometown; autonomy from provincial administration of Roman Asia Minor, freedom from all taxes and asylum rights for the temple of Aphrodite. Zoilos also lavished his own fortune on adorning his hometown: building a state of the art Roman marble stage to be fitted into the existing Hellenistic theatre, then creating the north colonnade of the North Stoa (as an additional public space for the city) before rebuilding the Temple of Aphrodite in marble. He single-handedly transformed the identity of Aphrodisias, from a war-battered provincial sanctuary within northern Caria to a major pilgrimage destination with imperial connections. And this project would be carried on by the next generation. Aphrodisias possesses one of the most elegant stadia in the Roman world, built in the first century to seat 30,000, when the cities entire population probably numbered just 8,000. This was not madness, just an awareness that the city (at festival times) quadrupled.

The Sebasteion, built by two local families between 20-60 A.D. was another concrete attempt to keep the intimate connection between the city and the ruling dynasty alive. On one level, it must be considered a cringing piece of fawning sycophancy, a two-storey avenue of propaganda sculpture that served as an approach way to a shrine raised to Augustus (the Sebastos – the King) and his successors within the Julio-Claudian dynasty. But they did it with style, rehearsing the connections, both real and mythological between Asia Minor and Rome, especially as Aeneas, prince of Troy, child of the Goddess Aphrodite was also the legendary founder of Rome. Caesar himself had been very aware of this mythological connection, so much so that he built the Temple of Venus Genetrix (the ancestor) in Rome in 46 B.C. As we all know, Octavian-Augustus took this theme to its triumphal conclusion, by encouraging Vergil to compose the Aeneid, as the foundation story of Rome. He also wrote to the local Roman governor, “This one city I have taken for my own out of all Asia. I wish these people to be protected as my own townsmen..’ The Sebasteion was never finished, and work stopped with the fall of Nero (the last Julio-Claudian) which briefly must have made the whole structure a potential embarrassment. But the work of maintaining patronage connections, in order to safeguard the cities status remained a vital task. So the city fathers honoured the new dynasty (the Flavians) with something that would appeal to their pragmatic sensibility: a brand new basilica (law court) conceived with an expansive vision - a hugely impressive 145 metre long hall furnished in its heyday with fine sculpture. The city walls were initially presumed to have been thrown up against the invasion of the Goths in 259 A.D., but have since been proved to have been built much later, in 350 A.D.

We do not know exactly how it happened, but possibly due to all these public commissions, Aphrodisias became a city of carvers and sculptors. Like every principal city in the Roman world, the living bustle of an antique city was replicated by statues of the glorious dead, not just Gods and Emperors, but leading citizens standing on honorary bases voted to them as marks of honour, allowing them to stand tall for ever in the theatre, the agora, in the baths or outside the bouleterion. In Aphrodisias you can watch the state propaganda panels of the first century mature into exceptionally observant sculpture. In the 3rd century this seems to have been partly directed into the production of sarcophagi, which remained a popular form of public sculpture, set up beside the roads that lead out from the city. Stone was usually too heavy and expensive to move long distances (unless by water) so Aphrodisias did not so much export sculpture, as export sculptors. The presence of a sculpture workshop, physically placed between the city senate house and the temple, reveals the respect felt for this craft. Here, the traditions of observant classical portraiture continued deep into the period we otherwise might think of Byzantine. Five 5th century A.D. statues were found in the workshop, the idealized bodies half-finished but the individual faces acutely observed. In the centre of the city, the pagan public monuments were now officially closed, but the old ways were respected in private houses. Pagan statues were long tolerated as part of the landscape but by the middle of the 5th century a Christian cultural revolution increasingly defaces and denigrates antique sculpture.

The museum amongst its many treasures contains a statue of the Goddess Aphrodite. She is not depicted in a sensual form, though clearly the carvers at Aphrodisias were capable of anything. She is emphatically the same Great Goddess of Anatolia as you observe at Ephesus, magnificent in her partial veil and imperiously crowned with her polos. In Aphrodisias, the four scenes embroidered on her vestment: the three graces, the sun and the moon, the Ocean and a scene of sacrifice, once again remind her worshippers that she is the universal mistress of the universe. Her divinity can be worshipped under a thousand names (Apuleius gives us a very good roll call of the Goddess’s multiple identities in the Golden Ass) but it is customarily divided into three archetypal faces: the stern warrior maiden, the sensual, capricious goddess of love and the dread sovereign of the dead.

The solar year was punctuated by her festivals. A celebration of the spring (calculated in relationship to the equinox) involved a procession of her statue that culminated in a sacred marriage in a paradise garden. Mid-summer was marked by the climatic death of her male lover. He was often mourned for under his ancient Caanite name of Adonis (which means lord), at other sanctuaries he was associated with the cult of Cretan Zeus, or connected up with the most ancient Mesopotamian rituals of Tammuz and Inana. Female choirs passionately mourned the beautiful dead young lord, and in some sanctuaries even the divine statues were laid out like a corpse. In the most popular form of the mythic cycle Adonis was savagely gored by a wild boar whilst out hunting, and bleeds to death from this wound in his groin, dying in the arms of Aphrodite. The public grief is ended by his triumphant rebirth, though henceforth he must divide his year into three parts and share himself with the different aspects of the Goddess: including the mistress of the Underworld. This sometimes permitted a second sacred marriage festival to take place during the vernal equinox, when the Goddess takes a young shepherd as her lord in the autumn, rather than the young farmer king in spring.

We have lost any record of the specific details of sacred geography at Aphrodisias, but the position of the temple, on the frontier between the mountain forest and farmland may have been an important aspect. The gorgeous Tetrapylon gate that opens directly onto the main street from the Temple enclosure, will have been specifically constructed to frame the festival processions. So just like at Ephesus, otherwise busy urban thoroughfares lined with shops, will have been turned for a succession of days into sacred processional ways. The elaborate formation of the South Stoa, with its central water basin surrounded by a double avenue of palm trees, could have worked as a formalised paradise garden for the bier of the Goddess to have processed around. The fruit garlands carved into the colonnade of this South Stoa could also be an architectural reference to the joyful carnival like swagger of this spring festival. Add strong wine, the broaching of last autumns’ vintage, music, dance, festival wreaths and throw in any personal memories of a public carnival to better imagine the mood. There was a college of priestesses at Aphrodisias named, antherphoroi, “flower bearers” and inscriptions talk of the annual Adoneia festival, and every four years a Philemoneia, which seems likely to have included races in the stadium.

All this would be gradually curtailed by the triumph of Christianity, though many elements would be continued, be it the public passion with which Good Friday and Easter is celebrated in the Orthodox world, or the procession of statues of female saints, taken out of their church once a year in the Roman Catholic world. At Aphrodisias the temple of the Goddess was literally turned inside out, in order to make a new cathedral for the Christian era.

I can only leave Aphrodisias content, if I have the intention to return. Once back in England I found a photograph of the time I first took my two young daughters there, about twenty years ago. We had arrived in the night without warning in an unseasonable time of the year, but the simple roadside hotel sprung immediately into action. The kitchen was fired up, while our rooms were dusted down. In the morning my daughters found some puppies to play with, and terrapins were discovered in the afternoon.

I left our party to enjoy a day off by the pool, while I dashed off to quickly walk around Hierapolis. From the summit of Baba Dag, we had been told it is possible to spot the cotton white cliffs of Pamukkale. The next day we explored the fine Ottoman town of Mugla after which we accepted the hospitality of a British couple who had gone into partnership with a Turkish friend. Together the three of them have constructed an oasis-hotel in a limestone combe just above his home-village. It had everything; donkeys, a pond, a yoga retreat, a bake-house and a wind-pump. It felt a little like a modern take on the Zoilos story.

LAGINA The sanctuary of Hecate is a vast enclosed piazza which stands alone amongst olive groves. The ruins of the temple and the free-standing altar that stood before it, occupy the centre of this great space. Fragments of the original fluted Corinthian columns (eleven on each side and eight at the front and back) allow us to imagine this shrine in its elegant heyday. As you pace around the site, you begin to focus your eye on the details, and so admire the Doric colonnade that once formally enclosed the sacred space. A great body of inscriptions have been found on this external wall, testifying to the mysteries of the temple, its role as an oracle and as a sanctuary complete with a sacred grove, eunuch priest and its own money-making market. Excavations have gradually revealed the structure of three ornate gateways ( labelled Propylon) and you can identify the rows of stone benches, where the moonlight rituals, processions and mysteries would have been observed. The birthday of the Goddess was celebrated by the light of the full moon, but the great annual festival was The Bearing of the Key. This solemn procession was led by a young girl along the six mile sacred way, and then back. The key was a multiple symbol of authority, vouchsafed by the Goddess to protect the city, but which also neatly showed that the sanctuary was also politically wedded to the city of Stratoniceia, aside from its greater role as an emblem for that final locked door - of the grave. The Goddess (as in all things) delighted in her triple role, so Hecate is often depicted as a trinity of three bodies, or with three heads. Her other popular symbols, aside from the key are the torch (both symbolizing the night and the end of life), dagger, whip, snake and the dog which had long been sacrificed in Caria and Lydia.

Lagina, like Aphrodisias had been sacked by Labienus during the Roman civil wars and its magnificent restoration seems to have been assisted by Augustus. A charming little cottage has been preserved as a dig house, but there is a much older one in a nearby village. For Lagina was one of the earliest Ottoman excavation sites dug by the pioneer archaeologist, artist and conservationist, Osman Hamdi Bey. He is a total Ottoman hero: as a husband, as a father, as a Turk, as an internationalist, as a servant of the state. In a hall within the museum that he designed in Istanbul are the metopes that he discovered at Lagina. They are still displayed – though they should be better lit. It includes an intriguing scene of Hecate assisting at the birth of Zeus and giving a stone to Cronos to swallow, rather than his newborn son.

It made perfect sense to visit this sanctuary, which was the third and last face of the Great Anatolian Goddess, her aspect as Queen of the Night, mistress of the Moon and the gates to the underworld.

The nearby city of Stratonikera might never catch on as a major tourist destination, for is fringed by a fast double-carriageway and is too close to the mining town of Yatagan. This is good news, for it is a wonderfully dense complex and fascinating place, an ancient Carian city formed from a confederation of highland villages which was re-named (around 281 BC) by Seleucus I. Stratonikera also takes time to explore as this ancient city has layer after layer of subsequent medieval occupation: Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman, all using the old stones, and following the lines of the ancient streets, or in some cases simply adding a new inscription beside a beautiful old Greek or a rather hurried price control edict in Latin. Recent excavations have unearthed the grand north gate (where the sacred way to Lagina started) and are cleaning up the theatre while an older dig exposed the Bouleterion (the senate house of the city). But it is the sense of continuity, the wooden columns of the town mosque supported by stone capitals, or a worn stairway leading down to an ancient old spring, that capture your memory. That and taking tea on a wooden balcony, listening to an old villager interested in pointing out what they have just discovered in the street below his neighbours front door.

But astonishingly, although already overwhelmed by the beauty of what we had seen, we had kept the best to the last. Monica had found the most perfect isolated family-run hotel down a dirt track road that casually led past a Lycian tomb or two. I never saw the bill, but I yearn to return to the Hotel Hoyran, run by a family who understand travellers, for every October they pack up and go travelling themselves over the winter months.

The Roman sculptures within the Antalya museum are a wonder. Antalya is another ancient city that has simply endured, once it had been established by the Attalid Pergamon dynasty as their advance naval base on the Pamphylian shore. The museum sculpture collection is not about Antalya but what has been discovered at Perge. It was so much of a revelation that Don and I have promised ourselves that we must return. There are a swaggering number of Emperors (three complete statues of Hadrian, and three of Trajan, a fine head of Alexander), a mesmerising Hercules, three statues of Nemesis, two tantalising Marsyas figures, a Zeus, a Dionysius, an Artemis, an Apollo, temple friezes, the Three Graces, all backed up dozens of intimate human portraits, and then replicated by the dazzling collection of sarcophagi, where all too honest life portraits of dumping looking patrons, reclining rather stiffly and formally (as they might do in their front room or in posing for the grave) lie above the most frenzied scenes drawn from mythology. To further prejudice us in its favour, we were given coffee by the most charming young Director of Antiquities who had studied at the British Museum under an old friend of mine.

Perge was a complicated site, for Don was simultaneously photographing, but was also being photographed and interviewed by an elegant young journalist. But it took up many of the themes that I had been thinking about since our time at Ephesus. There was truly dazzling urban engagement with water, which ran down a raised series of inter-connected pools, criss-crossed with foot-bridges and punctuated by opulent public fountains, all the way down the centre of the long and broad high street, all fed by a nypheum-like shrine that stood at the bottom of the Acropolis hill. This central avenue had been given its own character with some gentle dog-leg zig-zag to feed variety into the urban horizon, aside from the grandeur of flanking collonades of sturdy granite columns, elegantly picked up and played with on the side streets. The centre of the city was dominated by the commercial Agora (set to one side) and a vast Bath house. In the dead centre an intriguing public space had been formed by enclosing a pair of three-storey Hellenistic gate-houses with a horse-shoe shaped wall. The towers were originally defensive, but had been left behind as the city expanded. Twenty-eight statue niches have been found, which fuse mythical ancestors of the city (Achean warriors who survived the Trojan war) with the Italian-Roman elite grafted onto the city. These include the brother and father of Plancia Magna who was a generous and intriguing patroness of the city whilst serving as priestess at the temple of Artemis. Before the sun set, I rushed about, catching the theatre on the hill and the stadium beside it, in beautiful soft light. Then bolted up the Acropolis to catch an incredible view of the city walls and its formal gateways, beyond which stretched the cities of the dead which had furnished so many of the sculpture-rich sarcophagus in the museum. The city felt curiously secular on this first visit, full of Gymnasia and Baths the size of temples, but this was not the case. Artemis was Wanessa, ‘the Queen’. Statuettes show her to have been depicted in a similar style to the Artemis and the Aphrodite we had seen at Ephesus and Aphrodisias. In Perge her ancient cult statue had not been formed from out of a tree, but came from the heavens, as a meteorite. Iron had been known about, and worked for thousands of years, but it was once of the rarest and most expensive metals, exclusively sourced from meteorites, and trading at forty times its own weight in gold. In the mountains due north of Pamphylia some of the earliest depictions of the Goddess have been found, eight thousand years old.

That night we slept in the cool air of the Taurus mountains, which climatically seemed a world away from the tropical humidity of the Pamphylian shore. The only other guests in our hotel were a group of Spanish men off to hunt wild boar.

Sagalassos was a fitting place for Don to finally run out of film. It is a magnificent site, surrounded by mountains on all sides accept where the access road climbs up from the fertile Aglasun valley. Our memories are possessed by the views, the sharp clean air and by the sound of goat herds on the mountain slopes It is an ancient place, listed in the records of the Hittite Empire as Salawasa in the 14th century B.C. It was their reclusive ancient citadel which held the sanctuary and formal meeting place of a warlike highland people. It had towers but the mountains were its walls, its warriors were its defences. They had even impressed the army of Alexander the Great and although they were ultimately defeated, Arrian saluted them as “the boldest warriors of a warlike tribe.” Sagalassos must have acted as a summer town when the herds are grazing the high summits. In the winter, the winds are perishing and it is often covered in snow. Many of the inhabitants probably went down to their farms embedded in the orchards and gardens in the valley below, irrigated by mountains streams. What we look on today, with two small exceptions from the Hellenistic period, is a small but beautiful Roman city, encapsulated by the nympheum fountain built against the mountain face of the Agora. To the eternal credit of the Belgian archaeological team this has been restored and is full of trickling live spring water which sends rippling shadows to play on the columns, statues and the seven different types of stone from which the structure was originally fashioned. Above the Agora, the cliff face is dotted with modest tomb niches, as well as a small Doric temple and an ancestor shrine (the Heroon), both later turned into medieaval towers. We can see the face of this hero (in the local museum) and the swirl of dancers rippling in their tasselled shawls on the exterior wall, but we do not know his name. Nor do we know what god was worshipped in the temple, though I warm to the suggestion that this small mountain shrine could be for Kakasbos, the warrior-knight, the Hercules-like rider-deity of this region. You can walk uphill, passing another enchanting Doric fountain and a splendid memorial library as you approach the theatre, which like most of the town simply collapsed on itself in a 7th century earthquake. It seems possible that if you were able to give the theatre one more gigantic shake, and it will either completely right itself or cascade down the slope. The earthquake also destroyed the great Baths below the Agora, where a series of monumental statues (of eight Emperors and their consorts) have been found over the last decade or so, which once lined a great entrance hall. The Romans, like all foreign powers had difficulty in establishing their authority over these mountains, but Augustus seems to have established a peace of the brave, backed up by setting eight colonies of discharged veterans here.

We lunched below the castle of the black poppy in central Anatolia. The walls on the summit of the granite plug could be Ottoman re-using Hittite stone. Down a side street I found a shop that still sold those immense shepherd cloaks of white felt, which can almost stand up by themselves. Somewhere in the vast plateau that surrounds the city of Afyon, the battle of Ipsus had been fought, which destroyed the one man who could have held together the Empire of Alexander the Great. Lysimachus, Seleucus, Ptolemy and Cassander had come at him like a pack of wolves, and then proceeded to slice up kingdoms for themselves. We had touched walls and cities made by these men, who turned against each other. We seemed at the centre of the world, equidistant from the Aegean, the Black sea and the Mediterranean, from Ankara, Istanbul, Izmir and Antalya. Truly travel in Turkey remains too full of wonders.

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