ON the ROAD AGAIN: The Photographer and the Historian head to Southwest Anatolia on the final leg of their Roman Roads Adventure published in Cornucopia magazine, issue no 65, 2023

I had arranged to meet the world’s most famous war-photographer in Istanbul, in a garden overlooked by a ruined hammam. I hoped this had a certain resonance to John Buchan’s Greenmantle, where three friends (coming from every corner of the world) arrange to meet at the ‘Garden-house of Suliman the Red’ in Istanbul. There was talk of a film being made of the life of Sir Donald McCullin, and I feared that this was my last chance to complete our third Roman Road trip across Western Anatolia, hunting out numinous ruins.

I was coming from the south-east and to make certain of this connection, I arrived at Diyarbakir airport early, only to hear that all flights has been grounded. One look at the northern horizon, filled with dark storm clouds lit up by lightening, made me glad of this decision. But when we finally took off that night, there was no slack left for any further margin of error. Fortunately I made our rendez-vous and was able to tuck into breakfast in the back garden of the Empress Zoe hotel with Sir Donald McCullin and an Istanbul-based publisher. Such was our enthusiasm for this series of three Roman Road journeys across Western Turkey, that we had never draw up any sort of agreement, and it seemed likely that this latest journey would give us more than enough photographs for a book. Fortunately the last round of coffee came on paper-napkins, so my experience as a businessman was put to work. The napkin, now bearing seven simple clauses marked up in a red felt pen, was signed. And then we were off.

One of the pleasures of travelling with Don is that he misses nothing. So although I had missed out on all of yesterday’s work on Roman fragments scattered across Istanbul, we could talk about the Golden Gate, the Valens aqueduct, the surviving sphendone of the hippodrome, as if we were both still there. The new Roman sculpture gallery had just opened, and so some good use had been made of that day. Don insists on developing his rolls of black and white film himself, and he was already sitting on weeks of work in his dark room. I hoped to keep him busy for many months.

Our trusted team was back in place. Ahmet was once again at the wheel with Monica at the mobile plotting the fine details of our journey. So we were whisked off to have lunch in the original home of Iskender Kebapci, just a stroll away from the Bursa’s bustling silk Khan. It was an effective immersion into the ordinary everyday magic of Turkey. The respect given to food, it’s preparation and the dignity of service. If I have learned anything from my travels with Don, it is to try and stop behaving like some guilt-laden liberal, always trying to be helpful with dishes. Don reminded me that waiting a table is a proper job and you are just ‘mucking up a man’s work’. The Khan bustled with equal quantities of trade and chatter, while the mosque interior has just been restored, so painted baroque archways worthy of a Portugese palace stand check by jowl with enormous brush strokes of vigorous Kufic calligraphy, calling out from Arabia.

Aizanoi is equidistant from Usak and Kutahaya, and though we had passed this way before, it is not on the way to anywhere, so this time we gave it the dignity of being our first mission. Aizonai has one incredible building, an almost intact temple of Zeus still standing on its high podium, which drew us like a magnet across the back roads of Western Anatolia. It is near perfect, in that time had been good to it, wrapping it up as a medieval fort, so that has neither been pillaged as a quarry, or entirely reassembled by archaeologists. It is also exactly the right period for us, built somewhere between the reigns of the Emperor Domitian and Hadrian, a living expression of the golden age of the Roman Empire, where even a tribal capital such as Aizonai (living off the export of grain and horses) could afford to build big and bold. You can descend into the bowels of the temple, a barrel-vaulted cellar, for the vaults were customarily used as place of safety to deposit precious documents, such as wills and manumission. Despite the severity of the ionic columns, a sense of its old colourful flamboyance is retained by the discovery of one of the acroteria that one crowned the pediment. I also loved the provincial sense of self, revealed in all the tombstones (recovered from distant cemeteries) that now form a sculptural hedgerow. It is not highly sophisticated sculpture, but somehow seems more revealing of the actual tones of belief, because of the solidity of faces and form.

There is a splendid cascade of marble seating in the Roman theatre, rippling from the after-effects of an earthquake. Unusually this theatre was approached down the spine of the cities stadium, but this pair of interlinked urban monuments were in a continuous stage of expansion and adornment throughout the 1st, 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D. We were just looking at the architectural manifestations of a continuous pattern of agriculture and settlement that here reaches back to 2,500 BC. While the name of the local village, Cavdarhisar, connects us with a Turkic tribe (in the service of the Seljuks) that settled here in the 13th-century and left small graffiti-like sketches of mounted warriors, puckered on the walls of the temple.

But despite being drawn to Aizonai by its temple of Zeus, what we really fell in love with, was the old commercial quarter alongside the river banks: broken by the punctuation marks of minarets, poplars and ionic columns. Old wooden farm-houses perched on the remnants of a Roman embankment that had once framed the Penkalas/Kocacay riverbed where two (of the five Roman bridges) have always remained in use, and another one was being repaired. The simple dignity of these bridges, a succession of five spans of different widths, put us in mind of the bridges built by such Ottoman architects such as Sinan. The road-stones had been scoured by the wheels of thousands of years of farm carts, some of whom we saw that evening, loaded up with fresh hay that had been gathered in by the whole family, perched with forks on these summits. An inscription records the name of one local bridge donor (who also reappears in the list of benefactors for the stadium) while another stone told us that what “Bridge One” had been formally opened in September 157 A.D. A handsome tholos (a circular building) within the old market square stood the other side of the road from a mosque, recording an anti-inflationary price edict from the time of Diolcetian. Like all such proclamations, the difference between what the state labels, and what the market will accept, may have been different, but the value comparisons are always fascinating. A horse is worth three slaves, while two donkeys can be traded for one strong slave.

We could not tear ourselves away from the raking lateral light of the dusk on these enduringly useful monuments, but as we left, the silhouettes of the surrounding hills grew in strength, and we began to realise how much Aizonai is framed within a well-watered valley. As we travelled east, into ancient Phyrgia, the air grew colder and crisper, and the land seem ever more denuded, but now and then eroded into magnificent pinnacles. The simple but very welcoming hotel we stayed in that night, Frigya Organik Koy Evi, stood in the lee of just such a geological escarpment. It had also once served as a frontline. As we tucked into our supper that night (huddling close to the stove) we heard how four hundred and fifty young men had died (about 4km to our east) trying to oppose the advance of the Greek army. The Greeks camped in this valley for a whole year, before this line was broken by the Koca Tepe counter attacks over the summer of 1922. In the morning, over a splendid open-air breakfast (so good that it had attracted a Turkish film crew) we were shown old cartridge cases and heard more snippets of living history from those who had heard it from the lips of their grandfathers.

Later that morning we walked the streets of the old quarter of Afyonkarahisar until we tracked down the Seljuk mosque. The prayer hall is upheld by a forest of forty soaring wooden columns, each holding an attenuated capital formed from muqarna arches. We could pick out traces of red paint on the great beams and cross bars of the flat roof with flowers framed against dark blue on the side panels. It was at one with what I have seen in Turkic Central Asia but yet also felt in harmony with the ionic columns that we had seen yesterday around the temple of Zeus.

Our journey for the rest of the day, was due west. On previous journeys, we had stopped at such ancient cities, as Aphrodisas, Laodikea and Pammukale, which we could now see in their proper geographical perspective. They stood on a climatic frontier, between the great grassland plateaux of Anatolia and the richer Mediterranean fauna of the Menderes valley, filled with orchards of olives, figs and vines.

The ancient city of Priene, scented by pine trees and framed by a great limestone cliff face is emphatically part of this Mediterranean world. Though a near neighbour of Ephesus, it attracts no crowds, indeed after a century of labour even the archaeologists seem to have moved on. It is a romantic and beautiful place formed by a series of terraces, and the ancient city is comparatively easy to visualise from the evidence of the ruins, with a single main street cutting through the Agora (main square) and reaching out to the two principal gates. The city is still protected by walls (draped over the mountainside) that were raised in the 4th century B.C. But we had come to see the great temple of Athena Polias, which though initiated by Alexander the Great, was only completed under the Roman Emperor Augustus. For the ancient temples were like medieval cathedrals in that they continually evolved, and where construction and fund-raising (by gifts or tithes) can be seen as a form of worship. So when the eleven columns on each long side, and the six on the shorter faces of the temple sanctuary, were completed, it was time to flute them and further ornament the bases or capitals. A new free-standing altar would be constructed to the east, then a century later, a Propylon (a formal gatehouse splendid with arches and columns) was added to the complex. Priene also has an intriguing Heroon (a hero shrine) which was placed by the Romans within the walls in the 1st century AD (which was unusual) and the archaeologists have also discovered a 5th century basilica, and a house that was made into a synagogue between 4th-7th century AD.

We stayed nearby, in the charming but also efficiently run Pansiyon Puli, within an old fishing village on the edge of a national park, from where we were whisked off to the terrace of a fish-restaurant taverna which had magnificent views over the Delta and the isle of Samos. The marshland, the shallow waters, the midges feeding the birdlife possibly mean that this portion of the Turkish coast may remain undeveloped, inshallah.

Miletus is a confusing site. It is what London will look like when it lies in ruins and drowned in river mud. It is a difficult ruin to fall in love with, however obsessed you are with this Venice of the ancient world when it was a peninsular surrounded by sea and was adorned by half a dozen harbours and ancient sanctuaries. Ancient Miletus nurtured a whole school of usefully materialistic philosophers and was the motherhouse from which ninety daughter colonies were established. In its heyday Miletus was the greatest coastal city of western Anatolia, but it was totally flattened in 494 BC, having led the failed Ionian revolt against the Persian Empire. Virtually everything that has been so painstakingly excavated over the last 130 years is from the much later Roman period, when the city revived as a commercial centre but remained in the shadow of Ephesus’s pre-eminence.

With the single exception of the magnificent Roman theatre which is dug into the only prominent hill, Miletus is flat. As a basic rule of thumb where you now find water, you are looking at a flooded excavation site, whilst when you look over dry, well-worked farmland you are looking over what was once the sea – in ancient times. But it is fun to explore, for I have never met another tourist here, but often stumbled on frogs, snakes, egrets, terrapins, lizards, tethered cows and locals harvesting wild asparagus or salep root. And you will find little mosques near ancient shrines, Turkish Hammams right beside Roman Baths, and a bewildering profusion of classical piazza framed by the remains of handsome ionic collonades. After the theatre, the most striking single edifice is the marble mosque built by Ilyas Bey, the Mentese Emir in 1404. He was celebrating the defeat of Bayezid I (the Ottoman Sultan) by Tamburlane.

The shrine of Apollo Delphinion (Apollo of the Dolphins) is low and usually flooded but it is worth identifying (look for the foundations of a circular structure within what was once an enclosed courtyard - marked out by the stumps of columns). Though not much to look at now, it has some numinous fascination, for it preserved some elements of Miletus’s ancient Minoan culture. For this shrine was presided over by the Molpoi, “the singers and dancers’ who also acted as a governing elite within the city. So the next time you look at a Minoan fresco, be aware that what looks like a fit circus acrobat/ bull-vaulter, may also be a magistrate. The Molpoi presided over the cities three day long spring festival, the Delphinion, where the next generation would be folded into the community rituals through feasts, sacred drama, communal drinks and hymns. The festival culminated in a four day long sacred procession, ‘marching the broad road’ (sometimes at night by torchlight) singing paeons of praise, pouring libations to the gods and more drinking. There were seven ritual halting places: one sacred to Hekate, one to Dynamis, another to the nymphs and one to Hermes before reaching they reached the altars of Apollo (Philesis – the affectionate protector, depicted as a naked youth) and Keriates (a horned deity) before they reached the holy sanctuary of Didyma. Every fourth year, the shrine of Apollo at Didymas went international, hosting competitive games (music, atheletics, wrestling and a torch relay race) which attracted rival cities and prestigious foreign guests.

We were so overwhelmed by the strong midday light over Miletus that we relaxed our eyes with a long lunch, a swim and a siesta, before we were ready to follow in the footsteps of this sacred procession.

I adore the temple of Didyma, but I have learned not to praise it too much in advance, for you need to discover it slowly. At a first glance it can look a disapointing place, sunk in a depression and surrounded by a village adorned with cafes and carpet shops. All the glory of Didyma is in the detail, the astonishing fine and vigorous carving with which every detail of the exterior of the old temple was given, be it a column base, or a distant capital. It also takes time to understand the grandeur of its scale, for the temple was originally intended to be surrounded by a forest of 122 massive columns (only 72 of which were ever finished) and all this incredible external grandeur was in effect just an outer wall, a rectangular shoe-box, which framed a place of ancient holiness, left open to the sky. Twenty-five metre high walls enclosed a simple well, a circular altar and a laurel tree. This was the mystical sanctuary, one of the great centres of prophecy, which attracted the private worship of Emperors, generals and Kings, but also was the destination for the annual public procession from Miletus. These local pilgrims were greeted by a chorus of female seers (attached to the shrine) who revealed news of the future in hexameters (six lines) of cryptic verse.

The sanctuary is very old, existing here from at least the 8th century BC. Like the city of Miletus, the shrine had been flattened in 494 by the Persians after their suppression of the Ionian revolt. The sacred spring ran dry during the 150 years of Persian rule, but flowed again when liberated by Alexander the Great, after which the oracle could once again return. The presiding priestess bathed her feet in the sacred spring and inhaled its vapours, having already prepared herself through fasting and spiritual purifications. A supplicant had to go through a different process of purification, including the sacrifice of a goat, which allowed the priests to determine if the deity was present, and if the petitioner was welcome, after which a consultation of the oracle could proceed. In the period of the Roman Empire, the role of high priest was fulfilled for one year at a time by a high-ranking citizen of Miletus. There had been an ancient dynasty of high priests, the Branchidaea, but they had disgraced themselves by co-operating with the Persian Empire, and later sought sanctuary from Greek vengeance by settling in distant Sogdiana. Where Alexander the Great found them and destroyed them. Seleucus (founder of the Seleucid Hellenistic dynasty after the death of Alexander) was able to return the original cult statue to the shrine, which had been taken by the Persians to Ekbatana as a symbol of their victory. The temple grew to become the third greatest sanctuary along the Ionian shore, after Artemis at Ephesus and Hera on Samos. Work, to enrich and embellish the shrine continued throughout the Roman Empire, until it was closed down by order of the Emperor Theodosios in 385 AD.

That evening we journeyed to the Hellenistic city of Heracleia under Latmus. Heracleia overlooks Lake Bafa and is itself commanded by the magnificent granite peaks (and secret, very ancient shrines) of the holy mountain of Latmos. Heracleia is a wonderful place, but the cameras were off duty, for there is little evidence of occupation in the Roman period though later it attracted Christian hermits and Orthodox monasteries. Heracleia was raised in the 4th century BC, probably as a military base, at a time when the lake had access to the sea. We stayed in some cheap rooms kept by a taverna-campsite, which has a bar where local mountain guides can plot routes up into the complex geology of the hills. I swam out to an island draped with ruined walls. We also found the ruined temple associated with Endymion, the handsome shepherd beloved by the Moon. None of us could remember, if Endymion slept through the day, in order to prepare himself for his nights with the goddess Selene, or whether he had been put into a lifelong trance and enjoyed no more than a succession of beautiful dreams. Selene gave birth to a succession of fifty daughters. Don told us how a gigolo had confessed to him that it was a matter of professional pride to ‘always allow the woman to go to sleep first.”

I had a clear recollection of the Roman temple of Zeus Lepsynos at Euromos, all-forlorn, wistful and neglected, with sixteen corinthian columns standing amongst a ruin field flecked with clumps of cyclamen. But this was not our happiest morning, for a lot had changed over the last twenty years (all for the good in terms of conservation and easy access) and instead of cyclamen we found an archaeological team, complete with cranes and scaffolding, busy at work restoring the shrine. But cult statues have been found and they also pointed out to us some inscriptions on columns, a gift of Menekrates, a physician while others were at the expense of another local magistrate, Leon Quintus. The recent work has also revealed some of the shape of this Carian city which includes a most beautiful small Roman theatre, all wistful and neglected surrounded by a wild orchard of olive trees.

The surviving Roman arch in the town of Milas (Mylasa) was just as I had last left it, with a bycyclist thoughtfully passing beneath its vaults to show that it still remained in active use these last two thousand years. We stopped and had a coffee beside a patch of ancient wall and chatted to some locals. They pointed us uphill, to a single, standing column (favoured by storks) which stands in the centre of an old area of Ottoman mansions. This has recently been found to stand over the ruins of a vast, monumental mausoleum belonging to the Hecatomids, the local Carian dynasty of viceroy-like governors who ruled this region during the Persian Empire. It is an incredible discovery, as this looks like it is blueprint for the great mausoleum that they would build at Hallicarnassus (one of the seven wonders of the ancient world).

Greatly excited by this new find, we headed inland. The city of Mughla stands removed from the Bodrum coast, complete with its own university, law courts and an old market quarter which has been preserved for the love of it, rather than as a tourist attraction. So on our way to find our way to a family run Kofte house, Cavusun Yeri, which Monica had heard about we stumbled on intriguing old Ottoman buildings. The kofte was had rolled before our eyes and although they loyally conserve a traditional local recipe, they also make no fuss over it. They sent us off to take our coffee in an old caravanserai.

We all liked our midday stop in Mugla which permitted us to reach the Roman ruins at Patara in the gradually ripening light of late afternoon. The last time I walked these ruins was at dawn, twenty-six years ago with an infant daughter strapped to my back. The conservation work that has since been achieved is prodigious, for the Roman theatre was then buried up to its neck in a windblown dune of beach sand and guarded by thorn trees. The nearby Bouleterion, the old senate house of the city, which has been restored at the order of the Turkish Parliament. I was delighted to observe that homegrown pride, not some foreign institute, had honoured the conciliar traditions of ancient Lycia. The Lycian league had been identified by Montesquieu in his The Spirit of the Laws as a role model of good governance. The walls of the Bouleterion had been turned into a fortress in the dark ages, which enabled the Turkish restoration project to discover a series of statue bases. These had originally supported honorific statues of the provincial elite during the Roman period and are now back on display. Claudius had both annexed the region but also decreed that Patara should be the Metropolis of the revived Lycian league. Thirty years later, under the reign of Nero, a great lighthouse was raised. This too, is currently being restored.

Visually, however, it was the wide harbour avenue (granite columns once supporting a colonnade of merchant-shops on one side, with marble on the other) that caught Don’s attention, for the excavations were flooded which produce a dazzling reflection. We also all delighted by the shadows of the gaunt ruins of the Hadrianic Baths and a palm shaded spring nearby which has been romantically linked with the Grove of Leto. Leto was the mother of Apollo and Artemis who was worshipped at the coastal sanctuary of Letoon. The Homeric Hymns record how she “cast her arms about a palm tree and kneeled on the soft meadow while the earth laughed for joy beneath then the child leaped forth to the light” – a description lovingly mirrored by that of the Virgin Mary in the Gospel of Pseudo-Mathew.

The triple archway of Patara looked curiously modern, sleak, thin and crisply Doric in the last rays of dusk, but there can be no doubt about its age. It has been dated to the year 100 AD when Mettius Modestus was governor of the province under Trajan. Thirty years later, Hadrian passed beneath this gate, in 131 A.D.

Jeremy Seal had advised Monica to try out the Valley View hotel in Patara which he has in the past used as a base to write his books. The genius of the place derives from a marriage of minds and culture, of English Anne-Louise and Turkish Muzaffer Otlu. The one instinctively knowing what a foreign customer needs, the other determined to show them were they have landed. Muzaffer was refreshingly proud of his nomadic ancestry, and the hotel garden has become a safe haven for many a rescued fragment of Yoruk history. After breakfast he showed us a grain store, a nest of beehives and a wagon with solid wooden wheels. The wagons, traditionally drawn by a pair of cattle, were a vital component of the Yoruk seasonal migration between different pastures, carrying hay, sacks of corn, salt and tents. Muzaffer was also articulate about the role of the wooden kiosk in rural life. It was a place set apart, raised off from the damp earth and snakes and scorpions. It was a place of peace, where a traveller was free to rest for one night, or for a hodja to set up a temporary school for a few weeks and recite the Koran and teach the movement of the stars. It was also a place of neutrality where marriage negotiations could take place between the different clans, as well as settle disputes over over-grazing or the maintenance of the wells. He also showed us how the distinctive shape of ancient Lycian tombs was based on the form of the elevated wooden grain stories that can still be found in the mountains. Even the protruding struts of the wooden beams were conserved by stone masons – in the same way that the triglyph of a Doric shrine rests on an ancient wooden prototype. Armed with all this knowledge we then ascended into the mountain valleys and could try and imagine the old complex tapestry of regional migrations, with the herds moving uphill as the summer progressed, then returning back to the coastal valleys in the winter. Having shed the lush coast we twisted our way through beautiful forested highland valleys, the summits obscured by dark, lowering weather. Then we pushed on up, above the line of pine forest to ascend into a vast upland plateau of broken stone, broken by vivid green pastures and mountain lakes patrolled by granite tors. It was a borderland that had once communicated with all the Anatolian kingdoms: Lycia, Caria, Lydia and Phrygia.

The ancient city of Kibyra had been the centre node of a league of four cities that dominated this frontier zone, formed from low hills of grey crumbling schist and high moorland supporting a maquis of shrubs but few trees. This unpromising environment made the discovery of a series of astonishingly intact classical buildings (all formed from a beautifully dressed golden pale limestone) all the more intense and suprising. They seemed to have sprouted out of this unforgiving heath: a virtually intact stadium, a theatre set back into a hill, a ritual tholos (a circular shrine) and a high street adorned with fountains. Most astonishing of all was the Odeon under whose arcades I sheltered during a thunderstorm. I watched as the rain brought the colours of the circular marble floor of the orchestra pit (a mosaic formed from slivers of stone) into life, so the face of medusa and her serpents glowed within an aura of ten rows of stylized feathers.

Kibyra was another perfect objective for our Roman Roads project, a highland town living of its wits (four languages had been spoken in its marketplace) rather than prospering from an opulent trade route. It was famous for producing durable, useful things: iron, leather and horses. Although annexed in 82 BC, the dates of all the visible buildings are very securely Roman, for an earthquake flattened the ancient city in 23 AD, after which the Emperor Tiberius decreed a five year tax holiday to enable rebuilding. So the great stadium that we had walked down could hold 12,000 spectators, the theatre could seat 8,000 and the Odeon could accomodate 3,600 under its roof. They all date from the golden centuries of the Pax Romana. For the city was struck by a second earthquake, in 417 AD, after which her surviving citizens migrated downhill to Golhisar.

Our chosen road twisted east from Kibyra, across the high plateau, passing great lakes and Neolithic tell mounds to reach Burdur, where a museum compound has been thoughtfully created around an old Ottoman library. The director gave us coffee up in his office, and we were charmed by his enthusiasm but also by the graceful way in which he honoured his old boss who had dropped round for a visit. They chuckled together at how they were always expanding, year after year, to make space for the treasures that were being discovered in their province. We were shown a stone relief ( a cartoon like strip) of gladiators in combat that had been found near the stadium at Kibyra. Our primary mission was to see for ourselves the magnificent hoard of classical statues that have been discovered at Sagalassos. This superb gallery now dominates the entire ground floor. But the director also took us up to the top floor to admire a very fine bronze statue which had been rescued by the Turkish police. It was once part of an extraordinary gallery of bronze sculptures buried within a Sebasteion (a hero shrine to the caesars) which stood at Boubon, up in the hills above Kibyra. A dozen other statues have disappeared into the American antiquities market during the 1960s. The headless Emperor Valerian was a magnificent relic to stumble upon. By chance the previous week I was looking over the plain where he had been defeated and captured by the Parthian Shah, Shapur, at the battle of Edessa, in 260 AD.

We spent the next three days in a warren of old Turkish houses in central Antalya that has been turned into an elegant family-run hotel, the Tuvana. It was the perfect base from which to walk out and explore the city. Such was the hold over our imagination (from our last Roman Road journey) that Don and I found ourselves returning twice to the outstanding collection of sculptures in the Antalya archaeological museum. As our eyes became more attuned to their find spots within the Anatolian landscape, they developed an additional fascination.

For the young director of Antalya antiquities, Candemir Zoroglu, explained to us the curious journeys that antique statues could make. He had been instrumental in recovering the famous statue of Heracles from the USA as a piece of stolen art. But he also told us how statues of the gods came out of their temples (or they would be smashed up by christian mobs) but could yet survive as art, if they are put on show in the sculpture gallery of a Bath House, or ornament a garden in a private house, or become a good luck symbol stuck on the walls of a city gate. Candemir also sharpened our eyes about the symbolism of an imperial breast plate. We learned to spot the symbol of Zeus’s thunderbolts on shoulder straps as well as the vine-leaf of Dionyisus. How the central medallion of the winged Medusa head, protecting the Emperor could sometimes be repeated by a pair of griffins flanking an altar of holy fire (from the Persian East). He was also articulate about the multiple symbolism of the ubiquitous knot of Hercules, on the sash like belt around an imperial waist. This was associated with both fertility and fecundity and marriage, but also with an unbreakable contract, between the leader and his people. The lower edge of the breastplate (the carved marble representing a leather fringe studded with gilded bronze medallions) might carry the totemic symbols of the Emperor’s favourite legions, which could also cross over with auspicious astrology: so thus a Bull, the head Capricorn, or Pegasus and a panther. Over dinner one evening, we swopped stories about Professor Ian Jenkins of the British Museum, O.B.E (1953-2020) who died during covid. I learned that Ian’s understanding of antique sculpture had been deepened by working in a stone mason’s yard as a student over the long summer holidays, and that although Parkinson’s disease would put a halt to his work as an archaeologist, it perhaps redirected his energies into becoming such an articulate and inspirational teacher.

The triple-arched gate of Hadrian was an easy walk from our hotel, so we had time to experiment with different lights, that raked its coffered vaults and Corinthian columns. It also commemorates the visit of Hadrian to Antalya in 130 AD and is an extraordinary survival, albeit it now stepped down below the level of the surrounding pavement. It was inserted into the existing 2nd-century BC walls that had been built by Attalus II (160-139 BC) when he was establishing a naval base for the Kingdom of Pergamon, a toe-hold on the southern shore of the Taurus mountains. It was named Attaleia in his honour which has survived as modern Antalya. We stumbled upon all sorts of odd fragments of walls and towers, old houses and historic mosques that remain within the old city overlooked by the famous brick minaret of the Seljuks, formed from an elegant cluster of fluted columns. I also found three medresse and a Mevlevi tekke that have all been handsomely restored and put to appropriate new uses.

At the end of our trip Don went west for two days to photograph Olympos, reinforced by the arrival of his beautiful young wife. One morning I explored the ruined acropolis of Silyium, a wonderfully wild and neglected site, fortified by man and nature and still dominated by Hellenistic towers. The spring still ran from its ancient cleft and the place was animated by the tinkling sound of bells from invisible goat herds working their way through the thick undergrowth.

We all explored Aspendos together, after stumbling on a splendid roadside restaurant, whose terrace overlooked the swift moving waters of the Koprüçay. Like a conjuror with his cape, I was greatly looking forward to unveiling the splendour of the Roman theatre at Aspendos – arguably the best preserved such structure in the entire Roman Empire. It is near perfect, all forty rows of marble seats in place, neatly subdivided, like a sliced orange into segments by ten staircases. What is especially dazzling about the place, is that the upper promenade gallery survives, as does the full height of stage-backdrop, ornamented with two flights of engaged columns, and these walls are indented with niches that once held a whole pantheon of deities (which includes just one surviving statue of an effeminate looking Dionysus – locally known as Bal-Kiz/Belkis (the honey girl/the Queen of Sheba). The theatre was built by two brothers as a gift to their fellow citizens during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, and nothing prepares you for the sense of utter containment. It is a primed sound box, which remembers an uncanny sense of a well-ordered society, funnelled into precisely regimented seating, with the landowning elite of magistrates in the front, behind which stretched seats for the other 15,000 citizens. Like that other great survivor, the Roman theatre in Syrian Bosra, it had been turned into a medieval palace.

Don took one look at the ugly modern stage, and some lights, mikes and wiring that had been put into place for a live performance, and suggested we climb the acropolis hill to catch a view of the aqueduct at dusk. This turned out to be a splendid addition to our day, for the hill was empty of visitors and full of magnificent brooding ruins (from the basilica law courts, agora, temple of Zeus and bouleterion/senate house) made from the rough, abrasive, local pudding stone, which gave them a brutalist majesty.

He was right, the two surviving sections of the aqueduct (both just under a kilometre in length) are one of the wonders of the Roman world, marching across marshland, riverbanks and hills, to bring fresh spring water to the city just beside its north gate. They are also angled, which gave wonderful subtly to their forms, and in something of the manner of a suspension bridge, are now and then upheld by higher towers – which we later found out helped reduce the water pressure, so that it didn’t blow apart the piping. So fabulous was this vista that we hunted down a second section, some three kilometres to the north of the ruins.

As darkness descended, Don found that he had shot the last round of film. He was now faced with months of hard craft, developing photographs over the next three months of the English summer. He was ‘dumb-founded’ by what we had stumbled upon. Once again, the reality of what we stumbled across, far exceeded anything that a guide or photograph book could possibly prepare us for. It also became abundantly clear how obscure, poor, dark and dirty Britannia must have seemed to anyone who had any experience of life in Anatolia during the Roman Empire. Any single city that we had seen in any of our three Roman Road trips across Western Turkey, held more elegance and enchantment than all the surviving elements of Roman Britain thrown together. We also learned that although we were a pair of British travellers who revered our classical past, it was the Turks, in such everyday habits as bathing, housing and eating, who were part of a continuous living tradition with this ancient world. Any student wishing to understand the classical world, would do better by having a bath in an Ottoman Hammam, or by watching the arrival of all those tempting small platters of a Turkish meyhane, than by attending university lectures. While the cumulative energy of all those Roman bridges, embankments, fountains, gates, walls, tombs and columns that we had discovered, still standing in the soil of Turkey, and still being used where they had first been placed two thousand years ago, told a very powerful story. If the European Union is any way inspired by the achievements and frontiers of the old Roman Empire, it seemed marvellously absurd to have excluded the glories of Anatolia.

Yet we also agreed that it would be the very simplest things that would be the most enduring. Sipping coffee in the back streets of a provincial town, in the shadow of an ancient mosque, at places such as Afyon and Milas. Looking at the hands of men still associated with the soil, which brought back memories of Don’s youth in Somerset, an evacuated refugee from the London blitz, learning for the first time about the life a farmer.

Before dinner that night I spread open a map of Turkey, so that we could both retrace our various journeys, and imagine the many wonders that we had not yet examined.

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