On the Shores of the Mediterranean by Eric Newby

Author:Eric Newby [Eric Newby]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780007508198
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1984-08-23T16:00:00+00:00

From Alexandria Troas we continued southwards along the Aegean shores of the Mediterranean. Great tracts of the coast of Turkey between the Dardanelles and Antalya on the southern Mediterranean coast are in much the same condition as the French and Italian Rivieras must have been before the coming of the railway and the Grand Hotel, a state of affairs that will not endure much longer now that a newly-completed coast road makes it possible to drive uninterruptedly all the way along it to Antakya (Antioch) near the Syrian border.

Here, in early spring, we had the feeling that what we saw was for our pleasure alone. There were no guides to expound and interpret or shoo us back on board a coach so that we could get on to the next place, because at this season there were no coaches. Even the custodians, that is if there were any, had only recently emerged from winter torpor and went home before sunset, leaving us to contemplate their mostly unlockable ruins in company with the bats and owls. Visiting the ruins, which are almost too abundant, time ceased to have any meaning.

After the difficulties we had experienced looking down into the various levels of Troy from Troy I to VIIA we ceased to care what epoch any particular remain dated from. Faced with Assos, for example, a ruined city on the southern shores of the Troad, overlooking Lesbos to the south of it, it was impossible to know what one was looking at. Assos is believed to be Padasos, a city founded during the Trojan Wars and sacked by Achilles. In 1000 BC it was colonized by Aeolians from Lesbos – who themselves came from Boeotia in central Greece – and was successively occupied or dominated by Lydians, Persians, Greeks, Persians again – Alexander of Macedon delivered it – Romans, Byzantines, Muslims, Crusaders, Muslims again.

The acropolis is crowned with the ruins of a Greek temple and an Ottoman mosque which has a gateway that once formed part of a Byzantine church which was itself constructed with bits of a Greek temple. The city is surrounded by medieval curtain walls and towers built with stones originally hewn by Greeks, some of which resemble huge bolsters. Roman tomb chests lie around in picturesque disorder. It was visited by St Paul and St Luke and the people became Christians. Yet according to the author of the locally published guide book, ‘during its long existence it never played an important political role in history’. In such circumstances perhaps the visitor may be excused for satisfying what Rose Macaulay described as Ruinenlust by enjoying them simply as a highly romantic spectacle.

In search of ruins on these Aegean and Mediterranean shores, many of them far more ruinous and inaccessible than Assos, we fought our way through jungles of vegetation, thickets of thorn and laurel, dense groves of evergreen oaks and, more pleasurably, wandered among endless beds of pink oleanders which, as the weather grew warmer as we moved south,

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