Mugla, Turkey
8-8-13
I could use some rest. Nearly half the three hundred or so kilometers I drove today were logged on ill-maintained country roads and livened by hairpin turns and close encounters with livestock. My tires are caked with the cow manure of a dozen cobblestone streets, and my windows darkened with as many varieties of dust. Today is the first of the three days of Bayram, the celebration which ends Ramadan. Nobody works during this holiday – and so I had large audiences in every village as I hit hidden speedbumps and potholes.
My site visits were more satisfying, but also more tiring. Though one eventually grows accustomed to the heat, it is hardly pleasant to clamber around unshaded ruins in hundred degree temperatures for more than an hour or so. I begin to see the wisdom of taking a siesta in this climate.
Yet despite all the nerve-racking driving and enervating heat, I am glad I took the trouble to see Alinda and Alabanda. Like Alexandria Troas and Cyzicus, these are entirely untouristed sites; I saw only locals today. The downside, of course, is that there is no direction: it is entirely up to you to first find the ruins, and then to make sense of them.
Alinda, set on two rocky hills above the town of Karpuzlu, was neither easy to find nor simple to interpret. I could see the ancient walls from the streets of the town, but there seemed no way to reach them. Finally stumbling upon a tiny sign pointing up an alley too narrow for my car, I parked in the main square, walked up a switchback lined by straggling cottages and farmyards, and finally found myself directly beneath the ancient city’s market hall.
The superstructure of this remarkable building is still intact. Two floors of shops, built into the side of a hill, once supported a granite colonnade; and though some of the columns are gone, the building’s layout is clear. Alinda was never a city of more than perhaps ten thousand, and a place like this, capable of housing several dozen merchants at once, was probably only filled on special market days. The agora and colonnades which once held their stalls have vanished along with the whole of the lower city, plundered for stone by centuries of villagers. The market hall, spared because of the size of its building blocks, now stands alone in a field of shapeless ruins.
The theater of Alinda, well-preserved but overgrown with olive trees, proved a wonderful place to eat lunch. As I sat in the shade, I could see a wide panorama of fields and distant hills where the ancient stage building had fallen away. In the village below, drums were beating at Bayram celebrations; but there was no noise in the theater save the chirp of cicadas, high-pitched in the noontime heat.
Atop the citadel (more than five hundred feet above the village), I took a few pictures of a two-story watchtower in Hellenistic ashlar masonry. Then I began my descent, pausing to look hungrily at the large necropolis spread along the hill’s southern slope. As at Colossae, the dead of Alinda were buried in rock-cut niches covered with close-fitting lids. A few of the wealthiest families constructed large mausolea, whose gray roofs loomed among the surrounding olive groves. I itched to explore that necropolis, but did not linger.
Alabanda was supposed to be easy to reach. Only twenty miles from Alinda as the crow flies, my guidebook placed the site “near the main highway on a passable road” – if not promising, these directions at least seemed manageable. In the event, it took nearly two hours to find Alabanda. No signs, on the highway or elsewhere, pointed towards the site; neither it nor Araphisar (the modern village) were in the GPS database; and none of the people I asked had ever even heard of it. I finally found it only after I discovered that Araphisar had changed its name to Doganyurt; having entered this in my GPS, a succession of bumpy roads soon brought me to the one-street farming village that occupies the center of ancient Alabanda.
Though a much larger and more substantial place than Alinda, Alabanda is less well preserved. Some rather haphazard digging in recent years has uncovered much of the theater and one end of the Agora, but the great majority of the site remains unexplored. The relatively intact bouleuterion is marked out for excavation – a chalk grid has been drawn among the fallen stones – but there seem to be no plans to disturb the ruin-dotted fields on either side.
From the bouleuterion, I drove my car along the village’s single gravel road towards the ancient acropolis, stopping to examine ruins along the way. The temple of Apollo, once the religious center of the district, has been reduced to an incomprehensible mass of rubble. The neighboring farmhouses and pasture walls are built entirely of stone plundered from the ruins. A nearby Roman bath, whose walls still stand to the height of fifteen feet, is being used as a cow pen.
Bumping over short stretches of exposed ancient pavement, I stopped at the large theater, excavated and partially restored by a team from the local university. Though most of the marble seating has long since been quarried away, the retaining walls that once supported the cavea still stand to their full height, and substantial remains of the lowest rows and stage building have been exposed. From the theater, I had a fair view over the ancient city. The Hellenistic walls, still preserved atop the citadel, descended brokenly on both sides towards the plain, where stone-robbing had reduced them to a shapeless mound. The scanty remains of a temple on the adjoining slope were the only recognizable ruins. Elsewhere within the vast area enclosed by the walls, only crooked doorposts, scattered throughout the modern village and the brown pastures beyond, attested to the existence of the ancient city.
I rattled back down the single road and drove a short distance outside the ancient walls, in hopes of finding the necropolis. I found it easily enough, but was dismayed to discover that local farmers had rooted up hundreds of sarcophagi for fencing material. The grandest of the ancient mausoleums stood in the middle of one of these makeshift yards, offering scanty shade to a few bored-looking cows. Since dense scrub covers the rest of the necropolis, I saw little use in exploring further.