7-21-13. Erdek, Turkey
The ride to Erdek, a resort town some four hours by bus from Bursa, only became interesting after Bandirma, when the road came at last into sight of the sea. A few miles down the highway, I caught sight of a hilly and densely forested peninsula, bound to the mainland by a ribbon of marsh. This was the site of Cyzicus, one of the great cities of the Roman east.
The three great harbors of Roman Cyzicus received the trade of Europe and Asia; her squares and streets were thronged with visitors, some come merely to do business, others to admire the vast Temple of Zeus-Hadrian. Today, however, the site of the city is nearly desolate, with only a few clusters of houses standing among the olive groves and patches of scrub that cover the ruins.
Before I could inspect these remains, I had to escape from Erdek, the faded seaside resort where my bus left me. The “cab” driver who was supposed to take me to my hotel turned out to be a tout for a rival establishment; ignoring or misunderstanding my protests, he drove me to his hotel, brought me to the manager, and tried to bring my bags upstairs. Eventually, I convinced him to bring me to the right hotel, which he did will bad grace, charging me 10 lire for his services. The desk manager at my actual hotel, though wholly ignorant of English, was much more helpful, and – once I finally managed to communicate that I wanted to see Cyzicus – was kind enough to call a cab driver who could take me there. Neither she nor Mehmet (my cab driver, a pleasant older gentleman) had ever encountered someone who wanted to visit the ruins, and Mehmet had to avail himself of my handmade map at several points along the way, twice stopping to ask local farmers whether the “antik kenti” was nearby.
The ruins of the great Temple of Hadrian were closest to the main road, so Mehmet drove there first. The remains are more evocative than attractive; little remains but the scrub-covered mound that covers the temple’s substructures. The five corridors that run beneath this tangle are too chocked with rubble to explore, and the mound itself is rendered inaccessible by thorns. Yet the sheer size is impressive – this building was roughly three times the size of the Temple of Zeus at Aezani – and enough fragments of the original decoration remain to give some sense of its original effect. A team of Turkish archaeologists has been at work here for the past few years, and has managed to clear the rubble away from one side of the platform. In doing so, they have uncovered numerous pieces of marble ornament. These lie where they were found – column drums eight feet in diameter, capitals as tall as a man – and more lie buried in every direction. Surveying the pieces, I felt rather like a paleontologist trying to reconstruct some lumbering sauropod from a single tooth.
Similarly evocative were the ruins of the amphitheater, poised over a densely wooded valley amid a sea of olive groves. After Mehmet decided that his car couldn’t make it down the steep gravel paths leading toward the ruin, he walked down with me to where four hulks of masonry, once supports for the arena’s seating, loomed out of the trees. The tallest of these loomed nearly sixty feet over a trickling creek, which is through to have once supplied the water for naval spectacles. Although the arena itself was too thick with brush to explore at any length, the old stadium was still apparent as a wide concavity in the hillside, lined with broken masses of masonry.
After we left the site and began to drive further uphill, I asked Mehmet to stop the cab at a sharp turn in the road, from which I could survey the whole site of Cyzicus. The panorama, a mirror image of my view from the bus, was spectacular; but the lineaments of the ruined city were as confusing from above as they had been at the ground level. The shape of the amphitheater was clear, as was a deep hollow in the hillside that could only have housed a theater. Little else protruded from the olive trees and scrub: a jagged line of walls on the eastern side, along with what might have been the tower of an aqueduct, represented the sum total of what I could see from above. Much of the rest has been destroyed, eroded to nothing by the patient depredations of the weather and stone-hungry villagers. Most, however, simply lies buried. As I walked through the olive groves beside the amphitheater, I was struck by how many of the stones heaped into boundary fences by the local farmers were marble, the shivered remains of some tomb or monument. Cyzicus will never be excavated, or at least not in any but a piecemeal fashion. One wonders how much we are missing.
After leaving the amphitheater, Mehmet insisted that a man like me, so interested in the local ruins, would surely want to see the old monastery. Despite the fact that I was unaware any such building existed, I agreed; and after a nearly half-hour ride towards the head of the peninsula, we arrived among oak groves at the bottom of a deeply shadowed valley. There, as Mehmet had said, were the remains of a large monastery complex, standing in some places up to the third story. I could see at a glance, however, that these ruins were not ancient. I think it unlikely, in fact, that they are much more than a hundred years old. They tell a story repeated again and again in the cities of Turkey’s western coast. Before the population exchange of 1922, substantial Greek communities, often mixed with or set alongside their Turkish counterparts, lined many of the districts on the seaboard. These communities, organized into bishoprics under the loose supervision of the patriarch in Constantinople, supported a number of monasteries. The most famous were and are on Mount Athos in Greece; but others were scattered wherever Greeks lived in sufficient numbers. The monastery near Cyzicus was doubtless one of these. Abandoned ninety years ago (and doubtless burned shortly thereafter), it stands (like the ruins of the dynamited church in Iznik) as a sad memorial to the consequences of extreme nationalism.
I paid Mehmet his hard-earned fare and retired to my hotel, rounding out the evening with a stroll along the beach. Though I doubt I will ever return to Erdek, my little excursion here underscores the fact that even a place like this, just fifteen minutes from the main Bandirma-Canakkale highway, can be at once virtually untouristed and thoroughly worth seeing.