7/19 – 7/20/13. Kutahya, Turkey
My guidebook could find no better adjectives for Kutahya than “provincial” and “dusty” –and both, it must be said, seem to be borne out in truth. In the center of the main square, where the blanket-hung door of the great mosque (Ulu Cami) faces a row of decaying Ottoman houses, a plastic dervish whirls to the tune of an ageing battery, lashed by a gritty wind from the surrounding hills. I am very far from the cool sophistication of Istanbul.
Even Bursa seems distant from this place. In every direction, the prevailing color is brown. Besides a few rocky hills dotted with pines, the landscape is treeless, a sullen sea of golden hills. This is Phrygia, a region lightly populated and seldom visited even in antiquity. Far removed from the great and bustling cities of the coast, the inhabitants of this region had little use for the trappings of Greco-Roman civilization. The figures on their tombs, shown with lidded eyes and elongated hands, represented something older than the classical ideal. Though the inhabitants of modern Kutahya are not quite so flagrantly isolationist, this is a conservative place, the Turkish equivalent of a small Midwestern city. Most of the women are veiled, few restaurants open before sundown, and tourists seem absolutely unknown.
People come to Kutahya primarily to use it as a staging point for more interesting places. I myself would never have come here were the Roman ruins at Aezani not an easy hour’s drive away. But I managed to spend a very full four hours yesterday exploring this city, and had no reason to regret the experience afterward. Using a homemade map, I found the aforementioned Ulu Cami at the end of a long street of crumbling Ottoman houses. The wood-and-stucco half-timber buildings I saw in Bursa, their second stories projected over the street on wooden brackets, are everywhere here, though often in sadly ruinous condition. Where Bursa’s older neighborhoods were quaintly lived-in, these are actually dilapidated.
The Ulu Cami itself, by contrast, wears its seven centuries well, and exudes a sort of simple elegance in its complete lack of ornament. The same might be said of the neighboring archaeological museum, whose rather meager collection consists almost entirely of artifacts from Aezani. The centerpiece is a large marble sarcophagus depicting the battle of the Greeks and the Amazons. Its back half was, unfortunately, shattered by the looters who discovered it some twenty years ago outside Aezani – but I know enough mythology to assure you that the Amazons lost.
After a pleasant hour spend wandering those winding streets of crumbling Ottoman houses, I came upon a well-preserved example, which now serves as a memorial to the great Hungarian revolutionary Louis Kossuth. Banished from his native land for fomenting insurrection against Austrian oppression, Kossuth was welcomed by the Ottomans, and sent (for some reason) to live in Kutahya. The municipality has preserved the house as it was when he lived, thus allowing the curious visitor (moi) to admire its spacious design, neatly dressed in dark wood. The house was diverting (and, more importantly, free); but my real purpose in coming into the neighborhood was to climb past it, up ever more tortuous alleys, and onto the citadel.
Perched atop a hill some three hundred feet high, still guarded by dozens of crumbling Byzantine towers, the ancient citadel of Kutahya dominates the old city, rearing high above the slipping tiles roofs and peeling stucco of the houses at its base. Searching for a way to the top, I ascended to the highest line of streets, most nothing more than six- or eight-foot wide alleys, where children played under the watchful eyes of heavily-veiled ladies. I must have looked particularly perplexed, since one of these families, an old couple and their grandson, asked what I was looking for. I replied in my best Turkish: “that hill, I up want go” or something to that effect. They directed me to a narrow staircase, which soon became a winding dirt path straight up the face up the citadel. Climbing on my hands and knees, I finally made it to the top – and, as on the tower at Iznik, the view made the effort seem worthwhile. All of Kutahya lay spread out before me, the crazy lanes and gray minarets of the old quarter seemingly just beneath my feet. To my right, a steep hill flung up bone-white spurs of clay and shale among thickets of pine; and all around, brown-burnt grass streamed before a fresh breeze. After this prospect, the rest of the citadel was rather underwhelming.
To my chagrin, I discovered that the other side of the hill was graced with a newly-paved road leading into the city, and that its peak was topped, of all things, with a rotating kebab restaurant. Preferring my route, I elected to climb back down the rocky slope. Near the end of my descent, I passed a small cave in the cliff face, where twelve puppies, maybe five or six weeks old, lay sleeping together. Leaving them to their sleep, I emerged at the bottom of the hill in cypress-shaded cemetery, and made my way back to the hotel.
Today, I saw Aezani. I can confidently say that it was worth the trouble – worth every jostling bus ride, endless walk, and blast of gritty wind. Aezani, deep in the Phrygian hills, receives few visitors; and most of those who do come stay only to photograph the famous Temple of Zeus. I spent more than six hours walking the site, and could have spent as many more.
The site is about an hour’s ride from Kutahya. There are no cities between. Some of the more fertile valleys are planted with wheat or corn; but most of the land is uncultivated, mottled with wild grass and clumps of stunted pine. As around Kutahya, surging hills, flecked with white stone, roll in long lines to every horizon. In a broad trough between these waves is Cavhardisar, Aezani’s modern successor. The bus stop is located in the modern part of town, roughly a half-mile from the old village. Old Cavhardisar, the village located atop the ruins of Aezani, is now mostly deserted. Forty years ago, after a severe earthquake leveled many of their houses, the Turkish government encouraged the villagers to move into modern housing. Most of them did so; but a hundred or so remain in their old homes among the ruins, with the result that the center of Aezani is a curious mix of monumental ruin and farm village. Clusters of crumbling houses, many built with scraps of marble from the ruins, announced my arrival in old Cavhardisar, where two Roman bridges still carry traffic over the river which ran through the center of Aezani.
At first, the ruins are unobtrusive: a column drum built into a wall here, a sarcophagus lid in a farmyard there – and then one stands upon the graceful 5-arched Roman bridge, and sees the Temple of Zeus, the best-preserved temple in Turkey. This structure owes its remarkable state of preservation to several factors. First, and perhaps most importantly, it was built to last, having been funded in part by the emperor Hadrian himself. Second, having been converted into a church in the fourth century, it was spared the Christian vandalism and stone-robbing which leveled so many temples to their foundations. Finally, and most uniquely, the temple and its high-walled precinct were used in the thirteenth and fourteenth century as the fortress of a tribe of Turcoman raiders, a circumstance which made the building’s most likely devastators into its guardians. Two of its cella walls and perhaps a third of its columns have succumbed to earthquakes. Otherwise, it stands virtually intact. Beneath the temple podium, the great vaulted chamber which once ensconced the local oracle has lost scarcely a block in two millennia. Above, one can still read a letter of Hadrian, inscribed on the cella wall by the civic elders: “I, Imperator Caesar Trajan Hadrian Augustus, three times consul, twelve times holder of tribunician power, have restored the boundaries given to the temple of Zeus creator and the city of Aezani…”
The temple of Zeus was part of a vast monumental scheme that, over the course of the second and third centuries, made this part of Aezani the showplace of the province. Only a few hundred yards from the Temple of Zeus, a large bath complex – a full complement of frigidaria, tepidaria, and caldaria, with a great colonnaded palaestra thrown in for good measure – was erected by the combined efforts of several local benefactors. Only a small portion has been cleared to the ancient floor; the rest stands as centuries of earthquakes have left it, a vast pile of grass-covered ruins, from which jagged masses of stone jut like ribs. For all the seismic violence written in these remains, I found the great bath a peaceful place, colored by a half-dozen varieties of wildflower.
More poignant still was the great Stadium-theater complex, built into a hill a short distance beyond the baths. The combination of theater and stadium is practically without parallel in Roman architecture. Though its effect has been blunted by earthquake damage and extensive stone-robbing, the complex is still awesome to approach. The end of the stadium facing the city has vanished, but the long sides still bear many of their seats, built of limestone blocks twelve feet long. In a few places, the vaulted entrances have survived; but most of the stadium is now reduced to a jumble of gray stone, a testament to the terrible power of earthquakes. The theater is in much better condition, though its seating has likewise been cracked and staggered by periodic shocks. Even the fine marbles of the stage building have survived, to such a degree –or so the clerk at the local bus station tells me –that plans are underway to rebuild it. Thus far, despite a considerable amount of police tape and a few fresh excavations, little seems to have been accomplished. More interested, perhaps, in the aesthetics than in the (Roman) design of the theater, I scampered up and down its tumbled seats, trying to frame pictures of the brown plain and distant hills.
At this point, my careful advance preparations began to pay off. Before leaving home, I had taken the precaution of printing out a detailed city plan produced by the German excavators. Looking at this, I noticed that a large cluster of tombs was marked on the hill beside the theater. At first, I saw nothing but brown grass in every direction, broken here and there by large white stones. As I approached one of the stones, however, I saw that the whole was carved as an ornate door – the gate to the other world, a common Phrygian grave motif – and realized that all of them were tombs, the tumbled and shattered remains of sarcophagi and stelai. I spent a pleasant hour walking among them. All along that sunburnt plain, a stiff breeze bent wild grass and scrub over the remains of a vast necropolis, where generations had built their marble tombs along some long-vanished road. After eating lunch (some crackers) while sitting on a particularly large sarcophagus lid, I resolved to visit the rest of the city’s cemeteries before I left. First, however, I had to see the ancient center.
Behind the temple of Zeus, the crumbling half-timbered cottages and barns of old Cavhardisar cluster among the ruins of fora and monumental streets. In the old agora, the gates of a cowpen hang from marble columns, and chickens peck among the fallen blocks. Even the river is still bounded by huge Roman retaining walls, and runs on a bed of ancient blocks. Following the river, I came upon the site’s other perfectly preserved Roman bridge (as if to underscore its durability, a tractor and hay cart rolled over it as I watched). Near this landmark are a partly reconstructed colonnaded avenue and a circular macellum, the walls of which are inscribed with the fullest surviving version of Diocletian’s famous price edict.
Having followed the Roman retaining walls past another ruined bridge (where a woman was busily doing here laundry), I decided to go in search of a large cluster of tombs marked on my map about a mile and a half outside the city. I followed a cowpath (complete with cows) to a region of wheat fields, and there, on a hill covered with drying wildflowers, found a large cemetery. The views in every direction were spectacular, and several of the sarcophagi were fairly well-preserved. My enjoyment of the site was marred, however, by evidence of recent grave robbery; recently, perhaps within the past few months, a great stone slab, the roof of a chamber tomb, had been uncovered, and a hole large enough for a man drilled through. I couldn’t see the bottom of the chamber (it was at least 10 feet deep), but whatever treasure this tomb contained is surely now in the vaults of a prestigious auction house, or the padded drawers of some private collector.
I followed the cow path in a wide loop five miles long, to where the wheat fields broke about a rocky escarpment some fifty feet high. As I drew closer to this cliff, I began to see tombs again, ranged like a guard of honor along the processional way. For here, among the tumbled crags and wild scrub, was the shrine of Meter, the oldest and most sacred sanctuary in Aezani. Even after the construction of the Zeus Temple, the humble cave of Meter, Mother and Mistress of All, was the city’s religious heart. The very wealthiest citizens chose this place for their elaborate chamber tombs; it was from here that the Amazon sarcophagus in the Kutahya museum was taken. I hunted among the windy cliffs for some time, but never found the sanctuary. Since Meter’s cave collapsed in an earthquake long ago, only a few later foundations testify to its location. These eluded me; and finally, too tired to walk much farther, I left the goddess’ sanctuary to the cows, and made my way back to the bus station.