Sultanhisar, Turkey
8-4-13
When I drove in from Izmir this morning, I headed straight to the site of ancient Nysa, set on the spurs of a hill about three miles above Sultanhisar. There were no other tourists. A small team of Turkish archaeologists was working on a neighboring hill; otherwise, the site was deserted. The site guard was sunning himself when I walked up. He had to unlock the drawer where the tickets are kept. So Nysa is not often visited – but the site was, for once, a pleasant surprise, its well-preserved and extensive ruins spread out over a picturesque landscape of hills and gorges. The complete absence of visitors, however, has not encouraged the Turkish government to invest much in infrastructure. To see the ruins, I often had to plunge into dense scrub. Whenever I emerged, my clothes were a mass of burrs and bristles from the armpits down.
But it was worth it. Though never an important city, Nysa could afford the usual complement of grand civic monuments. And here, unlike so many other places, no substantial settlement grew up in the ruins, so many of the city’s buildings have been well preserved. The gymnasium, where I parked my car, was a relatively unimpressive ruin. But the sheer size of the adjacent amphitheater, a massive building cut into a steep ravine, more than compensated. The actual seating has only been uncovered in a few areas; but vaults emerge jagged from the scrub on every side of the valley, creating a general impression of monumental size.
Into the gully’s head is carved the well-preserved theater. The entrances, seats, and even some of the richly carved stage building have survived; I sat in the magistrate’s chair, and tried to imagine watching a play of Euripides or Aeschylus some summer afternoon two millennia ago. Feeling cultivated, I went next to the ancient library, the best-preserved of its kind in Turkey after the famous Library of Celsus in Ephesus. It still stands two stories high; and scroll niches still line the walls, stripped of marble, but otherwise much as they were when fire or decay claimed their last books.
My next stop was the two hundred yard Roman tunnel, vaulted on two levels, which still carries water under the ancient streets during the wet season. In summer, one can one walk through and admire the Roman brickwork. My guidebook mentions bats; but the only living things I saw were spiders, whose webs glimmered by the hundreds on the walls and ceiling.
The tunnel led me across to the other side of the city, where recent excavations have begun to uncover long stretches of a magnificent colonnaded avenue. At one end of a new pit, the jumbled blocks of a monumental gateway have been uncovered, lying as they fell in some medieval earthquake. I followed the line of the old street past a row of vaulted shops to the ruins of the bouleuterion (council chamber).
After pausing to admire a few more recently excavated colonnaded streets, I returned, dusty and covered in burrs, to my car. After a few more passes through the village (I forgot about and hit the same speed bump three separate times), I finally found the Nysa Otel. Locally, I discovered, it advertises itself as a “Restaurant and Disco.” I suppose they have to stay in business somehow. In any case, I checked in, paused briefly to deposit my baggage and admire the tawdry ambience (my walls were actually speckled with glitter) before heading back to Nysa. It was only 4:30, and I had not yet seen the Necropolis.
Nysa’s dead were buried in contiguous vaults, arranged in neat rows along the sacred way to a Sanctuary of Hades. Today, only two long mounds, planted with olive trees, trace the remains. The old sacred way has vanished, marked only by the ruined Roman bridges along the ravines. The remains were scanty; but the hills and woods were very picturesque. Charmed by the landscape, I decided to follow the sacred way across the first ravine, just to get a sense of how visitors approached the ancient city. This proved to be a mistake.
From above, the gully looked like a fairly broad and passable valley. Only when I actually began to descend did I realize that what I had taken for brush along the valley bottom was actually the tops of overhanging trees. The ravine proved to be about a hundred feet deep and only twenty wide. The slope steepened towards the bottom, to the point that it became a virtual cliff for the last twenty feet. As I tried to decide how best to descend this section, the hill decided the issue by giving way beneath my feet. I slid down in a cascade of dust, landing safely but ingloriously in a large thorn bush. Eighty feet above my head, the shattered arches of the Roman bridge were just visible through the brush. The shale cliffs on both sides were pockmarked with graves; shards of ancient pottery, washed by winter rains down from the necropolis, rattled like dry bones at my feet.
Eventually, I found a safe place to ascend the other side. Having followed the line of tombs to the brink of another, even deeper gully, I decided to call it quits and return. This time, I planned my slide down – choosing a smooth slope of dead grass, I sat back on my heels, and glided eighty feet to a gentle (if dusty) halt. The downside (or rather, backside) of this plan was that it embedded every thorny plant in western Turkey in the seat of my pants. Live and learn.
When I got back to my hotel room, I spent a whole hour on the balcony, picking thorns and burrs out of my clothes, shoes, and hair. This was tedious – but it must be said that the view was pleasant. The Nysa Otel stands on the brow of a hill overlooking the valley of the Meander River. Across the valley, checkered with fields, a line of hills stretches to either horizon, creased and scored with countless folds and gullies. The sun set softly on the tired hills and green valley, blurring lines into an Impressionist pastel. I have picked burrs out of my eyebrows in worse places.