Alexandria Troas
7-23-13
Like Cyzicus, Alexandria Troas looms larger in the annals of ancient history than in modern guidebooks. The Roman city was one of the jewels of the Aegean, noted especially for the size and magnificence of its buildings. Little of this grandeur is visible today. First overshadowed by the foundation of Constantinople, Alexandria gradually declined to the status of a small provincial bishopric, and was finally abandoned to the advancing Turks sometime in the fourteenth century.
For nearly 300 years thereafter, the city’s massive ruins were subjected to systematic pillaging. Squared and dressed stones were dragged away for piers; columns were pulled down to adorn mosques; and the marble which had sheathed every public building was fed, piece by piece, into glowing lime kilns. By the time the stone-robbers had finished their work, little was left of the city’s great monuments but their foundations and rubble substructures. Orchards were planted over the sprawling ruins; and within the eight-mile circumference of the old city walls, only a vast debris field, punctuated by occasional masses of brick, remains. The city’s setting is beautiful, overlooking the Hellespont and the brown island of Tendeos beyond. But the ruins themselves have a melancholy feel, scattered like broken caskets in a pilfered tomb.
It difficult to reach Alexandria, and even harder to explore it. From my hostel in Çanakkale, I had to board a bus going to the terminal outside town, wait there for half an hour to board a smaller bus going to another station, and wait there for an hour before boarding an even smaller bus to get to the point from which I could walk two miles to the site. The whole process took about three hours (even longer on the way back); and once I finally arrived in Alexandria, I discovered that only about a third of the c. 4000 acres contained within the city walls were now planted with orchards. The rest had gone back to nature; and nature, as I soon discovered, had apparently spent the interim devising new types of thorn and bramble. There was one particular plant specially designed to penetrate gym shoes and – once embedded – to eagerly seek blood from the nearest convenient patch of foot or ankle. Various types of thorn, scorning such subterfuge, opted to come at me slashing. Every plant, however innocuous looking, bore some appendage – barb, hook, burr, needle, stabbing twig or sharpened leaf – waiting for the hapless hiker.
Yet I persevered, and saw the site. There were only a few real highlights. The first building I came to was a bath-gymnasium complex. Though the walls stood up to twenty feet high and one of the subterranean vaults was still preserved, the building’s effect was rather compromised by the fact that someone had turned into a cattle yard. More impressive, if more ruinous, was the great theater, which preserved little more than its shape and a few of the vaults which once supported the seating. In partial compensation, the rim of the cavea offered panoramic views of the site and the sea beyond.
The Baths of Herodes Atticus are certainly the most impressive monument, if only because they were the best-preserved. While not on the scale of the Baths of Diocletian or Caracalla in Rome, this was a massive complex, built with huge blocks of rusticated masonry. Its springing arches, moreover, make for a good photo-op. The neighboring Nymphaeum, on the other hand, was surrounded by brambles so thick that I nearly lost my camera to clutching branches.
Outside the city, I followed the line of Herodes Atticus’ aqueduct across a wide wheat field. Yet no single monument was the real attraction at Alexandria Troas. As I walked or crashed through the site, it was the vast emptiness that struck me most. At my every step, the ground crunched or rattled with fragments of ancient brick and pottery, glinting here and there with shards of blue-green Roman glass. Where fields had been plowed, the exposed surface was a mass of debris, so thick it was sometimes difficult to walk through. Every fence had its marble column drums; and in the midst of more than one field, a line of columns, tracing some buried stoa or portico, rose and sank oblivious. I always felt, in other words, that I was among the ruins of a great metropolis. The near annihilation of its buildings merely added to the effect.