In Amongst The Ruins

Considering the debate that is ongoing over whether Turkey should be allowed to join the EU, it is instructive to reflect on the extent to which this place has helped shape our whole notion of western civilisation. The other day we visited the ruins of Ancient Troy, the setting of Homer's 'The Illiad', where Achilles battled it out with Hector to win back the enchanting Helen of Troy. Helen had been carried off by the Trojan prince Paris in the elopement of all time following a jealous tiff between a couple of the Greek gods. She came to be immortilised as 'the face that launched a thousand ships' when the Greek king Agememnon set in motion a rescue mission that would take ten years before tasting success. It's when hard gazing on these battered stones to envisage the setting for this timeless story.

Troy nowadays is a confusing jumble of stone walls dug up from nine different phases of the city's history. Yet, the story of Troy was seminal to the foundation myths of several countries anxious to assert that the pedigree of their particular nation was superior in antiquity and lineage to those of their rivals. In medieval times, the French made great play on the coincidence of the name Paris ocurring as the name of their capital city to assert that they were the true descendants of the Trojans. The English countered with an equally absurd story that England had been founded by Brutus, a Trojan prince who had escaped to Britain from the catastrophe that fell upon Troy when the Greeks infiltrated inside the city walls after ten long years of siege through the cunning devise of a wooden horse. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts as the old saying goes.

It is interesting to obverse how a story such as this one could have impressed itself on the landscape of the imagination down so many centuries and across so many cultures. Even Mehmet the Conquerer, the Ottoman Sultan who wrested Constantinople from the Byzantines, a man who had little call to busy himself with dusty tales from past times, nevertheless did bother to do so in the case of Troy.

More impressive and hardly less significant are the ruins of Ephesus, a vast expanse of predominantly Roman remains from a city which helped shape the future direction taken by Christianity at a key juncture in its emergence as a major religion. Here, in 431, in this city famously written to by St. Paul, the church took a momentous decision in asserting that Christ had two natures in one, being at once both human and divine. Henceforth, all those who strayed from this view were to be considered outside of the Church, and the long history of heresy, schism and internecine conflict that has characterised the Christian tradition got itself properly kick-started. We visited Ephesus on a foggy morning which lent much atmosphere to the columns and capitals that loomed out of the murk, even if it did make for some rather disappointing photos.

However, my favourite pile of old stones is a more modest affair. The ancient city of Termessos may have sent Alexander the Great on his way, but it was never a place to rival the splendours of Ephesus. Nonetheless, the setting of the city high in the mountains above Antalya preserved it from the pilfering hands of later builders on the lookout for cut stone, and perhaps more surprisingly, from intrusive examination by modern archaeologists. It remains today as it has been for centuries, an evocative ensemble of broken walls rearing up in higgledy-piggledy fashion from the enveloping undergrowth. It is almost as though the place were designed to be a set for an Indiana Jones movie, and somehow it seems all the better for that.