Category: Greek Islands and Turkey 2011

August 8, 2011

You know I like to see as much as possible when I am somewhere, so I think you can understand my challenge here in Rome when I describe it for you:  it’s as though every Chinese capital I’ve been to was all in one place—Beijing, Xian, Soochow, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Anyang (actually haven’t been there yet), Kaifeng, Luoyang, etc., and that most of what was there remained (sometimes recycled, as in a Buddhist temple becoming a church, or a small palace becoming a temple).  That’s my impression of Rome—overwhelming.  For about 500 years, it dominated Western Europe, borrowing a lot of Greek ideas, including religion and architecture; and for about 2000 years it has been the center of Christianity (since the Reformation of Catholicism).  It’s the center of Empire I thought I’d see in Athens, but didn’t.

Here’s how I tried to master—or perhaps experience is a better word—as much as I could.

Tours.  Carolyn and I did four tours with guides.  When we got in Saturday, we took the on-off bus tour, which we’ve found the ideal introduction to a new city.  Turns out, the ancient walls (circa 3^rd century A.D) enclose a small city—around 16 kilometers, and most of the sites are in that area.  As you’ll see though, most streets were too narrow for buses, but the trip did hit the highlights—the major plazas and palaces, skirting ancient Rome and the Vatican City.

 Two of our tours were of the ancient world.  One was of the Appian Way, which got us out of the ancient city into the early Christian catacombs.  The other  was a walking tour I did of the three major areas of the Palatine Hill, one of the seven hills on which Rome was built. It was the center of the religion and politics, including what’s left of the palaces (the marble is mostly gone—much of it adorning churches, some of them in the ancient city of Rome; Constantine’s conversion around 325 ensured the churches would start taking precedence over the temples), including the ones of the first emperor, Augustus, and the remnants of the huge additions Nero did; the Forum, where in the republic senators debated issues of the day (bailout anyone?);, the supposed home of Romulus and Remus, the founders  of ancient Rome, the pyre on which was burned Julius Cesar, ending the Republic; and above all, the Coliseum (which got its name from the Colossus of Nero, a huge statue that stood on top of the arena, a name it has given to other sports arenas over the years).  To the cheers of 60000 Romans (including Victor Mature in my youth) gladiators fought each other, animals (they’ve been excavating the area under the stage which made possible a flow of activity), in the “sports” of the day. My favorite, though, has to be the arches of victory the legions marched through during the reigns of Constantine and Trajan; the 50’s movies featured lots of the Romans tromping and triumphing, as they in fact did for centuries.

The other tour was of the Vatican City, the smallest independent enclave in the world.  The visit there almost required a tour to “jump the queue”  since August is THE tourist month (Europe essentially closes) and Rome is a popular destination.  I heard something like 3 million tourists, but that may have been just the crowd at the Vatican today.  Three hours barely scratched the surface.  We did a quick tour of some of the rooms of the Vatican museum, which as befits the history of the Papacy, has some of the greatest art in Western Civilization, including Michelangelo’s Pieta (would I love to wander in the entire museum!), the Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo spent nine years painting the ceiling (and designing the uniforms of the Swiss Guard which protects the Pope) and the ‘last judgment” behind the altar, and Botticelli and other famous Renaissance artists covered the sides of the walls (no pictures allowed  inside what is a private chapel of the Pope, built by Pope Sixtus, hence Sistine), and St. Peters Church, which is the largest Catholic church in the world (none are allowed to be bigger).  Constructed over 300 years on the site of the burial of St Paul, it’s lavishly decorated, as you might imagine.  The Popes can determine where they want to be buried (and many of the 200 plus are in St. Paul’s; the papacy was not always located in the Vatican City; for a time, the Popes were kept semi prisoners in Avignon France); some had lavish monuments, others were mummified, etc.  At one time, the Pope had political as well as religious power—as late as the 17^th century, for example, he was one of the instigators of a war after the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 that ended in 1699 with a treaty that began the slow decline of the Ottoman Empire (tying together parts of my trip!).

A personal highlight though was a function of the art deco boutique we are staying at—the Hotel Locarno.   It’s famous for being the centerpiece of the movie, Hotel Locarno, which I do not know anyone has seen, but it’s charming for its 6 person cage elevator, rooftop restaurant—and the fact that it lends bicycles.  In other words, it’s helped me see this manageable city by bicycle.  The best time to see was Sunday morning; I was on the road at 7—and had the city essentially to myself (most Romans vanish during August; most tourists vanish in the morning), when it was almost cool enough to enjoy.  I was especially interested in finding the Baroque masterpieces (can you imagine, the Romans brought back many obelisks from Egypt; one Baroque master put one on an elephant), but the small streets, many of them pedestrian malls, went all the places that the bus could not reach.  I went two other times, including tonight, when I took most of the Baroque tour from Fodor’s; I hadn’t realized Rome was the ringleader in the Baroque, which was part of the counter reformation, the Catholic Church’s response to the rise of Protestantism in northern Europe—an over the top ostentatious glorification of God.  I had to go back to the main Jesuit Church for a second look tonight.   Though it’s a lot busier at 7 pm than 7am, Rome is still a fascinating city to wander around, on foot or on bicycle.

In 36 hours, our journey will be over, around 1200 digital pictures and 15 guidebooks richer.  My favorite business story occurred in Istanbul, in the Grand Bazaar.  The Bazaar, built in the 16^th century, houses around 5000 shops, some selling the same trinkets (and knockoffs) you find in the Silk market in Beijing, some selling the high class merchandise you can find in the Pearl market in Beijing—and everything in between.

I tried bargaining using my Chinese skills.  “How much for an Old Friend?” I asked.  “We’re not old friends,” the grizzled shopkeeper replied, “ but if you buy this, we’ll be better friends in the future.”  We’re now better friends.

Talking Turkey:

Our tour next took us to Istanbul, which was on my bucket list, and it still is because even one fully-packed day is not enough to more than sample the at least 2000 year old city of 16 million, the capital of not one Empire, but two—the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine) and the Ottoman Empire

(after 1453).  Approaching it from the sea, we clearly saw the three parts of the city—the Golden Horn (old city), Galata (the older commercial district), and the new city which is on the Asian side of the Bosporus.  Istanbul sits astride one of the major maritime arteries in the world—the straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.  That strategic location has been important in its history, since the grain from Black Sea countries (Russia and the Balkans) was important in feeding Europe, and could provide revenue to support an empire (which it did).  It also got the Ottoman Empire involved in the politics of Europe and the Middle East.

What we saw was mostly the Turkish delights (a local candy; pardon the pun), the splendors of the Ottoman Empire—including the Blue Mosque, a magnificent dome, the Topkapi Palace of the sultans, and the now-museum Church of Divine Wisdom, probably better known as the Hagia Sophia.  The latter dates from the early Byzantine period, a wondrous Orthodox Church that became a mosque after the conquest; when Turkey became a secular republic, the government turned Hagia Sophia into a museum, and stripped the walls back to when it was probably the largest Church in Christendom, revealing the mosaics that are, and deserve to be, world renown.  It was the only Byzantine art we saw in Istanbul, so I was glad to have spent an hour in the Byzantine/Christian museum in Athens.

Topkapi Palace was quite impressive.  The seat of government for the “sublime porte” as it was known, its only rival for me might have been some of the Mughal palaces in India, which have some of the same architecture—the eaves, arches, open areas, tile-art decorations (floral or calligraphic; Islamic art doesn’t permit paintings of people).  One of the areas that surprised me (though it shouldn’t have) was the religious display.  The Ottoman Empire early conquered Mecca/Medina, and thus became the protector of the Holy Relics of the Prophet Mohammed.  There were relics (the beard of the prophet, his sword, a footstep), as well as the rod of Abraham and something from Moses (the Ottomans also controlled Jerusalem).  I read somewhere that periodically the Sultan would trade Christian relics to the West.

The trip to Istanbul tied for me several of my trips together—from Mongolia (where the Turks supposedly originated) to the trip in Eastern Europe last year, which was the battleground between East and West—the sieges of Vienna (which at least twice beat back Turkish incursions; the early Sultans saw themselves as the inheritors of the Roman mantle as universal rulers, just as did many of their Western European contemporaries), and even incursions into northern Poland, not to mention the occupation of the Balkans, and the incessant Russian-Turkish wars, as Russia crept to the Black Sea (conquering the Khanate of  Crimea and depriving the Turks of the cavalry it provided).

As we cruised along the coast of Anatolia (Asia Minor in Turkey), we stopped at Izmir, a city once known as Smyrna, and for a long time settled by Greeks.  As a result of the division of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, and the resistance to it by Turks led by Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, Greeks were pressured to leave; about the same time a fire and an earthquake caused major damage in the city.  When we landed, we had a choice of a city tour, or a visit to “another pile of rocks.”  Those who took the city tour told us that it consisted of “here there used to be…”

Carolyn and I took the tour to “another pile of rocks,” which happened to be at Pergamon, one of the most striking of the 4000 ruins in Turkey.  We got to see the Acropolis, and the medical spa; the Acropolis sits about 1000 feet above the town, our visit facilitated by a cable car.  The medical spa was in pretty good repair, but the Pergamon was another of those ancient ruins excavated to Western Europe—in this case, to Berlin.  Happily, when I was in Berlin in 2002, our guide insisted in taking us to the Pergamon museum, not realizing how useful to me that would be a decade later. We also stopped at Ephesus, another impressive “pile of rocks”.

August 1, 2011

Greece is the word

We’re back in Greece again, having wandered in and out of Turkey—where we’ll wander back again of tomorrow and here’s some impressions:

Athens looks less like the capital of an empire (which it wasn’t) than the spiritual and cultural leader of the Western world, a position it owes as much to the Romans, who adopted the architecture and the gods (whom they renamed—Zeus became Jupiter, for example) and the Byzantines, who were the curators of classical wisdom and channeled it back to the west in time for the Renaissance—as to the political power of Greece.  Athens did save Europe from one Asian Scourge (the Persian Empire, but that was in the 5^th century B.C.) as the leader of a Greek confederation, and Greek city-states left ruins of settlement throughout the region, but the highlights of the city—the Parthenon and the Acropolis—date from the end of the Persian wars.  The grateful citizens of the other cities gave Athens protection money, and Athenians spent it on the fortress (Acropolis) housing temples that celebrated the city’s patron, Athena, in what is now a world heritage site looming above the city.  It helps to imagine what it might have been like that I’ve been to the British museum, which houses the “Elgin marbles” that once graced the temple of Athena—Lord Elgin took the temple decorations home, but was forced to sell them to the British museum (which can fend off Greek requests for their return by claiming to have “purchased” the marbles, not stolen them).  As I said, the Romans took the architecture and expanded on it, both in Athens and elsewhere.  In the city, there’s a Temple of Zeus, built by Emperor Hadrian, who had a soft spot for the Greeks, who had reciprocated, building a triumphal arch for the Emperor’s visit to dedicate the Temple. Alexander the Great, a Macedonian barely mentioned in Greece, helped popularize Hellenistic Civilization as far as India, but it was the Roman legions who made it the European standard.

Greece’s esteem in Western civilization also comes from its being a democracy (of a select few), who voted to use the money to build the Acropolis.  Thus, Greece has earned a sentimental spot in curricula and emotions, which led, among other things, to my taking Western civilization, and the EU voting to bail out the notoriously corrupt economy, not to mention Lord Byron, who joined the fight that brought Greece independent of the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s (and cost Lord Byron his life).

From the modern period, there’s the parliament (formerly the palace of the first Greek king, one of the princes of Bavaria; when he did not work out, the European powers placed a Danish prince on the throne, and his dynasty lasted till the mid 1970s).  One interesting statue is to Melina Mercouri, actress and politician, but another is of Harry Truman, whose Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan helped save Greece for the west after World War II; a bitter civil war against the communists result in an anti-communist victory and a pretty ruined city!

 

As I have said, if you want to savor Greek civilization, you have to sample the settlements the Greeks had in the Eastern Mediterranean and on the coast of Turkey.  That was one of the purposes of this trip–to Crete and Naxos and Delos and above all, the photogenic Santorini.  That island, blown up in a massive volcanic eruption, has the familiar white and blue buildings that identify it immediately.  Many of the islands have, by contrast, ruins that demonstrated their importance in the ancient Greek world.  Not so much today, however, but the ruins themselves are extensive and impressive. Perched atop the hill, the city is accessible by funicular–or donkey! Some of the other islands included Patmos and the palace of King Knossos on Crete.  And the wonderful  windmills  at  Mykonos. Easy  to  remember,  but  hard  to  keep straight.