Tear Down the Walls of Troy

A horse is a horse, of course, of course,
Unless the horse is in the harbor of Çanakkale and not outside the walls of Troy.

I've read the Iliad. I've read the Aeneid. So it was time to see Troy for myself. Well, what's left of the place. And that's not much, but more is being uncovered all the time, complicated by the fact that there was no one City of Troy. There were nine. Layered on top of each other.

And that complicates the archaeology, especially in a world where archaeologists are trying to balance preservation with discovery. And in a place such as Troy, the fact that the pendulum has swung hard in favor of preservation, that makes the process of uncovering the deeper layers, going back to 3000 B.C. (And, again, B.C., not B.C.E., because what makes the "common era" common? Or should I ask, who makes it common? Exactly.)

It's about a four-hour drive in a large passenger travel van (the van is large, the passengers vary in size). You travel along the Sea of Marmara, the body of the water with the Bosphorus to the north and the Dardenelles to the southwest, for a long while. (It is the set of three bodies of water, the Dardenelles, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosphorus, that separate the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas from the Black Sea.) After you reach the Dardenelles, you take a ferry across the water from Eceabat on the European side of the Dardenelles to the city of Çanakkale in Asia. The sign in the above photo shows you where to go to get the "feribot," so, yes, it is not a ferry and it is not a boat. It is a ferry-boat. Like a tuna fish or a turkey bird.

Eceabat does feature statuary near the ferry-boat harbor.

I had limited time in Eceabat, so I saw this one, but missed the massive "Respect for History" monument and the trench warfare. (There were a huge number of Aussie and Kiwi tourists on my van and nearly all were going to Gallipoli, a famous WWI battlefield where an enormous number of Australian and New Zealand troops were slaughtered,)

Off to the ferry-boat and to Anatolian Turkey.

There's more than one ferry-boat operating these waters. I'm not sure why there are multiple bridges over the Bosphorus but, at most, one over the Dardenelles. I am guessing it's the combination of the fact that the Dardenelles is a wider channel and Bosphorus has one of the world's most populous cities built astride it.

Once you land in Çanakkale, the setting of the Trojan mood begins.

There is a replica of the Trojan Horse in the Çanakkale harbor. Actually, that is not a replica. It's apparently the real thing. The "real thing" as in the real Trojan Horse from the filming of the Brad Pitt movie "Troy" several years ago. The movie studio gifted the horse to Çanakkale after filming. So this is the real deal. In a way.

A little aside of town are Trojan busts.

 

Above is the happy loving couple that, according to Homer, caused the whole Trojan War mess. I guess this couple sort of served the same role as the Archduke Ferdinand and his spoiled wife Sophie did in fomenting WWI. History does not repeat, as they say, but it rhymes.

This is King Agamemnon. You also may know him from the Aeschylus written Greek tragedy play named for him.

Odysseus. He was the star in Homer's sequel to the Iliad, the Odyssey.

This is a tragic figure:

No. I am not referring to the man in the foreground who made the tragic fashion choice of fluorescent yellow. I am referring the Achilles, the man with the famous heel, over his left shoulder.

And here I am posing with a heroic figure, not a tragic one:

  

Me and Mr. Ataturk. Kemel Ataturk, the founder of modern day Turkey. Now modern-day Türkiye.

As an aside, I really should get used to spelling it "Türkiye," since the locals, when speaking English, pronounce the name of their country "tur-KEY-uh," with a pronounced extra vowel sound at the end, and not "tur-KEY," as we do. R.E.S. P. E. C. T. And all that.

We now are in the Troy archaeological site, with a very sad and not-at-all-original Trojan Horse, The Trojans would have got what they deserved if they couldn't figure out a giant wooden horse with a staircase coming out of its belly was trouble. With a "T" and that stands for "Troy."

Time to explore some ruins. Time to tear down the walls of Troy:

This is from the Homeric Era of Troy, which would be the sixth of seventh of the nine incarnations of Troy.

I am here:

The path doesn't neatly go from Troy #1 to Troy #9, or vice versa, because archaeology doesn't work that way. What got uncovered got uncovered and it's impossible to put them in numerical sequence. So you walk along the designated route, see what you see, and hope you can make sense of the historical perspective necessary.

All in all, I was surprised that there were nine Troys, ranging from 3000 B.C. to 500 A.D. in the late Roman Era. I though there was one Troy and it was destroyed in a war with Greece, fictionalized and sensationalized by Homer -- whoever heard of author sensationalizing reality -- and once Odysseus started his long, long journey home, that was the end of the saga of Troy.

Actual history, as it always is, is more complicated.

And we only guess it what those complications were. We can't interview the eyewitnesses, after all. We can only unearth what is there and hope to guess the right answer from extremely limited data and our overwhelming expectations and pedelictions.

This was a trench dug by a German archaeologist in the 1870's, Heinrich Schliemann, who dug a deep trench through the middle of the Troy ruins. Which, under the current rules of archaeology, was verboten. But, again, life is complicated, it is from his trench we learned over the nine Troys and that there was not just a single one. Under the current rules of practice in archaeology, we never should dig deeper than the Roman layer on top.

Was this the ramp they used to get the Trojan Horse inside the walls of Troy? Assuming there was a horse ... as that may just be a conspiracy theory.

This sidewalk in old Troy shows evidence of a massive earthquake. I still choose to believe Homer that Troy was destroyed by Greeks bearing gifts, all because of that shameless hussy Helen, But history and the archaeology seems to bolster the "massive earthquake in earthquake country" theory regarding the destruction of Troy.

This is a Trojan oak:

It is a form of oak tree, but the leaves have needles at the points, like holly. Look, don't touch.

This is an ampitheater:

Trojans did not have massive American sized butts and bodies to fit into these seats. In fact, they were so petite that they could have fit comfortably well in a Spirit Airlines seat. Almost. But could they have offered the price of a plastic bottle of water?

And the tour of Troy comes to an end. Evening is falling and it is time to get back to Istanbul and my hotel room bed.

But if you are ever in the neighborhood, visit Troy.

You will jump for joy. (That is my attempt at the instagram leap. Kudos to the photographer who caught me mid-air before gravity won the battle.)

A Day Full of Old City Istanbul Tourism: the Day Ends with an Aqueduct and a Hamam

This remaining segment of the Aqueduct of Valens cuts through a residential neighborhood

After all this tourism-ing, I needed a bath. So I opted for a traditional Turkish bath. There are dozens of hamami in Istanbul to choose from, ranging from the very high-end touristy to the very low-end primitive. I chose one that was a little off the high-end and a little less touristy: the Zeyrek Çinili Hamam. I also chose it since it would be close to the historic Roman aqueduct.

It was about a two-mile walk from my hotel, but I could take a tram for about half that distance. Which I did because I already had put in my one-million steps for the day (approximately). 

The tram stop was Aksaray. At the stop, as with mots street corners, there was a mosque. This is the Pertevniyal Valide Sultan Mosque. It is relatively new construction, dating from the 1870's. It is an Italian design, which generally means beautiful but non-functional. Italian is not an architectural school commonly associated with mosque design and construction, but here you go anyway.

Then it was time to walk up a hill. Something was going down at the park I was walking past.

This is Fatih Memorial Park, in the Fatih neighborhood of the Old City. It was packed. It also seemed like some sort of rally, as there was a noticeably sized police presence and electronically amplified voices (which, in my Latin American travels, almost always means a political rally, usually benign but loud). It could have been a routine outdoor religious service. I don't know. I didn't ask.

But I did notice this cool statue at the center of the park, so I ventured into the gathering to snap some photos.

This is a statue of Mehmet II, Sultan from the 1500's, which was early into the Ottoman reign. He's on a horse, which likely means that when you're sultan, the ordinary rules against depicting humans and animals in art in a Moslem country do not apply. I got no looks when I wandered into the crowd for some shutterbugging, so I am guessing the gathering was benign. You can feel hostility and I felt none, genuinely. Just people ignoring me as they focused on their reason for being in that park and that time. As it should be.

At the north end of the park, actually more NNE if you want to be technical, was the surviving segment of the city's old aqueduct.

This is the Aqueduct of Valens, the Bozdoğan Kemeri, a.k.a, Valens Su Kemeri, in Turk. I'm not sure of the reason behind the dual naming. Maybe I should have asked someone at the rally/gathering I just walked through.

The aqueduct was an amazing bit of Roman engineering, done in the 300's A.D. The reference to "Valens" in the name is of the Roman Emperor in 373 A.D., when construction was completed.

Very little of the aqueduct remains, but the segment in this neighborhood looks much like it likely did more than a millennium and a half ago.

Once you pass under the arches of the aqueduct, you enter a real neighborhood, not the upscale tourist Istanbul.

It's just where you go to get what you're going to cook for dinner.

All the sights and smells you would expect. This is not the tourist-focused Grand Bazaar by any means.

And then I found the place where I made my appointment for my evening bath.

The Zeyrek Çinili Hamam. It doesn't look like much from the outside, but it is large, ornate, aand somewhat traditional once you enter.

Photos are OK in the public area.

But beyond this point, no photos. For so many reasons.

By the time the scrubbing, washing and massaging of over-tired tourist body was complete, it was dark in Istanbul.

And in Fatih Memorial Park, the sultan was now on his horse, flying alone.

A Day Full of Old City Istanbul Tourism: Stop 4: The Archaeological Museums (ft. Multiple Rooms Just Dedicated to the Hittites)

This street cat thinks it's an historic figure, worthy of being on display in a museum.

For several hundred years, the Ottoman Empire rules over many lands that we now consider to be the most archaeological interesting places on our planet. So, of course, Istanbul would have a worthy addition to the world's great archaeological museums.

You enter walking past a large array of pagan statuary. Some with heads!

There is so much statuary that much of it is waiting outside, hoping someday to be brought inside, protected from the elements, like a real family member.

Such as, for example, that bear/lion hybrid guarding the entrance to the one of the buildings in the archaeological museum complex.

And these statues, busts to be more accurate, are proof that having a head doesn't mean having a face.

Let's start with this impressive university-looking building.

It has a glass head of Apollo at the entrance,

Which I do not believe dates back to antiquity. It reeks of "modernism."

But the other statues appear not have an iota of modernism about them.

A lack of modernism as well as a lack of heads.

Inside is this:

He's a signature piece of the museum since you can by a miniature replica of him in the museum gift shop. That's how you know for sure that something in the museum crossed that line and became a signature piece.

And here's one thing we know about ancient statuary. There are always missing something. Arms. Legs. Heads. Noses. In fact, if you see an intact statue of a human form purporting to be from the ancient, it's not the real deal. It's either fully a replica, or at least has been significantly reworked so that it appears as it did in ancient days,

This one is called "side of beef":

Actually it doesn't have a name. And the animal behind the steer is missing so many parts that when the museum told me it was a lion, I just had to accept that on faith. I am fully convinced the one on the right is a cow or steer. Legs do not define the bovine. But the one on the left? That is going to take a whole lot of imagination to see the lion within,

This one looks to good to be true:

It claims to be the real deal.

This one I found creepy.

It looks like that weird flying creature that the kid rode in the movie "The Never-Ending Story" or, to reference the part that I saw, the clips from the movie used in the music video by Limahl.

Here's an interesting effect. As time moved forward, the human figures became more three-dimensional. From the above style, to the style below.

This is listed as being a representation of death.

I can see it.

And this is a representation of Alexander The Great.

He lived the dream enunciated by Blondie: "Die Young Stay Pretty". At least if the sculptures and movie castings of him are to be believed vis-à-vis the second part of that equation.

Here we enter the Troy section of the archaeological museum.

Ancient Troy was located within the borders of modern-day Turkey (or, as is preferred locally, Türkiye, now with umlauts, as if the aspirational goal is to be a metal band). So it was massively disappointing the lack of Troy "stuff" found here.

It was mostly information about the ongoing dig of the sight of ancient Troy.

And so we move onto the sarcophagi part of the collection:

There is always a sarcophagus section in any anthropology/archaeology museum worthy of that title.

Time to exit the first building and enter the section.

And this houses the part of an anthropology/archaeology museum that I typically find to be the least interesting: textiles and ceramics. YMMV, as the kids would say.

Your mileage may vary, but mine stays the same. At least with regard to ceramics and textiles. On the other hand, ancient statuary? Can't. Get. Enough.

So we enter the final building of the complex, the one housing the most antique of its antiquities.

Three rooms at least dedicated just to the Hittites! This is how you know you've struck a rich view of archaeology museum gold.

I love my Hittites. They are name-checked in the Old Testament, for example as contemporaries of Abraham. I hope someday to figure out who they were exactly.

This looks to good to be real antique:

But good enough for a photo-bombing.

So much archaeologically important statuary; so little brain space remembering what was what.

There is even an Egyptian section, which makes sense because Egypt once was part of the Ottoman Empire, leaving the Empire well before it devolved into its status as "The Sick Man of Europe." And who would want to continue rooming with "The Sick Man of Europe."

Cats! The Egyptian kind. Not the T.S. Eliot kind. Or, worse yet, the Andrew Lloyd Weber Kettle Grill kind.

And with that, it is time to end my time in the Istanbul archaeological museum complex. I got more to see before this day ends.