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After our Diggings tour and dig concluded in Israel, about half of the group stayed for an extra week for our optional tour of Turkey. We flew from Tel Aviv to Istanbul where we stayed in a unique hotel in the oldest part of the city. The hotel consists of a row of 19th century terrace houses, once the residences of wealthy citizens. The picturesque wooden villas have been converted into tourist accommodation with period furniture and antique Turkish decor. We ate exquisite meals in a glass-roofed restaurant overlooking the hotel garden and enjoyed the quaint atmosphere. An added benefit was that we were within walking distance of all the major sites of the city.
After lunch, we walked along a arrow lane through a jumble of old buildings and emerged into a large, open space in the middle of old Istanbul. This is the site of the hippodrome but the modern street plan still reflects the long, rectangular shape of the racecourse. Constructed by Septimus Severus in 203 AD when the city was called Byzantium, the hippodrome was rebuilt and enlarged by the Emperor Constantine in 303 when he transferred his capital from Rome to the city he renamed "Constantinople."
The hippodrome was 480 metres long and 117.5 metres wide (525 yds x 125 yds) and seated 60,000 spectators on stone seats supported by giant vaulted arches. Down the long axis of the hippodrome was the spina decorated with columns, statues and obelisks. The chariots and horses raced around the spina. The crowds were divided into four factions known as the Blues, Greens, Whites and Reds, each group associated with a different trade guild in the city. The four colours were linked to the four elements: water, earth, air and fire.
The hippodrome was also the scene for the riot that broke out in 532. Even though the Emperor Justinian arrested the leaders, the mob rampaged through the city and destroyed houses, civic buildings and churches, including the original church of Hagia Sophia. When the mob returned to the hippodrome the next day, Justinian sent in his soldiers and 30,000 rioters were massacred. Today, the seats have disappeared and only parts of the foundations remain. The spina is now a park and includes an obelisk of Thutmosis III (see picture on page 3). Originally set up at Deir el Bahri in Egypt, the granite obelisk was brought to Constantinople in the 4th century AD. It was 60 metres tall and capped with a gold sheath, but only the upper third survived the journey from Egypt. The obelisk is inscribed with the name of Thutmosis in hieroglyphs: "Thutmosis, who crossed the great river of Nahrain [Euphrates] as a mighty conqueror at the head of his army."
Near the obelisk is the Serpentine Column consisting of three intertwined bronze snakes. The top formed a tripod of snakes' heads that once supported a victory trophy taken the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in Greece. The trophy was made from the shields carried by the Persian soldiers who invaded Greece at the Battle of Plataea in 479 BC. Today the trophy has gone, and only the lower portion of the column remains. A drunken Polish diplomat is said to have lopped off the heads after a night of carousing in April 1700-one of the heads is now in the Archaeological Museum. The base of the column is about 3 metres below the modern street level-when the column was first erected the base was on the original ground level.
On one side of the Hippodrome is Hagia Sophia, at one time the largest church in the world. The church was consecrated on 26 December 537 in the presence of the emperor Justinian and his wife, Theodora. On entering the immense building, Justinian is said to have exclaimed: "Glory to God who has thought me worthy to finish this work. Solomon, I have outdone you!" The interior walls were originally covered with mosaics and frescoes, many of which have been restored. The vast open nave was covered with a dome 31 metres (101 ft) in diameter. At its highest point the dome soars 55 metres (180 ft) above the marble floor. Four massive pillars support the dome while other smaller columns are believed to have been recycled from the ruined Temple of Artemis (Diana) at Ephesus. Pierced by hundreds of windows, the whole interior is flooded with soft light. For nearly 1000 years, the church was the scene for countless imperial and religious ceremonies. The building functioned as the principal religious building for the Greek Orthodox Church until the fall of Constantinople in 1453 when it became a Moslem mosque. Four minarets were added to each corner of the building. But since 1934 it has been a national museum.
A few hundred metres away is the famous Sultan Ahmet Mosque, popularly called the "Blue Mosque." It is built partly over the ruins of the Roman hippodrome and partly over the area occupied by the Byzantine imperial palace. Commissioned by the Sultan Ahmet (ruled 1603-17) when he was only 19 years old, the young sultan was so eager to see it completed that he even helped in the construction. The mosque is unique in the world in having six minarets, which at the time was the same number attached to the mosque at Mecca. To avoid problems with the religious authorities, Ahmet sent his architect to Mecca to built a seventh minaret. The feature of the mosque's interior is the beautiful blue light that fills the huge space. Light from the 260 windows of coloured glass reflects off the 20,000 tiles that cover the walls of the prayer hall and galleries. The blue-edged tiles depict a wide variety of flowers and trees.
Nearby is another reminder of Istanbul's past-the huge underground cistern constructed by Justinian in 532 AD. Later abandoned and lost, the inhabitants above had no idea of the existence of the cistern, even though numerous city wells were sunk into it and the people had been using its water for centuries. A French traveller, Pierre Gilles, rediscovered the cistern in the 16th century. Rowing a small boat and lit by torchlight, he explored the cavernous interior supported by 336 marble columns. Any visit to this dark, damp and dimly lit cavern is eerie: water drips from the roof, the wooden ramps and walkways are suspended over the underground lake, and hundreds of dimly-lit columns are reflected in the black water. The columns are a strange mixture of styles and shapes, since the majority were salvaged, or stolen, from many ancient buildings and reused. Some of the columns are upside down-two columns are erected on bases portraying the head and face of Medusa. One face is upside down, the other on its side. The surreal atmosphere is made the more strange by the weird music played over the loudspeakers and the objects of modern art suspended over the water.
The Archaeological Museum is one of the world's great treasure houses of artefacts from the ancient Near East. Our group spent several hours wandering through the galleries housing reliefs of lions and sirrushes from the Ishtar Gate and ceremonial way in Babylon; statues and stelae from Assyria; hundreds of tablets and figurines from ancient Sumer and Nippur; and most significant of all, the rooms filled with Hittite statues, altars, sphinxes and reliefs excavated in digs all over Turkey. The Hamath Stone bears one of the earliest examples of Hittite hieroglyphs ever discovered. Nearby is the cuneiform tablet on which is written the peace treaty between Rameses II of Egypt and Hatusilis III of the Hittites, drawn up after the Battle of Kadesh.
Around the gallery are orthostat reliefs-huge blocks of stone carved with various scenes including gods, chariots, kings, soldiers and servants. The stones formed the gates to temples and palaces. The amazing thing is that most of the objects we viewed came from the time of the later Hittite Empire, after the Hittites had supposedly been destroyed. Of course, this anomaly disappears with the adoption of a revised chronology that brings the end of the Hittite Empire forward from the traditional date of about 1200 BC down to the 8th century BC.
King Hezekiah's Inscription
The building across the courtyard houses the impressive sarcophagi from Lebanon, including the "Alexander Sarcophagus" depicting the battle between Alexander's soldiers and the Persians. However the best galleries are upstairs and on every previous visit to Istanbul, they have been closed. But for some inexplicable reason, this year the upper floors were open. One gallery houses a vast array of pottery and other items excavated from Troy. A famous cuneiform tablet in another case listed the methods used by the Hittites for training horses.
I was overjoyed to find the top floor gallery was finally open. Here are kept such archaeological treasures as the inscription found in Jerusalem describing the construction of Hezekiah's tunnel, 700 years before Christ. Also on view was the famous Gezer Calendar, a fragment of limestone on which is the oldest example of Hebrew writing, from the time of King Solomon, about 950 BC. The tablet, probably a schoolboy's exercise, lists the seasons and what crops are planted in them. Other items in the museum included pottery, oil lamps, jugs, bowls and figurines from Megiddo, Gezer and Samaria, all dating from the Middle Bronze Age, the era we believe is the time of Israel's greatness during the reigns of David and Solomon.
The afternoon was spent wandering through the vast Topkapi Palace, built after 1453 by the Turkish sultans on the site of the ancient acropolis of Constantinople. A rambling collection of sumptuous rooms built around five vast courtyards, the palace is now a museum of Islamic art and Turkish history featuring costumes and warfare, Chinese and Turkish ceramics, gold and silver regalia and lavish jewellery. Most of the objects date from the time of the sultans, but fabulous as the contents of the museums are, even more fabulous are the palace rooms themselves - state rooms, private rooms, the kitchens and bedrooms, audience chambers and religious buildings, stables and servant's quarters, as well as the famous harem. The latter consists of about 300 rooms of which only about 20 elaborately furnished and decorated rooms are open to the public.
Many of our party spent the next day wandering the streets of Istanbul, shopping at the Grand Bazaar or admiring the splendid view from the Galatea Bridge up the famous harbour called "The Golden Horn." Beyond was the Bosphorus, the shining strip of water that separates Europe (where Istanbul is built) from Asia. In the distance we could see the buildings on the other side of the Bosphorus near where Florence Nightingale worked at Scutari. I wandered off my own to see the Mosaic Museum where sections of the mosaic floor from the old Imperial palace of Justinian's time have been excavated and preserved under a rambling collection of steel and glass roofs. The mosaics show all kinds of animals and people from the 4th century AD and are a veritable encyclopaedia of the times.
Early next morning we set off along the northern shore of the Bosphorus for Gallipoli. With lumps in our throats, we trod the beach of Anzac Cove and looked up at the impenetrable heights controlled by the Turks in 1915. Reliving the terrifying scenes, we explored the nearby trenches and foxholes covered by the low shrubs. With a tear or two on our cheeks, we read the inscriptions on the graves of countless young Australian and New Zealand soldiers who died on these shores. No one spoke-there are some places too emotional for words.
We crossed by ferry from Europe to Asia. At this point the strip of water is called "the Dardenelles" but was known in ancient times as "the Hellespont." This was where Xerxes crossed with his Persian troops to invade Greece. When storms threatened to wash away the 600 boats that formed a floating bridge across the water, he is said to have made chains to hold the Hellespont back and had the sea lashed with a whip 300 times to tame its turbulence. A century and a half later, Alexander the Great crossed the Hellespont the other way to attack Persia. As Alexander landed, he hurled his spear into the soil of Asia to claim the Persian dominions for himself.
We drove through Canakkale, always a strategic fortress city, and came to Troy. Although little is left of the ancient city other than a few excavated walls, the sense of history is overpowering and the view from the top of the tell over the surrounding plains is superb. Those of our group who had watched the in-flight movie a few weeks earlier quickly populated the scene with the characters from Homer's classic story told in The Illiad. We wandered through the ruins, a confusing array of nine cities and 46 levels of occupation superimposed on each other, each exposed at different levels. Turkish archaeologists are convinced that Troy VI was the level at which the Trojan War took place, while American archaeologists argue that Troy VIIA was the city in which the wooden horse was dragged in. No one can be sure even now. A modern wooden horse built near the entrance gate of the city reminds all who come to Troy of the famous story when the Greeks hid inside the horse and were dragged inside, to attack and capture the city from within.
Exploring the Seven Churches
It was late afternoon before we arrived at our superb hotel overlooking the harbour at Ayvalik, a beautiful tourist town on the Aegean coast. But we couldn't linger long-next morning we left for Bergema, ancient Pergamos, and one of the seven cities mentioned in the Book of Revelation as the location for a Christian church in the first century AD (Revelation chapters 2 and 3). The royal city of the Attalid kings was atop a small mountain overlooking the modern city. Here are the ruins of the palaces of Philetaerus, Eumenes I, Attalus I, and Eumenes II and III, the kings who ruled western Asia Minor between 300 BC and 133 BC. The theatre seating 10,000 people was carved into the slope of the steep hill, while further around the hill was the most famous structure, the Altar of Zeus, now reconstructed in Berlin's Pergamon Museum. After the last Attalid king bequeathed his empire to Rome, the Romans erected several vast temples including one to the Emperor Trajan .Of particular interest was the ruined library of Pergamos that rivalled even the great library of Alexandria for the quantity and range of ancient scrolls it housed. Parchment, a writing material made from the skins of animals, was originally named "pergamene" after the city where it was invented in the second century BC.
Below the Acropolis was the Asclepion, a temple complex that included a gymnasium, sports ground, theatre and hospital to which the sick came from all over the ancient world. Named after the god Asclepios, depicted as snake, the priests gave their patients hallucinogenic drugs, made them bathe in a sacred spring and then led them through an underground tunnel to the basement of a temple. While the patients slept, they dreamed of the gods who, they believed appeared to them and described what treatments were needed to cure them of their ailments. The treatment usually involved some kind of offering or payment, after which a cure could take place! That afternoon we explored the centre of another of the cities of the "Seven Churches", known in ancient times as Smyrna and now called Izmir. Excavations of the Agora commenced here many years ago, but in a new burst of enthusiasm the antiquities department has recommenced excavations and opened up huge areas that have exposed walls, underground bazaars and even the gate. It is planned that part of the agora will be restored with modern shops occupying the ancient buildings and selling the kinds of goods that were sold here 2,000 years ago.
The next day we explored Ephesus, the first of the Seven Churches listed in Revelation. Passing through the Magnesian Gate of the city, we walked along the marble paved streets lined with public bathhouses, civic buildings, temples to various gods and emperors, houses of the wealthy and the ruins of elaborate fountains. This was the city where the apostle Paul preached around 55-57 AD. At one end of the street is the famous Library of Celsus, reconstructed from the fragments and now the most impressive sight at Ephesus. At the other end of the city is the theatre where the riot took place recorded in Acts chapter 19 when the citizens of the city gathered in protest against the preaching of Paul and chanted for 2 hours "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!"
The temple of Diana (known to the Greeks as Artemis) is a couple of kilometres outside the walls of the ancient city. Once one of the "Seven Wonders of the World" hardly anything is left except a single marble column, reconstructed from the mangled bits of many other columns and erected in a swamp which was the site of the magnificent temple. In one of the great adventure stories of archaeology, John Turtle Wood identified the site in the mid-19th century. Undeterred by disease, the collapse of a trench, appalling food and accommodation, a broken collar-bone, an attempted assassination, and a murder, he continued his search for the temple. An inscription found in the theatre of Ephesus provided the vital clue: at the time of a performance, certain images were brought from the temple along the sacred way through the Magnesian Gate to the theatre. Starting from the gate, Wood located the sacred way and followed it back to the site of the temple.
A three-hour bus journey, following the main highway west, brought us to the site of ancient Laodicea. On my previous visits to the site, my fingers itched to scratch away the dirt of this unexcavated tell. Now, an archaeological dig is in full swing on the site. Already they have exposed a long stretch of marble paved street, the ruins of a monumental fountain, and most of the agora, or central square of the city. With the group following me, we marched off across the grassy slopes and easily identified the outline of the unexcavated hippodrome, the lines of seats clearly visible in the grass. Not far away was the bathhouse, fed by water brought in atop an arched aqueduct. One slope contained the clear outlines of the theatre, still in ruins. We stopped near the remains of a large church, possibly the one where the church council of the mid-4th century AD decreed that Christians should no longer observe the Sabbath on Saturday but should rather work on that day and honour the Lord's Day [Sunday] instead. That night we stayed in a hotel near the thermal springs of Pamukkale, known in ancient times and in the New Testament as Hierapolis (Colossians 4:13). People have been coming to this city for thousands of years to bathe in the hot mineral water and they still do today. Our hotel was equipped with hot pools for bathing, and we saw more the next day as we explored the ancient city. The ruins included an impressive gate, a well-preserved theatre, extensive bathhouses, and the church built over the reputed tomb of St Philip, the evangelist in the book of Acts who baptised the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26-40).
White crystal terraces
Below the ancient city are the white travertine cliffs and terraces, basins and channels that make Pamukkale famous. Gleaming stalactites and crystalline formations, all made of natural salts, have been left behind by the evaporating hot water as it tumbles down into the valley below. The lukewarm water provided the inspiration for the message to the Christians in nearby Laodicea-their faith was like their water, lukewarm and insipid to taste.
The following day our bus took us over the mountains to Alasehir, the site of ancient Philadelphia. Little of the ancient city, mentioned in the book of Revelation, has been found, although a 4th century AD ruined church stands in the middle of the city. We photographed the scant remains and travelled on to Sart, the rather miserable village built on the site of ancient Sardis. Here there was more to see-the remains of the Roman road, the 3rd cent AD synagogue and the large gymnasium and sports complex. Archaeologists who excavated the 4th century AD shops identified one as a paint shop belonging to Jacob, another was a hardware shop, while the shop of Sabbatios had a small private toilet. Another shop belonged to an elder of the nearby Jewish synagogue. Crossing the modern highway (built over the ancient Roman road) we explored the ruined Temple of Artemis, built in 334 BC and still standing in the 4th cent AD when it was abandoned, probably because the spread of Christianity rendered the temple unnecessary. Although much of the marble architecture was looted as a source of building material elsewhere, enough remains to remind the visitor of the glories of the past. In one corner of the temple is the small roofless Christian church reminding us that Sardis was another of the Seven Churches mentioned in the book of Revelation.
We travelled back to Izmir for our final night in Turkey then next morning flew to Istanbul to connect with our plane to Singapore and Sydney. Next year's Diggings tour leaves on 25 April 2006 for Egypt, Jordan and Israel. The tour includes an opportunity for a stopover in Turkey and an extra option to see all the sites mentioned in this article. For further information and to receive a free tour brochure, write to Diggings, PO Box 127, Toronto NSW 2283, or phone Sydney (02) 9477 3595 or Newcastle (02) 4950 5603.
by David Coltheart
