Istanbul and the Islands Armchair Voyage: Hellenic Cruise

Benjamin Disraeli said of his wife, "She's an excellent creature,

"but she never can remember which came first,

"the Greeks or the Romans."

A Hellenic cruise is rather like that.

It's a strain on the historical imagination.

Greeks everywhere, but what different kinds of Greeks,

and how they get mixed up with Romans and Asians

and with their modern selves.

Here's the island of Mykonos in the Aegean, for instance,

holiday resort for jaded modern Athenians.

Mykonos, nothing much ever happens there.

No ancient temples, no indiscreet Greek gods.

It's a living place with its windmills

and a tiny Byzantine church for every day of the year.

But what the sea and the sun and the whitewash here achieve

is good enough.

After their breather at Mykonos,

the ship and its 300 passengers were bound for the island of Lesbos.

The ship did its voyaging by night

and disgorged us each morning at another place.

As an experience, it seemed almost unreal.

However, here we were in Lesbos.

We were within sight of the Turkish mainland,

but yet here's an island that has preserved

its essential Greek form almost better than any other,

an island of olive groves and simple living.

3,000 years separate Homer from this olive grove.

But the plough's the same,

and the ploughman's namesake fought at Troy.

HE SPEAKS GREEK

High up in the mountains of Lesbos lies Agiasos.

Here, the local ladies most graciously entertain us,

and their friends,

with the solemn and simple dances of the countryside.

There are those who like the bouncy earnestness of country dances,

not least the dancers themselves.

FOLK MUSIC

And now on towards the mainland of Turkey.

There, we're brought up against one of the astonishing features

of Greek civilisation, its tremendous reach.

Why, it's found even as far away as India.

'Often in the West, its best preserved relic is its theatre.

'So it seemed timely to discuss Greek drama

'with Professor Stanford of Dublin.'

What would you say, Stanford,

is your primary interest in the Greek drama,

its antiquity or its essential modernity?

Well, in a queer kind of way, both, I'd say.

If we went and saw a performance, I think,

in the theatre of Dionysus in the time of Pericles,

it'd seem weird, in many ways, completely outlandish.

But yet if we thought of the essentials behind it,

I'm convinced that they're the essentials of modern drama.

But it was first and foremost a religious rite, wasn't it?

Ah, yes. That made it, in a sense.

People didn't go there tired after their day's work.

They went there at a great festival of the god Dionysus

early in the morning, fresh sunlight,

everyone keen and interested to see the religious side of it.

-It began at the right end of the day.

-Exactly, yes.

Then they could get the full impact

of this extraordinarily complex form of drama.

There was music, there was dancing,

there were the elaborate rhythms, more elaborate than anything

we know, and the whole impact must have been quite tremendous.

We are, in some sense, returning to that, aren't we, now?

Yes, I'd agree with you there.

I think many of the most, so-called most modern developments

of drama are really getting back to the Greek essentials of the drama.

You mean Julius Caesar played in front of a packing case?

That kind of thing. Get rid of the scenery, get rid of the furniture,

get rid of the footlights get rid of the roof if you can,

and concentrate on the people and the words.

Do you think we should get back to masks,

like those of the classical actors?

Not entirely, though I've seen a good many mask plays,

and I think they're tremendously effective in their own way,

much better than any close-up of these film stars,

as far as I'm concerned, I must say.

I've seen masks used by actors in the East. It has certain advantages.

You know at once who the villain and who the hero is.

But of course, it has obvious disadvantages.

Well, it cramps.

One can't have mobility of features.

But I do think it gets the idea of the person

rather than the ego of the actor. And what we're up against

is the ego of these confounded actors most of the time, I really think so!

In a sense, your classical drama was a drama of disembodied ideas.

Well, it's subtler than that.

It's as if the character of Agamemnon, of Oedipus,

took possession of the person and transformed them.

It's not that it becomes abstract or symbolic entirely.

-It's a transformation, demon possession, if you like.

-Yes, yes.

Well now, you say we're tending more and more to approach

the classical ideals and the classical techniques,

even, in certain respects.

I think so. I think one can go back to Greece like to a pure fountain

and draw the original draught of water,

and then come into the modern age again

and use it here with extraordinary success.

One of those draughts of water can be drawn at Miletus.

In terms of sheer power, this place, Miletus,

produced more colonies than any other Greek state.

Its theatre shows it at once to have been one of the great bearers

of Greek tradition in Asia Minor.

Here, 10,000 spectators watched the classical and less classical dramas

of Greece and Rome.

Here at Miletus, modern science was forestalled by

the inspired oracles of Anaximander and Thales.

Living creatures arose from the most moist element

as it was evaporated by the sun.

"Man was like another animal, namely a fish,

"in the beginning" - so wrote Anaximander,

astonishingly near the mark.

And his teacher, Thales, even foretold an eclipse.

Miletus eventually silted up and was left high and dry,

a fate it shared with its neighbouring rival, Priene.

Between them still flows the River Meander,

which has enriched our language by its name

as it meanders down to the receding sea.

On the other side of the Meander lies the erstwhile rival of Miletus,

Priene. In contrast of the flamboyance of Miletus,

Priene had something

akin to the Anglo-Saxon spirit of understatement.

Its council chamber was small.

Obviously the town council was a modest size.

Its theatre abstained from all grandeur.

But its perfection seems almost enhanced by the passage of time.

Overgrown though it is, the beginnings of what

we now call town planning can still be seen in this austere little town.

Certainly, the 340 dwellings that have been excavated

display the Greek house at its most characteristic.

An unostentatious entrance, an inner courtyard,

and small rooms around it for living and sleeping.

It takes an effort of the imagination to set

this carefully perfected civilisation amongst the rugged

fantasy of the Turkish landscape,

to look at present-day life

and then to think back 2,500 years.

FOLK MUSIC

North of Priene, on the way to Istanbul, we called at Pergamon.

Down in the valley lies one of those splendid testimonies

to the almost Edwardian extravagance of the Roman Empire,

the spa erected in honour of the healing god Asclepius.

Here I met Professor Boehringer of Berlin,

the present excavator of the site,

and with him drank the radioactive water of the place.

These Romans had it all, down to medicinal waters and mud baths.

When the disreputable emperor, Caracalla,

got too bored with Rome,

he came here to recuperate.

The theatre, with its stage, is nearly perfect

and could in fact be used today.

A subterranean passage led to the pump room,

to protect those in search of better health

from the rigours of fresh air.

Professor Boehringer himself discovered this pump room

and explained its commodious proportions

with expansive enthusiasm.

The Romans certainly did nothing by halves.

They administered to the needs of the body

with unfaltering devotion,

and they knew how to keep a large place warm

better than we know in Britain 2,000 years later.

From the temple of healing to the Hill of Pergamon

is only a short ride,

and yet it's 400 years back in time from the Roman spa.

This was the capital of a sturdy kingdom

which held the Barbarians at bay, whether from

the interior of Asia Minor or from across the sea in Europe.

From this towering citadel, the Kings of Pergamon

freed Asia Minor from the invading Gauls.

Upon it, they erected an altar over the ashes of their victims.

But they were more than redoubtable soldiers, these Pergamese.

They were Greek in the fullest sense.

Their library, now a few broken and dishevelled walls,

was second only to that of Alexandria.

The word "parchment" is indeed derived from Pergamon.

Out of the steep hillside, they hacked one of

the most impressive theatres of classical times.

The arts of peace and war here went hand-in-hand.

Here is the arsenal where they stored

the great stone cannonballs which they catapulted upon their foes.

These same people did immortal justice to their victims

by sculpturing their dying agony in stone.

For Byron's dying gladiator was in reality a dying Gaul.

"He leans upon his hand.

"His manly brow consents to death, but conquers agony."

24 hours later, we arrived at that symbolic bridge

between Europe and Asia, Istanbul, the ancient Constantinople.

Its present skyline of mosques obscures the historical fact

that this was a Greek settlement to start with.

This was Byzantium, later, Constantinople. Today, Istanbul.

Founded 26 centuries ago.

Greek colony,

outpost of the Roman Empire,

capital of the Eastern Empire,

Hellenic, then Roman, then Byzantine,

but always Greek at heart

until 1453, when Islam finally triumphed.

Istanbul is one of the great hinges of history.

Constantinople lasted for more than 1,000 years.

Its heart was broken, not by the Turks,

who are commonly accused of the crime,

but by the rascally Venetian Crusaders

who, in the name of Christianity, plundered the city

250 years before the Turks.

We saw some of their loot in Venice at the beginning of the cruise.

In many ways, the Turks picked up

the artistic traditions of Constantinople,

where the Greeks had dropped them and, incidentally,

practised a tolerance that deserves our gratitude.

The centre, often the troubled centre of Constantinople

in its great days was the Hippodrome,

where chariot races and politics were equally at home.

Some of its monuments stand like petrified ghosts

in the modern square.

An obelisk from ancient Egypt,

brought here by the Romans,

and set up on a carved pedestal, showing the Emperor and his court.

Next to it, the famous twisted bronze column

brought by Constantine from Delphi in Greece,

the oldest Greek monument in Istanbul.

But infinitely the greatest of the Byzantine remains

is Santa Sophia, that mighty church,

built by the Emperor Justinian in the 6th century.

In the mechanics of architecture,

this is one of the outstanding buildings of the world.

Indeed, the whole span of Greek architecture is contained

between Santa Sophia at one end

and the Parthenon of Athens at the other.

1,000 years.

Athens marks the highest attainment

of purely static and restful architecture

but here at Santa Sophia, we are in the presence

of a perennial battle in brick and stone,

dome fighting dome, and stability secured by

the balanced opposition of forces, much as in a Gothic cathedral.

In this great church, the last of the Byzantine emperors,

the 12th Constantine, received the Eucharist for a last time

on the 28th April, 1453.

The following morning, the besieging Turks

at last breached the splendid walls of the city

and as the Turkish Cicerone has it,

"With the war cries from 1,000 breasts,

"mingled the death rattle of the countless wounded."

The Emperor himself died, sword in hand.

10,000 refugees packed into Santa Sophia

where, a few hours previously, the priests, they said,

had been furiously debating the sex of angels.

The Turks broke in, and there was such slaughter

that when Mohammed the Conqueror rode into the church,

his force trod bodies piled ten feet deep.

High up on one of the pillars is proof in the shape of a human hand.

It is the imprint of the hand of the conqueror

who struck the pillar and bade all bloodshed cease.

Thereafter, the high altar gave place to a prayer niche

facing Mecca. The greatest church in Christendom had become a mosque.

ISLAMIC PRAYER PLAYS

Istanbul is busily turning its back on history.

New highways instead of twisted medieval streets.

Instead of picturesque slums, new concrete houses.

A little of the trimness of a Greek or Roman town is retained

though with much loss to the artist and the antiquary.

When the ship was sailing west again,

I discussed the significance of Constantinople

with a Byzantine scholar,

Michael Maclagan, Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford.

Well, it's goodbye to the domes and minarets of Constantinople.

Ah, that's good.

Goodbye at last.

I never leave the place without wanting to come back again.

How it changes. Every time I go there, it's different.

But it changes. But the great things are always the same.

There are the grand walls and there is the dome of Santa Sophia.

Yes, but poor old Constantinople.

It's always being shattered by somebody.

The Christians, the Turks and now the bulldozers.

And shabby, too, by the move of the capital to Ankara.

Yes, but it's going ahead.

These great new bull bars are plunging through the city

to the gates. They're really restoring the old plan.

They're doing a good deal of it.

Clearing away all of this picturesque mess of the Middle Ages.

It's a pity. These concrete houses and bungalows going up,

but it's progress.

It's a very great pity we can't do some more digging

under all these places, and find out something about it.

Because, in fact, we always forget how much Europe does owe

to Constantinople.

I would prefer to go as far as to say that

there would not be a Western Christian civilisation

if Constantinople hadn't held out the Saracens in 717.

But, just a point there, you always think, or kind of think,

of Constantinople as a bulwark of European civilisation against Asia.

As though we had to avoid Asia, rather like a bad smell.

But, isn't there another point, too, that it was really

the channel between Asia and Europe?

Oh, indeed it was. The meeting place of East and West.

Its civilisation was undoubtedly an amalgam,

partly of things that came back from Rome

and things that came in, new, from the East.

I wonder how much of Constantinople was really due to the Greek genius

and how much it owes to Asia.

Well, I think one could say the foundation was Greek.

The stability, the enormous efficiency of the administration,

800 years of an un-devalued coinage was perhaps Roman

but a great deal of the artistic side, probably, I think,

the dome itself, came from somewhere further east.

Is it really fair to describe Santa Sophia as the last

great gift of Greek genius to the world?

No, I don't think it is.

To me, Santa Sophia is the first and perhaps the greatest

monument of Byzantine architecture.

I would say that Byzantine history

and Byzantine art begin at this point.

I suppose every work of genius is essentially a fresh beginning.

In that sense, Santa Sophia is new.

It's not only new. The staggering thing is that

Byzantine architecture begins, as you might say,

with this terrific bang.

It starts off with its finest and full-blown work

springing suddenly, like Minerva,

fully fledged, out of the head of Jove.

Another point, Maclagan, naturally, on a Hellenic cruise,

we tend to think in terms of Greece.

But what of the Turkish contribution?

Well, I don't think that we can say that Europe has much debt to Turkey

but, if we look at this skyline which is now fading away from us

in the background there, we will see that the beauty of the skyline

of Istanbul, as we call it now, is mainly due to the Turks.

Apart from the great dome of Santa Sophia,

this ravishing selection of minarets in different sizes and patterns

is all Ottoman art.

But based on the Greek, so ultimately we come back to

the Greeks, after all.

I think we do, because the highest Turkish architecture,

the work, perhaps particularly, of Sinan,

their rather underrated but noble architect,

is indeed probably a good deal derived from Greek models

although the Turks don't care so much to think so.

But his predecessor, working for the first Turkish conqueror

was a Greek. That links the two.

-That links the two.

-Some more coffee.

Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Turkish, each dominion in turn

has left its traces along the coast of Asia Minor.

And now on our way towards the centre of the Greek world

we are bound for Rhodes, a mixture of them all.

Rhodes was once a commercial rival to Athens.

That monstrous bronze statue, the Colossus of Rhodes,

one of the seven wonders of the world,

towered by the harbour, 105 feet high,

until it crashed in an earthquake

and was ultimately loaded onto 900 camels.

When, at the end of the 13th century, the crusading order,

the Knights of St John of Jerusalem were thrown out of the Holy Land,

they captured Rhodes and held it against all comers for 200 years.

Here, as later in Malta, the Knights carved their armorial bearings,

built their mansions and held onto this lonely outpost

of Western Christianity.

The walls of this fortress city were long held impregnable.

And each section was looked after by a different nationality.

This was the English section of the wall.

the Medieval Grand Master's Palace looks upon a Byzantine church

and a Turkish mosque is but a few streets away.

When one thinks that the almost unending conflict

in the eastern Mediterranean is with us still,

it is useful to remind the zealous of Rhodes

that there's hardly anyone, on this island at least,

whose ancestor hasn't come here as the result of some war,

fought for some faith or other.

Yet, today, there is harmony here,

and the leisured peace of a Mediterranean backwater.

A Hellenic cruise in these waters is a history lesson

for us to remember and to ponder.

But, for those who live here, to forget if they can.

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