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How to Tour Italy: Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!

The history of Greece versus Troy is fantastic. Two of the world's best books / epic poems tell us the story. Evidence of the epic war are everywhere in Italy through art.

The Vatican Musuem has one of my favorite statues that delivers through sculpture one of the pinnacle moments of the Trojan War, has been touched by Michelangelo, and is considered one of the finest examples of Ex Uno Lapide (carved from a single stone) in the world.

The Laocoon was carved in 25 BC...yes 25 BC by three Greek sculptors. It is the priest Laocoon and his two sons being dragged to their deaths by a serpent. The serpent was sent by Apollo as punishment for Laocoon's awareness of Greek treachery. The gods played an enourmous role in the fall of Troy.

The Greeks seemed to leave the beaches of Troy leaving behind a gift of a giant wooden horse. This gift was the brainchild of Odysseus. The Greeks sat quietly in the belly of the wooden horse, the Trojans opened up the city walls dragging the gift into the square. The Trojans, thinking the war was over, celebrated all night. Late into the evening when the Trojans slept the Greeks dropped from the horse and...well, the rest is history.

Laocoon knew this was a treacherous gift and warned the Trojans. Apollo punished Laocoon for his foresight and dragged him and his children into the sea.

This great sculpture was found in a vineyard in Rome on the Esquiline Hill. It was brought to Rome from Greece by Emperor Titus in 69 AD. The pope at the time of the discovery of the Laocoon was Pope Julius II...of course. Michelangelo himself went to identify the great sculpture, repaired the arm of the Laocoon (you can still see the cracks). Julius II offered the vineyard owner 600 gold ducats for life to own the great work.

It is now placed in the Vatican Museums and is one of their prize works.

Oh, by the way, the phrase, "beware of Greeks bearing gifts" was uttered by Laocoon and has remained a timeless phrase to this very day.

PATRICK COMERFORD: Kuşadasi: a city without a memory?

‘Warehouse: Greek Shop’ ... attracting shoppers from neighbouring Samos or one of the lingering signs in the Bazaar in Kuşadasi of the Greeks of Neopolis? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

I have been in Turkey about half a dozen times in recent years, and this week – for the third time – I am staying in Kuşadası, a resort town on Turkey’s Aegean coast. Kuşadası is about 100 km (60 miles) south of İzmir, and its economy is almost totally dependent on tourism. This is the biggest and best-known holiday resort on Turkey’s Aegean coast. It boasts one of the world’s deepest water ports and it is frequently visited by some of the biggest luxury cruise liners. It also boasts a large luxury yacht marina, and the seafront is lined with chic cafés and bars.

Kuşadası’s residential population of 50,000 rises to over half a million during the summer months when the large resort fills with tourists. They come from Turkey itself as well as northern Europe and the Balkans, especially Romania. Their numbers are added to by hotel staff, bar staff, building workers, dolmus and taxi drivers, restaurant workers, and the staff in holiday villages, aquaparks, rock bars, beach clubs and hotels. The Kismet Hotel (http://www.kismet.com.tr/), with its elegant, landscaped gardens high above the yacht marina, was once part-owned by the late Hümeyra Özbaş (1917-2000), a Turkish princess who was the granddaughter of the last Ottoman Sultan, Vahdeddin (Mehmet VI).

Sunset over the Aegean at the Palmin Sunset Plaza Hotel in Kuşadasi

Estate agents in Kuşadası and along the seafront at Ladies’ Beach are still bravely trying to sell holiday apartments and villas. For those much younger than I am, throbbing Bar Street is the place to go at night. I am staying in the very pleasant Palmin Sunset Plaza Hotel (http://www.palminsunsetplaza.com/hotel.php), a few miles outside Kuşadası. The local dolmus service means it is within easy reach of the city’s charming old quarter, with its narrow cobbled streets and alleyways, beautiful mosques and fountains, old town walls and towers, small cafés and restaurants – some of which even have secret gardens.

Kuşadası stands on a bay in the Aegean with the peninsula of Guvercin Ada sticking out into the sea at one end, and the mountain of Kaz Dagi behind. Above the port, a brash statue of Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish state, peers down on the city.

The brash honky-tonk presentation of Bar Street and the pervasive modern Turkish political climate give the appearances of a city without a past, a memory or a history. Apart from two 17th century mosques, the few remains of a tower and an old city wall, and the beguiling caravanserai, there is no indication that this is a city with a memory. There are no plaques marking the sites of former churches, basilicas, libraries or schools, or the homes of eminent past residents.

The narrow side streets and steep stepped alleyways look like the streets and alleyways of other Aegean towns – including those on the neighbouring Greek island of Samos. But their former names and their previous residents have been wiped out of Kuşadası’s collective memory.

Yet this is a town with a classical history worth remembering and recalling.

The area has been a centre of art and culture since the earliest times and has been settled by many civilisations since being founded by the Leleges people around 3000 BC.

Pygale, about 3 km north of Kusadasi on the road out to Ephesus, is said by Xenophon, to have once been the refuge of Agamemnon. Strabo in his Geography says that Agamemnon established Pygale and settled large numbers of his soldiers there. Strabo also says there was a temple to the moon goddess Munkyia in Pygale, and that during the Trojan Wars in the 13th or 12th century BC Pygale was a place for curing soldiers and repairing ships.

Later settlers included the Aeolians in the 11th century BC and the Ionians in the 9th century. Originally seamen and traders, the Ionians built a number of settlements on this part of the Anatolian coast, including Neopolis, close to the present site of Kuşadası. This was an outpost of Ephesus, and Neopolis was a minor port for vessels trading along the Aegean coast. However, Neopolis was overshadowed by Ephesus until the harbour of Ephesus silted up.

Panionium, 25 km south of Kuşadası on the Davutlar-Güzelçamlı road, was the central meeting place of the Ionian League or Panionic League in the 7th century BC. However, the ruins are in poor condition and their authenticity is disputed.

From the 7th century BC on, the coast was ruled by the Lydians from their capital in Sardis, and then from 546 BC by the Persians. In 334 BC it came under the rule of Alexander the Great, and was a minor centre of Hellenistic culture. His soldiers are said to have used Pygale as an entertainment and treatment centre. The Romans took possession of the coast in the 2nd century BC.

In Byzantine times, Kuşadası was known as Ephesus Neopolis and then as Ania. As Byzantine, Venetian and Genoese traders worked the coast, the port became known as Scala Nuova or “new port,” an Italian variant of the Greek Neopolis. The island was garrisoned, and the town centre moved from the hillside to the coast.

From 1086, the area began to come under Turkish control and these Aegean ports became the final destinations of caravan routes to the Orient. However, this arrangement was upset by the Crusades, and the coast then came under Byzantine control once again. The remains of a castle at Guvercin Ada or “Pigeon Island,” the peninsula at the end of the bay, date from these days. There is a another Venetian or Byzantine castle at Kadıkalesi, 10 km north, along the Kuşadası-Davutlar road

The Turks took control of the area once again in 1280. Kuşadası was brought into the Ottoman Empire by Mehmet I in 1413. The Ottomans built the city walls and the caravanserai that still stand today. The Kaleiçi Camii mosque was built in 1618 for the Grand Vizier, Öküz Kara Mehmet Pasha, and two years later in 1618 the Öküz Mehmet Pasha caravanserai was built near the docks for travellers and seamen.

The minaret of a mosque in Kuşadasi ... but where are the old churches, schools and tavernas? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

In 1834 the castle and garrison on the island were rebuilt and expanded, becoming the focus of the town. From 1919 to 1921, the town was occupied by Italian troops, and was then held by Greece until it was captured by the Turks on 7 September 1922.

After the disastrous events of 1922-1923, the local Greek-speaking population was deported and the town was renamed Kuşadası. The name comes from the Turkish words kuş (bird) and ada (island) as the peninsula is said to look like the shape of a bird’s head when seen from the sea.

The name change was just one small part of the process that ensued in the following years, wiping out the memory of the Greek, Armenian and Jewish communities that had lived in Neopolis and Scala Nuova for many generations and many centuries. The census returns from 1919 show that over 50 per cent of the people in the towns, villages and rural areas of this part of Turkey were Greek-speaking Christians at the time.

The Czech writer, Milan Kundera, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, offers a series of reflections on the importance of memory as the root from which emerges the self-understanding by individuals and groups of their identities. In one of the essays in that book, Kundera analyses the writings of Franz Kafka and comments:

“Prague in his novels is a city without memory. It has even forgotten its name. Nobody there remembers anything, nobody recalls anything … No song is capable of uniting the city’s present with its past by recalling the moments of its birth.

“Time in Kafka’s novel is the time of humanity that has lost its continuity with humanity, of a humanity that no longer knows anything nor remembers anything, that lives in nameless cities with nameless streets or streets different from the ones they had yesterday, because a name means continuity with the past and people without a past are people without a name.”

In this essay, Kundera explores the theme in relation to the way in which an attempt had been made by the state authorities to change the awareness of the identity of the Czech people since the end of World War II. An attempt has been made to erase the nation’s memory, and through this the identity of the people has been eroded. As Kundera notes when he quotes his friend Milan Hubi approvingly: “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory.”

The culture, traditions, songs, religious commitment, political ideas embodied above all in the literature and the poetry of the community are important vehicles communicating and challenging the identity of the society.

From the 1920s on, memories and names have been erased in Kuşadası and the surrounding hinterland.

Kuşadası was a fruit-growing rural district until the 1970s, when the first holiday apartments were built here. It first grew into a small resort town with holiday flats built as housing co-operatives for families from Ankara, İzmir, Denzil and other Turkish cities, and then – from the mid-1980s – Kuşadası grew into the centre of mass tourism that it is today.

Some of the old houses near the seafront that have been converted to bars and cafes are the last remnants of old Kuşadası. The city walls once had three gates, but only one remains today. The old street names have been forgotten. The Greek people who had been here for thousands of years and who were the majority of people in the city until the beginning of the last century were forced to leave in 1923 and they never returned.

On Friday [28 August 2009], I visited the mountain village of Sirince, east of Selcuk, a once-thriving Greek village that provides the setting for Dido Sotiriou’s novel, Farewell to Anatolia. With its crumbling churches and houses, it is a disturbing reminder of the violent ethnic cleansing in this region in the 1920s. I plan to write more about this visit over the next few weeks. But as I travelled back through Selcuk and Ephesus to Kuşadası in the cooling evening, I wondered how many similar villages were erased from local memories and histories because there was no Dido Sotiriou to revive the stories of grandparents forced to leave unwillingly.

There was another reminder of those disturbing and murderous events and the loss of memory and story, diversity and pluralismn, as I returned from Samos this week. A Greek monk on board the small ferry removed his cassock and hat so that he could disembark at Kuşadası in casual clothes. Perhaps there is still a small Greek Christian remnant in this area that relies on the ministry of visiting priests.

Occasionally I have been spoken to Greek in hushed tones by a taxi driver who thinks I am a Greek priest or by a shop owner who tells me his mother or grandmother spoke Greek. Every now and then I am surprised to find Greek used on a shop sign or in the bazaar. But after less than three generations, the Greeks of Neopolis and Ania have been forgotten, their history has been erased, there is no-one to keep their memory alive, and tourists must never be told their story. And there is no novel by Dido Sotiriou or Louis de Bernières to bring them back to life again.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute

Poetry and Pop/Rocks

I think that songwriters have essentially taken over an old form of literature and become today's poets. I expect disagreement with this statement, and perhaps even confusion for those of you who know that i, myself, am a poet. This might be less confusing for those of you who know that i am an aspiring song writer, and perhaps even less so for those of you who know that the most common comment i get from people who read my poems is "well, i know this is a poem, but it kinda sounds more like a song to me..."

But perhaps i should explain myself. Back in the day, poets were hot stuff. I mean, the women were swooning and crawling all over them because they said such moving things - some more...moving than others, depending on what type of poetry we're talking about here. There was a whole genre called Seduction Poetry, after all. I mean, when you get to the Romantics, those guys were the bad boys of poetry. But poets used to be widely published and read all over the place. It was shorter than a book, so it was easier to read and more likely to be read aloud. They evoked emotions that anyone, regardless of status, could relate too. And now poetry is almost a lost art. I say almost because lots of poetry is still written and published - but who reads it? How many modern poets have you read? Do you know how people usually react when i tell them i write poetry? And this is after they understand that it is not angry, angsty, 'i hate my life and no one understands me' lines, but honest to god poetry? They are quiet for a moment, cock their head to the side, and say "huh. Really? I didn't know that..." Not that they should, if i haven't told them, but it's unexpected. If you aren't e.e. cummings or Maya Angelou, nobody expects you to write poems. I mean, who does that??

And i feel like songs have sort of taken the place of poetry. They are short, lyrical, and they make us feel. And most importantly, the ones who write the songs are quite popular with the ladies. I mean, think of the old poets who all died of syphilis. Women love poetry and flowery words - it's a stereotype, but it's often true. I mean, i recently learned that Robert Burns had 13 illegitimate children...that we know of. THIRTEEN. And if you think about it, that's how it is for musicians and rock stars today. They get all the girls.

And some might argue that popular music often does not try to evoke emotions, or make a person think - sometimes it just a narration of crude acts and profanities strung together. Well, there are many songs that are trite and shallow, have very little behind them, if they mean anything at all. But there are some songs that have lyrics that really are poetry. One of my favorite examples of this is Ben Folds. He has his share of songs that are fun and well done, though the lyrics are not poetic - such as in Song for the Dumped, in which the chorus says "give me my money back, give me my money back you bitch. And don't forget to give me back my black t-shirt." But this is also the same guy who wrote the song Magic, which contains the lyrics "you're the magic that holds the sky up from the ground. You're the breath that blows these cold winds 'round. Trading places with an angel now." And while the first song is more or less an angry excuse to yell at your ex, the second song is so beautiful. It's hard to believe that the same person wrote both songs.

And there are some bands or songwriters who write songs that, while they might not have the most eloquent language, still have an element of poetry to them. They still make us feel. The best songs make us feel not only because of the melody, but because of what the words say. Not a lot of people achieve both at once. But a band i like for this reason is We the Living. You may have seen me mention them before here. That is bound to happen because i like them quite a bit. I find their music inspiring, both melodically and in terms of the lyrics. And the lyrics are very intelligent ones, often referencing older works - just like the old poets used to do. One song even references the Trojan war and reads(listens?) like a love letter from Menelaus to Helen. According to TS Eliot, the most original things we can create come from taking bits and pieces from the great writers who influenced us.

And poetry and songs can go hand in hand quite often. Numerous poems by W.B. Yeats or Robert Burns have been made into songs - sometimes people know the song better than the original poem. Which i suppose proves my point. And it's an interesting transition - i suppose songs in way feel like they continue on long after they are done, even more so than poetry. But I'm not saying that poetry being replaced with music is a good or a bad thing. It is what it is.

The matter of Troy

By coincidence, my last trip to the comics shop I patronize produced the last issue of Marvel Illustrated: The Iliad, and the latest issue of Age of Bronze. Which gives an opportunity to compare two completely different approaches to reinterpreting the Trojan War.

When people retell the tales of Troy, there are four aspects that I think are always worth looking at (these are notions I've developed partly out of conversations I've had with the likes of Nick Lowe, Paula James and Lynn Fotheringham, so they deserve credit). First, there's the issue of the 'canon'. Most of us know these stories in their most famous versions, and this can sometimes lead to imagining that they are fixed in that form. This tends to manifest itself in attacks by some classicists on retellings for 'changing things', which was the fate of Wolfgang Petersen's film Troy. Other treatments stick pretty closely to the received version, such as Daniel Morden and Hugh Lupton's version of The Iliad, which, as I recall (it's a while since I saw it), only deviates in certain minor details (and even this received criticism from some quarters). In fact, the 'canon' is a mirage. Euripides, Chaucer and Shakespeare did not feel themselves bound by Homer, and it is unfair to expect modern writers to be (see here for a fuller discussion of this in relation to Petersen's film).

Then there's the scope of the retelling. Most versions choose to tell 'the story of the Trojan War', from the rape of Helen to the Wooden Horse; Petersen's Troy fits into this, as does Lindsay Clarke's The War At Troy, and indeed Morden and Lupton's work. But Greek and Latin versions don't do this (as far as I'm aware - I may have missed something minor on this point). For an ancient author, the Trojan War was like World War II is to modern writers, a background against which to tell stories, rather than a story in its own right.

Thirdly, the attitude to the gods. Most modern treatments don't like the gods - they don't know how to cope with them. So they get removed, along with most other elements of the fantastic, leaving little more than prophetic dreams. Again, Troy is a good example of this.

Finally, there's homosexuality. Homer does not emphasize a sexual side to the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, and it can be argued that he did not intend one to be read into his writings. Nevertheless, people have done so, ever since the fifth century BC at the latest, and it is a potential nightmare for anyone coming to the story in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Play the relationship up, and conservative critics will attack the work - but play it down, and activists will comment on the removal of a gay subtext. This happened to Troy, though I have suggested (in a piece for CA News in June 2006) that, whilst the film plays the gay relationship down in the dialogue, it is restored in the visual semiotics.

So how do these comics stack up against these points? Marvel's Iliad is part of a line of retellings of well-known literature, taking up the mission of the Classics Illustrated line. So it is the Iliad, not the tale of Troy. A prelude explains the background, but writer Roy Thomas sees no reason to add a postscript describing the final fall of Troy - the comic ends where Homer ends, with the funeral of Hector. In terms of the Homeric canon, obviously there are no conflicts. There is much omitted, as you'd expect when compressing twenty-four books of poetry into eight issues of a comic, but no changes.

And the gods are present. When you actually think about it, this is hardly unexpected, even were it not for the requirement to tell the Iliad, in which the gods are crucial. Roy Thomas has been writing superhero comics since 1965, in which gods like Hercules and Thor have regularly featured. So it's not too surprising that he has no issue with writing the gods here. If anything, they come across as better rounded characters - Thomas seems to have enjoyed writing the gods more than writing the heroes.

Pity about the art by Miguel Angel Sepulveda. It's serviceable, and at least it's not ugly in the way a lot of superhero art is these days. But all the women look like Californian porn stars, and Athena is dressed up like an Amazon from Xena: Warrior Princess.

Eric Shanower's award-winning Age of Bronze is a different matter entirely. Shanower is very definitely telling the story of Troy, according to the ancient accounts, except carefully writing out the gods, beyond the dreams of Cassandra and other prophets. Key events of divine intervention, such as the Judgment of Paris or Iphigenia being spirited away from the sacrificial altar, are reported, by people who may not be telling the truth. It's meticulously drawn and meticulously researched. Shanower makes sure to set the War against the geopolitical background of the twelfth century B.C., so far as that is known. Everyone is clothed in Bronze Age outfits, in contrast to Marvel Illustrated: The Iliad, where the arms and armour of historical Greece are depicted.

The trouble is, it's also very slow. Shanower is determined to get every part of the 'Trojan story', so we have seen the stories of Telephus, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the story of Palamedes. Every possible author, from Homer and Aeschylus, down to obscure Latin playwrights like Accius, is drawn upon. As a result, ten years and twenty-seven years down the line, and we're only just getting to the first Greek attack on Troy. This amount of characters makes it difficult to keep track of who's who (especially on the Trojan side, where many of the main characters look alike). And combining so many different stories means that, as a whole, Age of Bronze lacks dramatic shape.

Besides, setting the story in an authentic historical background may seem like a good idea, but I can't help but feeling that, like 'historical' King Arthur stories, it's ever so slightly missing the point. These are timeless legends, that have become unshackled, at least to a degree, from whatever historical origins they may have had, and exist in an invented time that never truly was. In that respect, Sepulveda's Corinthian helmets, and the like, which look right to the general reader, are perhaps truer to the spirit of Homer, who happily mixed up elements remembered from the past and from his own time, than are Shanower's boar's-tusk helmets, which are right for the Late Bronze Age.

Shanower does make explicit a sexual relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, something Marvel Illustrated: The Iliad doesn't really engage with (but then neither does Homer, so you can see why). But Shanower does this in a very twenty-first century way. Achilles meets Patroclus, falls in love with him, and immediately loses all interest in his wife Deidamia. To me, this doesn't really accord with Greek attitudes.

I feel quite bad about my reaction to Shanower's work. It's beautifully drawn, an obvious labour of love, and unquestionably, it's a more serious piece of art than Marvel Illustrated: The Iliad. But the latter seems in some respects a little more successful.

futuratronics: El pasado y el futuro de las computadoras

Cientificos han descubierto una computadora con más de 2000 años.

Reporta La Nación:

“Pero hace un siglo, piezas de un extraño mecanismo con engranajes de bronce y diales fueron recuperadas de un antiguo naufragio en las costas de Grecia. Los historiadores de la ciencia concluyeron que era un instrumento que calculaba e ilustraba información astronómica, en especial las fases de la Luna y el movimiento de los planetas, en el segundo siglo a.C.”

Mientras tanto esta lista la laptop de 150 dólares.

Según reporta hoy The New York Times, hay un gran debate alrededor del lanzamiento.

Para gente como Nicolas Negroponte la mejor forma de ayudar a los pobres del mundo es integrándolos a la red mundial digital. Sus críticos alegan que es una utopía absurda y que es más importante dedicar esfuerzos de ayuda a temas de desarrollo tradicional.

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Saturday, 29 August 2009

How to Tour Italy: Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!

PATRICK COMERFORD: Kuşadasi: a city without a memory?

Poetry and Pop/Rocks

The matter of Troy

futuratronics: El pasado y el futuro de las computadoras

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