TWO RUINED CITIES

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 192, 10 May 1921, Page 9

TWO RUINED CITIES

ANCIENT EPHESUS AND MODERN AIDIN

I approached ancient Ephesus from the slopes of a limestone hill spangled with crimson anemones, gashed with the quarries from which the stones of the city were hewn, and crowned with the remnants of towers and curtain walls (wrote a "Manchester Guardian" correspondent in Smyrna during March). I had chosen my direction so as to descend upon the theatre from above, and the view, suddenly disclosed, of the vast cavity, with the seats still in place and the stage buildings standing, was as impressive ns I had expected it to be. Beyond it the great central thoroughfare of the city, a streak of marble pavement showing up against the green of the plain, led down to the ancient harbour, now a reed-bed, yellow and brown. Parallel to the thoroughfare on our left stood the mountain of Koressos, with Lysimachuc’s fortifications on the sky-line. Beyond, on a separate and lower hill of limestone, stood the "Prison of St. Paul,” a tower in a salient of the city’s defences. Beyond that again lay the sea, deep blue against the horizon. And to our right stretched tho plain of alluvium which has choked the harbour and driven the sea away. The river Cayster, which built the plain and co-operated with the folly of man to the city’s undoing, wound like a snake in spiteful loops and curves through the feverish levels which it has laid down.

The Austrian archaeologists who were excavating Ephesus before the war have only laid bare the main outlines, but the view from the top of the theatre — and still more the view from the summit of Koressos, which I climbed next day—gives one an impression of how great the city was. The vast circuit and finely cut masonry of Lysimachus’fl walls, tho immense circumference of the harbour, an artificial basiu dug in defiance of the Cayster’s malice, record the ambitions of its founder. In this same spirit tho Germans built the port of Haidar Pasha and the Bagdad railway, and the prize they strove for was the same—the conquest of a commercial hinterland extending into the heart of Asia. The Former Greatness of Ephesus. Lysimachus was one of Alexander’s generals and heirs, and ho laid out Ephesus at a moment when all Asia, from the Aagean to the Pamirs, had been opened to Greek enterprise by tho conquests of Alexander. From Ephesus the caravan routes led up the three rivers into the interior, as the railways lead up them from Smyrna now. Bur Ephesus was greater than Smyrna has ever been. In the time of the geographer Strabo (about the beginning of tho Christian era) the economic hinterland of Ephesus had spread into the provinces of Sivas and Kaisaria, diverting their exports from the ports of the Black Sea, and it was a more prosperous as well as a wider hinterland over which Ephesus ruled. As I stood in the orchestra. of the theatre and, thought of the eiowd shouting "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians,” and tho city clerk standing perhaps where I stood and trying to calm .'them down, my eye caught an inscription on the base of a vanished statue: "To the Emperor and God Caesar Augustus Vespasianus, in the proeonsulship of Lucius Mestrius Floras, the townspeople of Siniav, for the temple of tho Emperors at Ephesus. . . .” “The townspeople of Simav”! I had seen their modern representatives the other day, coming with their strings of camels to market at Kula, inside the Greek lines—veritable types of primitive man, with wild faces and outlandish costumes. The modern Simavlis do not erect monuments in Smyrna. Civic, organisation, art, and all that the marble base anti its inscription imply must rw things utterly beyond their horizon. The contrast is a measure of the difforrmco between Anatolia now and then. Modern. Anatolia could not support: so great city ns Ephesus, and when tho crimes and which ruined ancient civilisation had reduced Anatolia, from its former to its present condition, tho city deserted Lysimnchus’s ambitious site and retreated to tho little hill at the back of the plain where the original settlement hail been. Here, out ot touch, with the. sea (a dangerous rather than lucrative neighbour in.times of anarchy and decline), stood the Byzantine Church of St. John and the citadel walls, nnd below,the citadel there still stands tlm shell of the fourteenth century Seljuk mosque, the latest and in some ways the. most beautiful monument of all. Except where a few masses of brickwork rise above the soil or whe.ro the excavators Imre laid marble pavements and foundations bare, Lysimachus’s city has disappeared. Its' extent is only indicated by the fine-ground fragments of bricks nnd masonry that strew the fields. Could Smyrna, the modern Ephesus, be blotted out as eomnldtelv if statesmen in London nnd Faris and Rome co-nner-nted with the alluvium of the. River Heroins to destroy it? I speculated on this as I walked along the ridge of Korewos. nnd Irnnrd the Lewis mins ponpln l ’ a few miles away over tho hills, where, the economic hinterland of Smyrna is at present 1 rut. short by the boundary between flm Greek and the Dalian zone. Next dov I went on tn Airilut. and saw how the process could be begun. The Sack of Aidin. The Greek quarter of Aidin had been a miniature European city. It' had its finely placed church, its well-equipped hospital, its school, its theatre, its kinema, its electric light, its flour mills, its factories for crushing' olives and making soap. There were doctors and lawyers, merchants and manufacturers, a municipality and a club. This life and prosperity were s recent growth. It was one of those Greek colonies which had sprung up along tho railways built from Smyrna into the interior. It had survived the Committee of Union nnd Progress and the European war. Destruction overtook ft nine months after the armistice, in July, 1919, when the Greek forces after landing in Asia Minor made a premature advance up tho Maeander Valley, occupied Aidin, and were temporarily driven out. When they reoccupied the town a few days later this was what they found. It does not matter for the moment who began the destruction. I have hoard the most conflicting accounts, and do not propose to deliver a verdict, especially as one has been delivered already, I believe, by an interallied commission which examined and reported not long after the events took place. Anyhow, whether in reprisal for previous provocation or not, the Greek quarter was reduced to a ruin and the Greek community partly massacred and partly carried away into captivity beyond the Maeander. The work was deliberately done. The buildings were not dest'royed in the heat of battle, but burnt one by one, and there is a midden sharp boundary between tho gutted** Greek houses and the intact Turkish centre of the town. Here were twisted bedsteads, there safes with holes knocked in their sides, here a shred of clothing or a boot. I was shown gardens where people were killed wholesale, and a gully where fndivfidna.Js, entered on a written list, were taken out and slaughtered one by one. I visited these ruins in the late afternoon of a firm day. Below ns stretched the plain of the Maeander, covered witji olives and fig trees, one of the most beautiful views I have ever seen. Above us the setting sun was turning the spurs of the mountains to purple and crimson,, nnd my boots were grinding a rubble of brick and masonry which reminded mo suddenly of the fields on the site ol Lysimachus’s city.