1668: The Parthenon as Monster Manual

George Wheler's Athens, 1676 (via Surprised by Time)

How did people experience archaeological sites in the age before archaeology? We like to think that sites we know well have 'obvious' meanings, but it's not always so. Take the great Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi, who found first himself at Athens - then barely a village - in the hot summer of 1668.

When Evliya saw the Parthenon, he saw a mosque with a minaret, surrounded by 46 columns, and for most of the way around, the space between the columns and the walls was open to the sky, not lidded over. He saw sculptured scenes on the metopes between the tops of the columns, and more scenes around the top of the cella. Our interpretations are dominated by archaeologists, but Evliya was under no such handicap. The sculptures he saw contained fairies, angels, dragons, elephants, rhinoceri, giraffes, scorpions, crocodiles, thousands of mice, cats, ghouls, cherubs, and many many other kinds of creatures from this world and others in processions: one of the saved in Paradise, the other of those petrified in Hell.

This reconstruction of his experience, from Diana Gilliland Wright's wonderful blog on Greece in the 15th century, exposes how modern is our understanding of the mysterious place-time called 'Classical Greece'.


More fantastic than it looks.

I love this vision of the Parthenon as a fantastic bestiary, a Monster Manual if you will. You could tell stories about it without being an 'expert' or a trained tour guide, and find ways of fitting the building organically into your life experience. To me, it's a little sad that the Parthenon - and other monuments like it - have become places whose meaning is controlled by academic research. People make culture by telling each other stories about places. When you take away their right to tell stories - take away the element of fantasy - you strip away their ability to engage with the environment. If you take away the fantasy, it becomes really boring to visit archaeological sites.


The Parthenon metopes, as seen by Evliya.

There's a lot of talk in archaeology about "multivocality", or including non-experts in storytelling about the past. Of course, almost no one actually does it.

The rest of Evliya's stories about the Parthenon and Athens are fascinating. He reports that Athens was founded by Solomon, and describes the ceiling built for the Byzantine cathedral of the early middle ages:

The ceiling Evliya saw was made of cypress, gilded and painted. This was not the lid of marble coffers constructedby Iktinos and Kallikrates. At some time in the unwritten history of Athens between about 250 and 550 -- Evliya said it was on the night of the birth of Mohammed -- there was a catastrophic fire in the cella. The gold and ivory Athena was consumed, and the marble lid came crashing down, bringing down most of the interior structure with the double levels of columns... The Christians took over a shell, not Pericles' Parthenon.

In a sense, there was no such thing as the Parthenon until the 17th or 18th century: it was the church of the Virgin of Athens, then the Friday Mosque after the Ottomans took over the city. The concept of the "Parthenon" had no relationship to the experience of the users of the building, and had to be constructed over centuries. With, needless to say, mixed results.

Read the rest of the post over at Surprised by Time, it's great. It gives you a real sense of the history we lost in the mad rush to purge modern Greece of its Byzantine and Ottoman heritage.

Riding Anatolia with Evliya Çelebi

(Hoofprinting)

From Ottoman historian Caroline Finkel comes news of a horseback reenactment of the itinerary of a great early modern traveler (via H-Turk):

This is to announce that the first phase of the Evliya Çelebi Ride, in
western Anatolia, is now completed. We were on the road for 40 glorious
days and 40 nights, leaving Evliya in Simav, from where he continued
to Izmir and ultimately to Mekke which he reached in spring 1672, while
we returned to Kütahya.

Home from our journey, we learnt that 2011, the 400th anniversary of
our hero's birth, has been proclaimed the year of Evliya Çelebi by Unesco.
We could not have hoped for more exciting news, not just for our project
but for everyone everywhere. Congratulations to those who achieved this
remarkable coup.

Evliya Çelebi (1611-1682) was a great Ottoman traveler, whose Seyahatname, or Book of Travels, is am important source for the history of the Ottoman lands. His travels took him from Istanbul to Austria, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Egypt, Persia, and Mecca. The trip helped to inaugurate the “Evliya Çelebi Way”, “an international project of historical re-enactment and cultural re-connection that will establish a Cultural Route through Western Anatolia”.

(Hoofprinting)
The ride, an international group including literature professors, equestrians, and a retired ambassador, began on the third day of the Şeker Bayramı (sugar holiday), and retraced Evliya’s route from Istanbul as far as Simav, in west-central Anatolia. The ride’s blog has some great pictures. Apparently some villagers called the Gendarmes on seeing this strange group of riders, thinking they were sheep rustlers!

Large sections of Evliya’s route are now off the beaten path, and riding offers a new way of seeing beautiful, undeveloped parts of the Anatolian countryside that are otherwise unaccessible. However, underdevelopment is a problem, even in relatively better-off western Turkey:

“The countryside along the route is much neglected and the people are, we discovered, barely better off than villagers in the east,” Finkel lamented. Similar to the “Lycian Way” and “St. Paul's Trail,” the EÇR book will help to contribute to the local economy through sustainable tourism and could also act as a catalyst for local development projects along the route. (Today's Zaman)

I love the increasing interest in the scholarly, tourism, and NGO communities in promoting cultural routes, landscapes, and intangible heritage more generally - a move away from the traditional fetish for sites and monuments as the only way to experience the past, toward a more holistic view that includes traditions, practice, and experience. (I’m also glad to see that Finkel and her fellow riders are planning to translate more of Çelebi’s work, only small parts of which have ever been made available in English.)

A couple more photos, from the Hoofprinting blog: