Looking for Aphrodite. David Price Williams
across the mouth of the western harbour, along the mole and up the precipitous slope of the ridge behind the site to an acropolis at the top of the mountain where the planners conceived to build a huge block-walled fortress, a redoubt of monumental proportions, from where the city wall ran down the slope to the city’s eastern gate, around the commercial harbour and up the eastern slope of the island. The wall was punctuated with no fewer than sixty one protruding towers. When one considers the vast numbers of masonry blocks required both for the defensive wall and the city terraces, and their immense weight and the physical difficulties of parts of the site, this was an extraordinary accomplishment for the 4th century BC. And all this was to be done before any buildings were to be erected inside the city proper. The terrace wall blocks were to be laid in pseudo-isodomic, orthogonal courses (variously sized but neatly horizontal), but left with a rustica outer finish, a rough ‘countrified’ facing which when complete created the appearance of a series of ‘natural’ rock outcrops, each one above and behind the other. On these artificial scarps the formal, often pillared, buildings were to be laid out tier upon tier, giving the whole as seen by an approaching vessel a deliberately dramatic, ascending perspective of classic facades. Also, for the inhabitants of the mainland, the view over the sea and the adjacent islands would be idyllic.
All that was envisaged was accomplished. The mighty terrace walls were erected, the blocks being hewn from immense quarries on the eastern side of the city. The protective breakwaters were thrown up in the sea across the narrows. To see the one leading from the island defending the eastern harbour is to appreciate the scale of the work. Some of the blocks are the size of small trucks and must weigh many tons. The blocks are truly massive, especially in the moles and the upper theatre. It was as if they had been placed there by giants, which in a way they had …cultural giants, at least.
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Thus was the city planned and completed, and, like Halicarnassus, the people of Knidos, the demes and the clans and the families of the peninsula, moved into their new mercantile home. The age of intercontinental sea traffic had begun. The date – around 350 BC; Knidos was to enjoy just over one thousand years of sometimes palpable and sometimes precarious prosperity, an ebb and flow of security and distress as the centuries unfolded, until that fateful day in the 7th century AD when Yazid ibn Sufyan finally signed its death certificate on the marble stones of the chancel floor of the Byzantine Cathedral.
The investigation of those one thousand years was to lead to my own personal exploration. The expedition which I joined in 1969 as a surveyor, planning trenches, drawing sections, and laying out areas for the teams to dig, for me ushered in a whole new way of life.
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CHAPTER THREE
GETTING THERE
Your lost friends are not dead, but gone before; advanced a stage or two upon that road which you must travel in the steps they trod.
Aristophanes
I had been invited to join the excavations at Knidos by Mark, the Expedition’s assistant director, in the basement coffee lounge of the Institute of Archaeology in London one showery afternoon during the previous winter. They needed a field surveyor, he said, someone who could make plans and sections of the excavated areas ready for publication. I was at that time making a living by drawing book illustrations for archaeological publications to get me through my PhD so I suppose it made some sense. But I had no idea about the site; in fact I didn’t have much experience of field survey either but I was sure I could pick it up as I went along; at least, that’s what I suggested at the time.
So that was why, the following June, I was negotiating my way to Knidos at the beginning of the dig, on my own. I had not expected it to be all that easy either, Knidos being so far off the beaten track, but I followed Mark’s advice on how to get there. I spoke not a word of Turkish, so the notion of trying to make my destination understood locally had caused me some anxiety, to say the least. But I did fly, for the very first time as it transpired, from London to Athens and buoyed up by that excitement next evening I took a ferry from Piraeus to Rhodes, sharing a cabin with a rather disagreeable gnome of a mathematics teacher from Kos. He disembarked there at dawn amid a clangour of dockside paraphernalia. The ship had then throbbed out of the harbour again and south across the Ceramic Gulf. At eight o’clock in the morning I went on deck. The sun was already quite high in a cloudless sky and for the first time in my life I beheld the azure blue of the Aegean Sea in all its beauty. What had I been doing in cold, rainy Britain all this time, I thought?
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As the ship approached the end of the Reşadiye Peninsula I saw the forbidding mountain landscape of Turkey for the first time, tier behind tier of grey silhouetted peaks reaching skyward from the sea. The air was fresh, with a light breeze, and the white waves danced away from the prow. The open foredeck was cluttered with students in sleeping bags, surrounded by a jumble of back-packs. The bright sunlight had woken them, but they had not yet risen. One or two were idly smoking. The ship passed very close to Cape Crio and Knidos as it rounded the Peninsula on its final leg to Rhodes. I could even see the tents on the beach which were to be my home, and just make out the outline of the lower theatre. But of course we could not stop; I had to cross into Turkey through a port of entry, and that would have to be Marmaris via Rhodes. I remember a song that was playing on a tinny tape recorder. I had never heard it before and it was some time before I discovered what it was. But it was to become the talisman of my new life, my ‘Knidos music’ - Judy Collins singing ‘Both Sides Now’. Every time I hear it I am transported back to that morning passing Knidos to Rhodes. And every time I make the journey the words still haunt me – “It’s life’s illusions I recall, I really don’t know life at all!”
So I had arrived in Rhodes that same mid-morning. There was someone touting hotel rooms on the quayside and I accepted. In fact, he was the owner of a recently-built, small hotel in the new part of the city, in Kolokotroni Street, very close to St. John’s Gate through which I had to pass into the Old Crusader town that afternoon to organise my ferry from Rhodes to Marmaris for the following day, a task which turned out to be far more difficult than I had imagined. At this time in the 20th century, with the calamitous rule of the Colonels in full swing in Greece promoting a rife and morose anti-Anatolian jingoism, Turkey as a country, and by definition Marmaris as a port, seemed not to exist in the minds of most Rhodians, so that theoretically it could not even be a topic of conversation, let alone be reached by sea. They had collectively blotted it out of their imagination, despite the huge land mass across the water that could clearly be seen from the northern end of the city.
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For some time, the only answer I got to my questions about a ferry, assuming anyone was willing to talk about it, was:
“Is’a no possible!”
Many were not even prepared to go that far, preferring to purse their lips, narrow their eyes, grimace and to raise their stubble-laden chins in an ultimate gesture of silent and defiant negativity.
This geographical charade went on for most of the afternoon with every travel agent I went into. Finally, when I was near my wit’s end, a man sitting at the back in one of the agencies beckoned me to follow him outside and motioning forwards we walked together briskly up one of the old Crusader streets passed shops selling hundreds of miniature Greek windmills, acres of lace work and ceramic versions of Greek theatrical masks for the tourists from the big cruise ships to buy who came to visit. We ended up in a shop which sold wines and spirituous liqueurs in lurid coloured bottles. It turned out that the family which ran this emporium, of which it seems he was the son, were originally Turkish Greeks that had left Smyrna in 1923 during the exchange of population following the Treaty of Lausanne. Anyway, almost fifty years later they still had relatives in Turkey and crossed over regularly. A couple of phone calls later and a sea captain appeared and said he was crossing early the next day. Some crumpled drachmae changed hands and he told me where to be in the harbour at seven the next morning.
I duly appeared at his boat, which turned out to be a small converted naval vessel, and after he had cast off we set out across the Gulf to Marmaris. It was a fine day with clear skies and a deep sapphire sea, the spray breaking into a bright white spume at the prow. The Greek flag, with its white cross