Innocence and War Read online

  We are more used to the charms of Asia Minor these days, and anyway the charms themselves have been somewhat depleted to meet the Western world half way. The main offence of Izmir today against the senses is its ugliness. Of course it has a wonderful excuse: earthquakes, twelve since Mark Twain’s visit alone, including three which challenged the outer limits of Dr. Richter’s earthquake-ometer. Buildings are short and square and squat, all right angles and cost benefits. Contractors skimp on the specs. Should the earth quake one can stand in the middle of the new main streets which are wide and open, wide enough to stay free from falling masonry above if not gaping holes below; there aren’t any old main streets. The best that can be said for Smyrna then, and Izmir now, is that it has a train station which doubles up as the gateway to Ephesus.

  For Ephesus-bound passengers the thirty-mile railway link today is as suburbanly efficient as one in, say, Oslo, Norway - the same Oslo, Norway to which British Airways keep sending my bags. Izmir’s suburbs now stretch halfway to Ephesus, not so much spreading like larvae in a duck pond as expanding like amoebae in a Petri dish. The best diversion from the drabness outside is the ticket collector’s uniform: a typically Turkish affair, which turns the humble cheerful clippie in to a five star general of no mean pomp and not inconsiderable circumstance.

  ***

  For Mark Twain and the Excursionists the train journey was a great steam- driven adventure, more so for having unexpectedly been taken under the wing of a remarkable British railway engineer, architect and amateur archaeologist, John Turtle Wood. By now in his mid-forties, Turtle Wood had been sent five years earlier to the Ottoman province of Aidan by an English civil engineering consortium, the Smyrna and Aidin Railway Company, to build a railway from Smyrna to Denizli. Turtle Wood’s specialty was the architecture of railway stations, and while constructing the station at Selçuk, the town nearest Ephesus, he became fascinated by the undug ruins of the great Greek and Roman capital of Asia Minor nearby, a city which in its pomp had half a million citizens, was second only to Rome in its glory, but which had now lain neglected and deserted as a pagan pile for seven centuries by its Islamic Ottoman rulers.

  By 1865, two years before the Quaker City visit, John Turtle Wood had negotiated for himself a reduced involvement with the railway company, made up for by an allowance from the British Museum - the latter in exchange for property rights should his digging prove fruitful. Property rights were freely available; one just had to pay for the digging via an elaborate system of reverse patronage, and pay again to take the artifacts home - usually to London. The Ottomans held no interest in non-Islamic images and found the Christian interest in Greek and Roman paganism quite baffling, if profitable. Just before Mark Twain’s arrival Turtle Wood had unearthed evidence that the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, unseen for over five hundred years, was relatively close at hand. By now a monomaniac with a mission he was to devote the next four years to what must have seemed to the expenses clerks at the British Museum like the wildest of goose chases, but in December 1869, having upended twenty feet of earth over 550 square feet of ground, he did indeed find the first remains of the Temple of Artemis.

  ***

  On a slightly less ambitious quest the writer cannot resist visiting the nearby Ephesus Train Museum, which boasts “the largest collection of steam engines in Europe”, even though it is not actually - sorry for the sudden attack of pedantry - in Europe at all. I want to see if there are any exhibits relating to John Turtle Wood, or the Smyrna and Aidin Railway Company, or maybe by some minor miracle the group photograph taken that day which Mark Twain mentions, but which has yet to be found. The museum is as empty and deserted as Ephesus must have been in Turtle Wood’s day, its only occupant being a weasly looking Belgian, owner of the equally deserted LeWagon restau- rant, both restaurant and restaurateur hiding in a dark and damp corner of the museum site.

  He doesn’t speak much English, so we settle for schoolboy French. He had married the daughter of a Turkish guest worker in Antwerp and decided to come to Selçuk, her home town, to make his fortune as a restaurateur. One could not help feeling that both sets of parents must have been disappointed by the union. He has not heard of Turtle Wood or his railway company, or of Mark Twain or his visit, nor has any interest in either, nor anything come to think of it. The museum, he assures me, has no curator or records, just the twenty-five steam engines lying outside. He has no customers. How does he manage? A grant from Selçuk municipality. Does he want any more customers? Not really. And Belgium? Huh! I must be joking. Gone to the dogs, just like here.

  ***

  Anyway, with some relief, back to Mark Twain, John Turtle Wood and more stirring times. I suppose you could say John Turtle Wood was Mark Twain’s first Holy Land Ferguson. Let me explain.

  In Paris the New Pilgrims came across the first of many guides they would use throughout their Mediterranean tour. Like every other breed, there were guides and there were guides. The one is Paris was of the less successful variety. This one presented his card and Mark Twain read the unlikely name of “A. Billfinger”. The American was disappointed; he had hoped for a guide called “Henri de Montmorency, or Armand de la Chartreuse, or Alexis du Caulaincourt” or his final suggestion “Alphonse Henri Gustave de Hauteville.” “Let’s call him Ferguson,” said his fellow Sinner, Dan. And the name stuck and became the generic name for any guide from the useless to the brilliant for the rest of the Quaker City excursion.

  (The Ferguson in Paris will sound familiar to anyone who, like the writer, habitually uses guides when in foreign parts. “As long as we had that fellow he was always hungry; he was always thirsty. He could not pass a restaurant; he looked with a lecherous eye upon every wineshop. Suggestions to stop, excuses to eat and to drink, were forever on his lips.” He was always looking for ways to chisel them out of money: “On the shallowest pretences he would inveigle us into shirt stores, boot stores, tailor shops, glove shops - anywhere under the broad sweep of the heavens that there seemed a chance of our buying anything.” Later the Sinners managed to shake Ferguson off and took in a show: “The music struck up, and then - I placed my hands before my face for very shame. But I looked through my fingers. They were dancing the renowned “Can-can.”)

  Along with the Excursionists, Turtle Wood loaded a coral of donkeys into the freight cars, donkeys so small that Mark Twain called them “scarcely perceptible”. The mini-donkeys would be fitted with specially raised saddles to keep their passengers’ feet in the air and would be needed to carry the group around “for we had much ground to go over”. They then had a much more interesting train journey than has the modern traveler from Izmir to Ephesus, seeing “some of the most grotesque costumes, along the line of the railroad, that can be imagined. I am glad that no possible combination of words could describe them, for I might then be foolish enough to attempt it.” Decanting from train to donkey they set off to see Ephesus. Turtle Wood took them first to “a high, steep hill, toward the sea, [where there] is a gray ruin of ponderous blocks of marble, wherein, tradition says, St. Paul was imprisoned eighteen centuries ago.” Tradition has since been found wanting: the ponderous blocks of marble are now known to have been laid three hundred years later. As a result of this new found lack of authenticity this hill site has now been abandoned again, and is in fact off-limits - a shame for the modern traveler because Turtle Wood had taken them to the place which offered the best views of the grand amphitheater and the surrounding ruins, and which would now still offer the best view of the greatly expanded site as a whole. No doubt a téléphérique operator is measuring up the angles right now.

  Walking down the hill, grappling with the sub-sized and single-minded donkeys, their platform saddles not quite platform enough, the tourists had their feet dragged over what would later be unearthed and known as Harbor Street, the restored broad colonnaded avenue that connects the grand amphitheater to what would have bee
n the grand harbor. It is hard to imagine that as recently as 1867 Turtle Wood was the only archaeologist - in fact the only outsider of any description - working there, and he was more interested in the Temple of Artemis, five miles off-site, than the Roman remains of the great city underneath him. It was to be a further thirty years before an Austrian delegation of archaeologists set to work uncovering the past glories of Ephesus. Indeed, a self-renewing new delegation of Austrian archaeologists are uncovering the past glories of Ephesus now; the Austrians have the Ephesus dig and sift concession - and a very fine job they are making of it too.

  But there’s no doubt that Mark Twain was quite overcome with the historical significance of the once-great, now hidden city:

  It is incredible to reflect that things as familiar all over the world to-day as household words, belong in the history and in the shadowy legends of this silent, mournful solitude. We speak of Apollo and of Diana - they were born here; of the metamorphosis of Syrinx into a reed - it was done here;

  of the great god Pan - he dwelt in the caves of this hill of Coressus; of the Amazons - this was their best prized home; of Bacchus and Hercules - both fought the warlike women here; of the Cyclops - they laid the ponderous marble blocks of some of the ruins yonder; of Homer - this was one of his many birthplaces; of Cirmon of Athens; of Alcibiades, Lysander, Agesilaus - they visited here; so did Alexander the Great; so did Hannibal and Antiochus, Scipio, Lucullus and Sylla; Brutus, Cassius, Pompey, Cicero, and Augustus; Antony was a judge in this place, and left his seat in the open court, while the advocates were speaking, to run after Cleopatra, who passed the door; from this city these two sailed on pleasure excursions, in galleys with silver oars and perfumed sails, and with companies of beautiful girls to serve them, and actors and musicians to amuse them; in days that seem almost modern, so remote are they from the early history of this city, Paul the Apostle preached the new religion here, and so did John when many men still lived who had seen the Christ; here Mary Magdalene died, and here the Virgin Mary ended her days with John, albeit Rome has since judged it best to locate her grave elsewhere; six or seven hundred years ago - almost yesterday, as it were - troops of mail-clad Crusaders thronged the streets; and to come down to trifles, we speak of meandering streams, and find a new interest in a common word when we discover that the crooked river Meander, in yonder valley, gave it to our dictionary.

  One hates to quibble, and Mark Twain had a journalist’s rather than an histori- an’s view of facts, but his history of Ephesus has rather improved with the telling. Apollo was born in Delos, and Mark Twain confused his sister Artemis with her Roman counterpart Diana; Pan and Syrinx dwelt on Mount Olympus; the Amazons lived mostly elsewhere in Anatolia; there is a statue of the Cyclops in Ephesus, but nothing more than that. But there’s no gainsaying that Ephesus was the great Greek and Roman capital of Asia Minor, a mighty cultural and trading center, and certainly Lysander and Alexander the Great strode through there, and Anthony and Cleopatra wintered there, and as were all the other prominent Romans listed above and many more besides.

  The Christian visitors Mark Twain mentioned are slightly more problematical. Paul was a Roman citizen and would certainly have been free to travel to Ephesus at his will, and his two visits are well documented by Luke in Acts and - more reliably - confirmed by contemporaneous Roman accounts. The John that Mark Twain mentioned was “John the Apostle”; in Mark Twain’s time it was thought he was also the writer of John’s Gospel, now reckoned to be a later John, “John the Evangelist”. But John, as in “John the Apostle”, was known to have led the church - a church at this stage meaning a gathering of worshipers rather than building - in Ephesus.

  Of the two Marys there is no hard, or even soft, evidence to suggest that Mary Magdalene was in Ephesus, nor that the Virgin Mary died there. The first suggestion of the latter event as even a possibility was not floated until 431 AD at the First Council of Ephesus. Mark Twain’s observation that “albeit Rome has since judged it best to locate her grave elsewhere” has been superseded by yet more hopeful prodding: “Rome” has now moved it again, and this time made it official. In 1812 a German nun, one Anne Emmerich, dreamt that the Virgin Mary had died in Ephesus and on awakening the nun dictated her vision of the house and the cave nearby where she dreamt that Mary was buried. With determination equal to John Turtle Wood’s, clerics from across the sects dedicated themselves to finding the site of the dream. In 1891 two Lazarist priests were able to declare that they had indeed found it, the exact spot. Confirmation from cardinals in Rome soon followed and Pope Leo XIII celebrated mass there in 1896. Pope Pius XII upgraded the site to a Holy Place in 1950, and since then there have been papal visits by Paul VI and John Paul II, and more recently, in 2006 by Pope Benedict XVI.

  Non-believers in the fantastic can easily scoff, but as Mark Twain observed two weeks later in the Holy Land tour: “Wherever they ferret out a lost locality made holy by some Scriptural event, the [Catholic] Church straightway build a massive - almost imperishable - church there, and preserve the memory of that locality for the gratification of future generations. If it had been left to Protestants to do this most worthy work, we would not even know where Jerusalem is today, and the man who could go and put his finger on Nazareth would be too wise for this world. The world owes the Catholics its good will even for the happy rascality.”

  ***

  Unfortunately, in spite of all this official, even papal, enthusiasm for the nun Anne’s vision, in the last thirty years archaeologists have rather spoilt the party by declaring that the house in the dream dates from around 500 CE - soon after the very same First Council declared it to be here or hereabouts. Today it is a fully designated tourist destination, with car parks groaning under coaches and taxis, souvenir shops and drink stalls selling junk and stewed coffee (in Turkey!) and crowds from every conceivable corner of belief and non-belief swarming around the shrine.

  Just after the ticket booth (six euros per adult) a scrubbed pine table and chair rest on the ground and a monk in a Capuchin hood (from whose appearance we derive the word cappuccino) sits in the folds of his habit. About where one would find a lapel he wears two small pin flags, the Union Jack and the Spanish. Like an air hostess, or even a flight attendant, I take it to mean he speaks English and Spanish. He looks around thirty, but I suspect he’s a good ten years older than that. He is in demand. I eavesdrop but the questions are directional not theological. In a break I ask him if he’d like something to drink from the stall and from where he comes, how come he’s here.

  No thanks to the drink, then “Burlingame, California.” “And what do you make of this Tower of Babel?”

  He smiles, patiently. “Benedictines find peace in the evening, and the morning. But it’s a rush here all day, that’s for sure.We are tired when they’ve all gone.”

  “I thought you were Capuchin. The brown hood.”

  “It’s any dark color now, the habit, outside of the big occasions,” he replies.

  “It will all come and go, all this activity.”

  “And the Virgin Mary, is this meant to be taken literally or symbolically?”

  “You must take it one way or another.”

  “True, and you, how do you see it?”

  “I’m easy with miracles2. I see us all as miracles,” he replies.

  “Good answer,” I grant. “How come you are here, Burlingame is not exactly a bus ride up the hill?”

  “There are four of us in Izmir. We stay in the Latin Convent. Today’s my day.” He smiles at some other world he keeps to himself.

  By now others are jostling around me wanting to ask him more intelligent questions and I wander off into one of the crowds. They are speaking Mandarin, of which I can only remember a few whehs and nwahs from time spent in the back streets of Kowloon. They have brought their own guide, and I wonder how he is explaining the concept of a virgin birth. There is no equivalent Chinese
myth, even Confucius being blessed with straightforward ancestry. I’m sure the guide told them that the Virgin Mary has good company in this department, with none less than the Buddha, the Lord Krishna and even the mighty Mongolian Genghis Khan all having later followers claim virgin births for them.

  It is often said that we have been confused because St. Matthew ambiguously translated the Hebrew almah into the Greek parthenos and we have come to build a cult around the “virgin” rather than the “young woman” meaning of the Greek word. That’s true but actually it is more interesting than that. The conception - as it were - of a virgin birth of a son (always a son) goes back to the earliest known myths. The Christian version of the virgin birth myth was introduced by St. Luke, a highly Hellenized Syrian from the Greek town of Antioch, some eighty years after the event. Luke constructed Jesus’ virgin birth directly from that of Dionysus by his mother Semele, Zeus’ adulterous lover. A constant theme is that a prophet, or god, or messiah, or a Greek- or Latin- style demi-god had to be given a leg-up by being born without leg-over.

  Common to Christian scriptures from Adam3 in Genesis is the belief that the female form is both inherently unclean and the ultimate temptation. This is a purely Hebrew invention. All other warrior gods married - and then some: Mars to Venus, Zeus to Hera (parents of the ultimate goddess Aphrodite); Arjuna (another virgin birth) had no fewer than forty wives but the Hebrew god Yahweh forbade all goddesses. In the Old Testament the Canaanite term for goddess is “abomination” and through ignorance the subjugation of women down the ages in the West has been as a result of this baseless biblical postulation.