Troy. Tafur’s trip (like that of many who came after) was disappointing:
So many ruined buildings, so many marbles and stones, that shore and the harbour of Tenedos over against it, and a great hill which seemed to have been made by the fall of some huge building. But I could learn nothing further and returned to Chios.
It is very likely that Tafur only saw the remains of Alexandria Troas.
Tafur’s visit only just preceded one by the most remarkable of all early travellers and antiquarians, Cyriac of Ancona. Archetype of the peripatetic early Renaissance antiquary, and one of the most influential – perhaps more than anyone hedeserves the title of the first archaeologist, though the word would not be coined for another 400 years.
In October 1444, having walked the Trojan plain, Cyriac set sail for Imbros and saw Samothrace peeping over the top just as Homer says. So the famous nineteenth-century travel writer Alexander Kinglake was not the first to note from personal observation (in Eothen ) that Homer spoke truly: ‘Aloft over Imbros – aloft in a far-away heaven – Samothrace, the watchtower of Neptune – so Homer had appointed it, and so it was.’ Cyriac’s note is scribbled into his copy of the works of the ancient geographer Strabo (now in Eton College Library). Coming from the region of Troy, from where the towering outline of Samothrace can be seen hovering in the distance, Cyriac recalled the passage in the Iliad where Poseidon watches the battle between Greeks and Trojans from the ‘top of the highest summit of timbered Samothrace’. Homer had told the truth!
A former shipping clerk, glorified commercial traveller and unofficial political consultant, Cyriac wandered the eastern Mediterranean for fifty years, clambering over ruins, sketching monuments, copying inscriptions, haranguing the citizens of sleepy Mediterranean towns to save their ‘half buried glories’. For Cyriac, the ruins of antiquity were living voices crying out for the torn fabric of that ancient world to be reknit, by both the ‘sons of Greece’ and the ‘sons of Troy’ – the Turks.
Cyriac’s hopes for the ‘sons of Greece and Troy’ and the rebirth of the ancient world remind us how peculiarly the story of archaeology in Greece is bound up with the rebirth of Hellenism and the idea of Greek nationhood. The Byzantines who ruled the Eastern Roman Empire until the fall of Constantinople did not call themselves Hellenes, the word Greeks use today to describe themselves (as did Thucydides). They were ‘Roman’, and moreover throughout their history as a Christian empire they were generally hostile to what became known as Hellenism – the philosophical, moral and religious conceptions of ancient Greece. To them it was pagan and polytheistic: in the eleventh century, Michael Psellus relates,Greek monks habitually crossed themselves at Plato’s name, that ‘Hellenic Satan’.
The Hellenising movement came to a head in the first half of the fifteenth century in the years immediately preceding the fall of Constantinople. The idea now emerged that the inhabitants of the Peloponnese and the adjacent mainland and islands were the direct descendants of the ancient Greeks, and should re-establish the national state in the lands once occupied by the Hellenes of old. This was the climate in which men like Cyriac of Ancona made their pioneering attempts to gather and record the archaeological evidence for Hellenistic civilisation, and in this the Trojan War had special significance for, as Thucydides had said, it was the first recorded action by a united Hellenic power. But in 1453 Constantinople fell to the Turks under Mehmet II and Greece soon followed – Athens in 1456, the Morea in 1460. The dream – for the moment – was dissipated.
There is an ironic tailpiece to Cyriac’s mystical mingling of ancient and modern, his desire somehow to make the Trojan tale serve contemporary political ends. In 1462 his friend Mehmet II
So many ruined buildings, so many marbles and stones, that shore and the harbour of Tenedos over against it, and a great hill which seemed to have been made by the fall of some huge building. But I could learn nothing further and returned to Chios.
It is very likely that Tafur only saw the remains of Alexandria Troas.
Tafur’s visit only just preceded one by the most remarkable of all early travellers and antiquarians, Cyriac of Ancona. Archetype of the peripatetic early Renaissance antiquary, and one of the most influential – perhaps more than anyone hedeserves the title of the first archaeologist, though the word would not be coined for another 400 years.
In October 1444, having walked the Trojan plain, Cyriac set sail for Imbros and saw Samothrace peeping over the top just as Homer says. So the famous nineteenth-century travel writer Alexander Kinglake was not the first to note from personal observation (in Eothen ) that Homer spoke truly: ‘Aloft over Imbros – aloft in a far-away heaven – Samothrace, the watchtower of Neptune – so Homer had appointed it, and so it was.’ Cyriac’s note is scribbled into his copy of the works of the ancient geographer Strabo (now in Eton College Library). Coming from the region of Troy, from where the towering outline of Samothrace can be seen hovering in the distance, Cyriac recalled the passage in the Iliad where Poseidon watches the battle between Greeks and Trojans from the ‘top of the highest summit of timbered Samothrace’. Homer had told the truth!
A former shipping clerk, glorified commercial traveller and unofficial political consultant, Cyriac wandered the eastern Mediterranean for fifty years, clambering over ruins, sketching monuments, copying inscriptions, haranguing the citizens of sleepy Mediterranean towns to save their ‘half buried glories’. For Cyriac, the ruins of antiquity were living voices crying out for the torn fabric of that ancient world to be reknit, by both the ‘sons of Greece’ and the ‘sons of Troy’ – the Turks.
Cyriac’s hopes for the ‘sons of Greece and Troy’ and the rebirth of the ancient world remind us how peculiarly the story of archaeology in Greece is bound up with the rebirth of Hellenism and the idea of Greek nationhood. The Byzantines who ruled the Eastern Roman Empire until the fall of Constantinople did not call themselves Hellenes, the word Greeks use today to describe themselves (as did Thucydides). They were ‘Roman’, and moreover throughout their history as a Christian empire they were generally hostile to what became known as Hellenism – the philosophical, moral and religious conceptions of ancient Greece. To them it was pagan and polytheistic: in the eleventh century, Michael Psellus relates,Greek monks habitually crossed themselves at Plato’s name, that ‘Hellenic Satan’.
The Hellenising movement came to a head in the first half of the fifteenth century in the years immediately preceding the fall of Constantinople. The idea now emerged that the inhabitants of the Peloponnese and the adjacent mainland and islands were the direct descendants of the ancient Greeks, and should re-establish the national state in the lands once occupied by the Hellenes of old. This was the climate in which men like Cyriac of Ancona made their pioneering attempts to gather and record the archaeological evidence for Hellenistic civilisation, and in this the Trojan War had special significance for, as Thucydides had said, it was the first recorded action by a united Hellenic power. But in 1453 Constantinople fell to the Turks under Mehmet II and Greece soon followed – Athens in 1456, the Morea in 1460. The dream – for the moment – was dissipated.
There is an ironic tailpiece to Cyriac’s mystical mingling of ancient and modern, his desire somehow to make the Trojan tale serve contemporary political ends. In 1462 his friend Mehmet II
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