John Stephens - Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland, Vol. 1 (of 2)

Pleased and amused with myself and everything I saw, I moved along unnoticed and unknown, staring, observing, and admiring; among other things, I observed that one of the amiable customs of our own city was in full force here, viz., that of the young gentlemen, with light sticks in their hands, gathering around the door of the fashionable church to stare at the ladies as they came out. I was pleased to find such a mark of civilization in a land of barbarians, and immediately fell into a thing which seemed so much like home; but, in justice to the Smyrniote ladies, I must say I cannot flatter myself that I stared a single one out of countenance.

But I need not attempt to interest you in Smyrna; it is too every-day a place; every Cape Cod sailor knows it better than I do. I have done all that I could; I have waived the musty reminiscences of its history; I have waived ruins which are said to exist here, and have endeavoured to give you a faint but true picture of its living and existing beauties, of the bright and beautiful scene that broke upon me the first morning of my arrival; and now, if I have not touched you with the beauty of its women, I should despair of doing so by any description of its beautiful climate, its charming environs, and its hospitable society.

Leave, then, what is, after all, but the city of figs and raisins, and go with me where, by comparison, the foot of civilized man seldom treads; go with me into the desert and solitary places; go with me among the cities of the seven churches of Asia; and, first, to the ruins of Ephesus. I had been several days expecting a companion to make this tour with me, but, being disappointed, was obliged to set out alone. I was not exactly alone, for I had with me a Turk as guide and a Greek as cicerone and interpreter, both well mounted and armed to the teeth. We started at two o'clock in the morning, under the light of thousands of stars; and the day broke upon us in a country wild and desolate, as if it were removed thousands of miles from the habitations of men. There was little variety and little incident in our ride. During the whole day it lay through a country decidedly handsome, the soil rich and fertile, but showing with appalling force the fatal effects of misgovernment, wholly uncultivated, and almost wholly uninhabited. Indeed, the only habitations were the little Turkish coffee-houses and the black tents of the Turcomans. These are a wandering tribe, who come out from the desert, and approach comparatively near the abodes of civilization. They are a pastoral people; their riches are their flocks and herds; they lead a wandering life, free as the air they breathe; they have no local attachments; to-day they pitch their tents on the hillside, to-morrow on the plain; and wherever they sit themselves down, all that they have on earth, wife, children, and friends, are immediately around them. There is something primitive, almost patriarchal, in their appearance; indeed, it carries one back to a simple and perhaps a purer age, and you can almost realize that state of society when the patriarch sat in the door of his tent and called in and fed the passing traveller.

The general character of the road is such as to prepare one for the scene that awaits him at Ephesus; enormous burying-grounds, with thousands of headstones shaded by the mourning cypress, in the midst of a desolate country, where not a vestige of a human habitation is to be seen. They stand on the roadside as melancholy telltales that large towns or cities once existed in their immediate neighbourhood, and that the generations who occupied them have passed away, furnishing fearful evidence of the decrease of the Turkish population, and perhaps that the gigantic empire of the Ottoman is tottering to its fall.

For about three hours before reaching Ephesus, the road, crossing a rich and beautiful plain watered by the Cayster, lies between two mountains; that on the right leads to the sea, and on the left are the ruins of Ephesus. Near, and in the immediate vicinity, storks were calmly marching over the plain and building among the ruins; they moved as if seldom disturbed by human footsteps, and seemed to look upon us as intruders upon a spot for a long time abandoned to birds and beasts of prey. About a mile this side are the remains of the Turkish city of Aysalook, or Temple of the Moon, a city of comparatively modern date, reared into a brief magnificence out of the ruins of its fallen neighbour. A sharp hill, almost a mountain, rises abruptly from the plain, on the top of which is a ruined fortress, with many ruins of Turkish magnificence at the base; broken columns, baths overgrown with ivy, and the remains of a grand mosque, the roof sustained by four granite columns from the Temple of Diana; the minaret fallen, the mosque deserted; the Mussulman no more goes there to pray; bats and owls were building in its lofty roof, and snakes and lizards were crawling over its marble floor.

It was late in the afternoon when I arrived at the little coffee-house at Aysalook; a caravan had already encamped under some fine old sycamores before the door, preparatory to passing the night. I was somewhat fatigued, and my Greek, who had me in charge, was disposed to stop and wait for the morrow; but the fallen city was on the opposite hill at but a short distance, and the shades of evening seemed well calculated to heighten the effect of a ramble among its ruins. In a right line it was not more than half a mile, but we soon found that we could not go directly to it; a piece of low swampy ground lay between, and we had not gone far before our horses sank up to their saddle-girths. We were obliged to retrace our steps, and work our way around by a circuitous route of more than two miles. This, too, added to the effect of our approach. It was a dreary reflection, that a city, whose ports and whose gates had been open to the commerce of the then known world; whose wealth had invited the traveller and sojourner within its walls should lie a ruin upon a hillside, with swamps and morasses extending around it, in sight but out of reach, near but unapproachable. A warning voice seemed to issue from the ruins, " Procul, procul, este profani ," my day is past, my sun is set, I have gone to my grave; pass on, stranger, and disturb not the ashes of the dead.

But my Turk did not understand Latin, and we continued to advance. We moved along in perfect silence, for besides that my Turk never spoke, and my Greek, who was generally loquacious enough, was out of humour at being obliged to go on, we had enough to do in picking our lonely way. But silence best suited the scene; the sound of the human voice seemed almost a mockery of fallen greatness. We entered by a large and ruined gateway into a place distinctly marked as having been a street, and, from the broken columns strewed on each side, probably having been lined with a colonnade. I let my reins fall upon my horse's neck; he moved about in the slow and desultory way that suited my humour; now sinking to his knees in heaps of rubbish, now stumbling over a Corinthian capital, and now sliding over a marble pavement. The whole hillside is covered with ruins to an extent far greater than I expected to find, and they are all of a kind that tends to give a high idea of the ancient magnificence of the city. To me, these ruins appeared to be a confused and shapeless mass; but they have been examined by antiquaries with great care, and the character of many of them identified with great certainty. I had, however, no time for details; and, indeed, the interest of these ruins in my eyes was not in the details. It mattered little to me that this was the stadium and that a fountain; that this was a gymnasium and that a market-place; it was enough to know that the broken columns, the mouldering walls, the grass-grown streets, and the wide-extended scene of desolation and ruin around me were all that remained of one of the greatest cities of Asia, one of the earliest Christian cities in the world. But what do I say? Who does not remember the tumults and confusion raised by Demetrius the silversmith, "lest the temple of the great goddess Diana should be despised, and her magnificence be destroyed;" and how the people, having caught "Caius and Aristarchus, Paul's companions in travel," rushed with one accord into the theatre, crying out, "great is Diana of the Ephesians." My dear friend, I sat among the ruins of that theatre; the stillness of death was around me; far as the eye could reach, not a living soul was to be seen save my two companions and a group of lazy Turks smoking at the coffee-house in Aysalook. A man of strong imagination might almost go wild with the intensity of his own reflections; and do not let it surprise you, that even one like me, brought up among the technicalities of declarations and replications, rebutters and surrebutters, and in nowise given to the illusions of the senses, should find himself roused, and irresistibly hurried back to the time when the shapeless and confused mass around him formed one of the most magnificent cities in the world; when a large and busy population was hurrying through its streets, intent upon the same pleasures and the same business that engage men now; that he should, in imagination, see before him St. Paul preaching to the Ephesians, shaking their faith in the gods of their fathers, gods made with their own hands; and the noise and confusion, and the people rushing tumultuously up the very steps where he sat; that he should almost hear their cry ringing in his ears, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians;" and then that he should turn from this scene of former glory and eternal ruin to his own far-distant land; a land that the wisest of the Ephesians never dreamed of; where the wild man was striving with the wild beast when the whole world rang with the greatness of the Ephesian name; and which bids fair to be growing greater and greater when the last vestige of Ephesus shall be gone and its very site unknown.