Note: the following was written for posting on Saturday evening, but shortly after getting into it I realized I was waxing rather lyrical and the piece was going to take quite a bit longer if I wanted to do it justice–hence the delay and references to “today” that don’t actually refer to today. Also, this is my first post that includes pictures!
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Today was cold and clammy with intermittent thunderstorms rolling in off the Mediterranean, but we’d planned to go see the local Roman ruins this morning and so we all bundled up and hoped for the best. As luck would have it, most of our time there fell between showers, so we only got a little wet towards the end.
A glimpse of the extensive Roman and Byzantine ruins uncovered in the middle of Tyre.
I often have a hard time grasping the sense of timelessness some people seem to feel naturally in any ancient place. Tyre to me is too alive–a city of high-rise apartment blocks and bad traffic, the trash of a plastic civilization lining the gutters and trodden underfoot by thousands of warm bodies every day. There is little here to indicate that this was once the pride of the Mediterranean, the seat of a sailing empire, or that Jesus himself grew up only fifty miles from here, and worked his first miracle in a village not far away. Perhaps it’s because the daily life that so overwhelms it has always done so; day after day, year after year, the traffic is heavy and the streets are dirty and the city is crowded and full of noise, and only the trappings change, so gradually that no one notices, until one day you wake up and discover that a thousand years have passed and the place is hardly recognizable. There is no sudden break in the timeline here; despite the many successive civilizations that have ruled–Ottomans before the French, Crusaders before Ottomans, Arabs before Crusaders, Byzantines before Arabs, and on back and back, Romans and Greeks and Phoenicians and Egyptians and Canaanites and who knows how many before them; even Neanderthals and modern humans once lived side-by-side in this region–despite all of that, there was never really a time when life here came to an abrupt end. You can sense the passing of the ages visiting, say, the ruins of an ancient pueblo in the American Southwest, because you know that no matter how far back you follow your own history, it will never arrive at that place. The history of Wupatki came to an abrupt end in the late Middle Ages, and there is nothing to shield the modern visitor from a full-on confrontation with the past, nearly as it stood, on the day it was abandoned. Not so here, on the edge of the Mediterranean–the “sea in the middle of the world,” as the name means. Civilization itself began in this region, and has continued thus ever since. It may well end here, too.
So despite the fact that for the past two months I’ve been thrilling at the prospect of coming to this land of living, breathing history, I haven’t felt it much since I arrived. But on my trip to some local ruins today, I caught a glimpse of some of it. Just a glimpse, but a very clear one.
The problem with so many ruins in the West is how far removed they are from their natural place–even when they haven’t moved at all. Too often they’re so cleaned up, rebuilt, restored, catwalked- and plexiglassed-in and labeled and plaqued and not to mention visited, that at some point they cease being ruins and become nothing more than some mildly interesting rocks. It is necessary–I fully understand–for their preservation and our education, but sometimes after visiting such a place, I wonder if I wouldn’t have experienced it the better had I stayed home and read a book about it. After all, even at their best, the most a ruin can offer you is ghosts; a well-written novel will truly bring it back to life. But I digress. My original point is, much as I know there are some terrible downsides to having ancient ruins completely open for the public to touch and clamber over and, yes, even scribble their names on and maybe cart off pieces as souvenirs, there are advantages, too, and the quality of the experience is chief among them.
A piece of the French railroad which once ran all the way from Alexandria to Istanbul.
The park has two layers, a Byzantine and a Roman. Through the middle runs the remains of a railroad, laid by the French, which once ran all the way from Alexandria to Istanbul. In fact, it may have been the railroad which led to the ruins’ discovery. David was a bit fuzzy on the details, but the jist of the story is that a piece of the Byzantine road was uncovered during some sort of construction project, and the archaeologists, excavating bit by bit, discovered the gates of the ancient city with hundreds of mausoleums lining the road outside, the remains of an aqueduct, and a hippodrome.
Standing at the head of the excavated road (the Byzantine portion,) facing the city gates.
A portion of the Greek inscription on a sarcophagus.
Today you can walk down the road yourself and read the Greek inscriptions on the sarcophagi. It was forbidden to bury people inside the city itself, so the area just outside the gates quickly grew up into a regular cemetery–except that, unlike our cemeteries where people are actually buried in the ground, this one was almost entirely above-ground. Tomb after tomb was built and filled, one on top of another, tucked
A tiny piece of the extensive cemetery outside the gates of ancient Tyre.
into every nook and cranny between the giant square pillars that supported the city aqueduct, (and which are all that remain of those waterworks now.) We clambered around on countless crumbling walls and sunken rooms, empty alcoves that once held shrines to the saintly dead, climbed above them on the stone staircases that once were used to maintain the aqueduct and now lead up to–nothing–peered inside stone coffins broken open by later thieves hoping for golden grave goods, and crunched under our feet the little white snails that now constitute the majority of the cemetery’s inhabitants. We saw little of the dead themselves,
An old aqueduct-maintenance staircase.
though in one opened tomb we did find quite a pile of broken bones, (from which I fled immediately and so can describe in no further detail, except to say that I saw no skulls, thank God.) For the most part, the graves have all been emptied long ago–by whom or to what end I can only guess.
A shot of the archway with some of the many flowering shrubs that grow among the ruins.
The archway that marked the outer boundary of the ancient city.
Halfway down the road, you find yourself standing under a great arch. The artistically criss-crossed patchwork of smaller paving stones laid by the Byzantines ends rather suddenly, the road drops off a couple of feet, and now you find yourself standing on the great square flagstones, impregnably practical, that mark the Roman layer. It seems the Byzantines built their road directly above the Roman one, without even bothering to remove the older stones of the road before them. Beyond the arch the cemetery ends–does that mean the arch marks the gateway to the ancient city itself?
Columns lining the Roman road.
It wasn’t clear–and the road is lined instead by countless marble and stone columns, half of them now lying on their sides. Here is also where a side-road branches off. The archaeologists, while following the main road and discovering all that lay around it, had known from textual evidence that there had been a hippodrome in the area, but they found no indication of it until they reached this arch, discovered the side-road, and decided to follow it. And that was how they found the hippodrome, practically a stone’s throw away.
Looking down the length of the racetrack.
The stone bleachers of the hippodrome.
We climbed around in the stands and wondered what the little alcoves beneath the stone bleachers were for. The Romano-Byzantine equivalent of the hotdog stands? Or maybe the parking garage, where the richer patrons of the races left their horses? And how is it that the design of stadiums has changed so little in the past two millenia? Is it so universal that everyone arrives at it independently? Or is the Greco-Roman world so imprinted on our cultural memory that we unknowingly reproduce it down to this very day, even in something so un-classical as a football stadium?
A view from the stands, looking over the free-standing archways that follow the hippodrome's length.
I sat awhile in the stands and wandered across the racetrack as raindrops started to fall again, thinking how once this place had held all the noise and action of a football game at any modern university, and wondering what process could cause such a center of life to come to ruin. Was it the Arab conquest, perhaps? Or did it fall into disuse even before that, during the final days of the Roman Empire, or the long, slow decline that marked nearly the whole of Byzantium’s existence? As the legions marched away to their interminable wars with Persia and the wealth was drained from the province and civic life declined? In one way or another, a year would have arrived when there were no more races, and then the sand, blown in from the shore, would have begun to pile up, no servants to clear it, no feet to disturb its lay. A few years more, maybe even decades, but inevitably nonetheless, and some farmer, passing by with his cart, would have appropriated a few of the stones to shore up a sagging foundation, or mark the corners of a new field. Then his neighbor would have done the same. Perhaps some of the blocks would have found their way to the building site of a new mosque, or down to the harbor to support the frames of new-built ships. Bit by bit, whatever was left above the sand would have been eaten away, until any signs of its location were erased and finally even the secret of its existence was consigned to ancient texts in a language the people had long since forgotten to speak to their children.
A hibiscus flower on the racetrack median.
After the hippodrome, there’s not a lot left to see. A few hibiscus shrubs bloom on the median, blossoms of sweet-scented fire bright against a landscape now gray with clouds, and a few mosaics line the path to the exit–though mostly simple geometric designs; nothing spectacular. But the place stays with you. Today its stones are once again exposed to the rain. Lovers tease each other in its hidden corners and children climb the restored bleachers and set off gyrocopters from the tops of the hippodrome walls. A few times a year, after dark, road and racecourse are lit by electric lights and people gather in the stands again to enjoy public concerts and poetry recitals. In between such times, the place is silent but for the distant
One of the mosaics that line the path to the exit.
sounds of the city, which seem disproportionately faint here, as if they have to travel through time as well as space–all but the haunting wails of the call to prayer, which echo off the stones and remind them that they are not the only remaining monuments to an older civilization in Tyre. You get the feeling the stones are waiting for something. Perhaps they are waiting for a day when there will be no more bombs, no planes overhead, no foreign rulers, the omnipresent shadow of war will finally melt away and the wealth will return to clear the trash of a plastic civilization from the city’s streets, and Tyre will take up once again her place as the crown of the Mediterranean. They have been waiting fifteen centuries or more. They can afford to wait a little longer.
A stela inscribed in Latin, which despite four years of Latin classes in college I was unable to decipher.
