Echoes of Old Greece in the Ruins and Monuments of Sicily and Istanbul
Hearing whispered secrets and laments from the Hellenistic and Byzantine worlds
It is a truism that when we travel, we expand our horizons by every experience of a new place, a new sight and new peoples.
We learn about different geographies, languages and ways of thinking when we visit cities and landscapes away from the familiar.
Yet, what we see when travelling across countries and continents is breadth, rather than depth. Bound by time, we often perceive only the present, locked as we often are in the here and now of modern, buzzy cityscapes.
Exploring the Greek ruins in Sicily gave me a more complete perspective as I was reminded that while I was in Italy, I was also simultaneously visiting a place that more than 2,000 years ago knew itself as Greece.
This is a grand two-in-one bargain, where I got to enjoy the current modern identity and landscape of Italian Sicily, while still accessing what it once was.
The Greek ruins in Sicily let us know that great numbers of people long ago built so well that their civilisational glories continue to resonate through the ages.
Finding Greece in Italy
Sicily on a map is like a stone about to be kicked away by boot of Italy.
It is usually crowded out in our minds by the spectacular attractions if the Italian north and centre. Lake Como, Florence, the Amalfi Coast, Rome — all these beckon to the point that many never ever go down the list to visit poor neglected Sicily.
And yet, Sicily is a unique palimpsest of Mediterranean history and has something that almost nowhere else in Italy can boast of:
The novelty of not having always been Italian.
You see it proclaimed in the huge Greek theatre at Taormina, but also shyly peeking out of the Cathedral of Syracuse.
Approaching the Duomo from the piazza that it dominates, you see first the ornate Sicilian Baroque facade. But that 18th century shell hides one of the most important Doric monuments in all Sicily: the Temple of Athena.
The temple is ancient, built in 480 B.C. by the tyrant Gelon after a victory over Carthage, and on the side of the Duomo’s exterior, you can see how Sicily’s Christians in the 7th century A.D. incorporated the temple’s Doric columns into the walls of their new church.
In the hush of the cathedral, amidst Roman Catholic liturgies and chants, you can touch the old Doric columns.
I found it special when visiting, to stand in a quiet corner of the church and put my ears against the hand-darkened Doric columns. I tried to imagine ancient Greek being whispered by its old builders, from a time when almost the entire eastern Mediterranean was Greek.
What would they have been talking about? Did they travel from Athens or Corinth? Were they awed by the wonders of fabulous, wealthy Egypt? Or were they concerned with aggressive neighbours like Phoenician Carthage and Latin Rome?
To understand more about that ancient time, we travelled to the outskirts of modern Agrigento, in the Valle dei Templi archaeological park, where ruins like the Temple of Concordia are the most well preserved outside of Greece itself.
After Rome’s victory over Carthage in the first and second Punic Wars, Agrigento was called Agrigentium.
Before that it was the Greek city of Akragas, part of Greater Greece (or Magna Grecia, the name given by the Romans to the coastal areas of Southern Italy in the present-day Italian regions of Calabria, Apulia, Basilicata, Campania and Sicily settled by the Greeks.
Today, the staying at the splendid Villa Athena hotel just outside the Archaeological Park, the temple ruins provide an atmospheric experience, especially at when lit at night and with the stars out.
Visiting the temple sites in the morning is a hushed and serene experience. You hear the sound of sheep bleating contentedly while you walk to the ruins through a field of olive trees.
Walking among the ruins, you can imagine the city as it must have once been, filled Greek, Phoenician and Latin traders, with people bringing offerings and prayers to the many pantheistic temples that dotted the city.
The ruins are echoes from the past and in these frantic modern days of mass tourism and endless crowds, I find such in places something precious.
Travelling from Classical Greece to Byzantium
From Agrigento in southern Sicily, we drove to Palermo in the north, a middling distance of about 130km.
Yet that two hour drive brought us forward in time 1,500 years to the Byzantine Greeks who made the interiors of the cathedrals of the Norman kings of Sicily into fabulous facsimiles of Constantinople.
In the year 1000 A.D., Sicily had been a Saracen Emirate for more than a century. Much of the rest of southern Italy was still part of the Byzantine Empire, ruled from Constantinople.
But a hundred years later, by the end of the 11th century, Norman knights from France, themselves descended from Vikings, had conquered much of southern Italy,
The Norman King Roger II built the Palazzo dei Normanni (Norman Palace) at Palermo, now considered the oldest surviving Royal residence in Europe.
This was the palace that we visited to see the fine example of the Byzantine culture, the Cappella Palatina, or Palatine Chapel, that Roger II built within his palace.
Like the Classical Greek ruins of Magna Grecia in Agrigento, the Byzantine motifs within Roger II’s Palatine Chapel in Palermo reflect give you a glimpse of how glorious the Greek Byzantine empire must have been a thousand years ago.
Keeping that in mind, we travel then to the source of all this Byzantine bling, to Constantinople, now Istanbul, and enter the Hagia Sophia, the crowning achievement of the Emperor Justinian almost 1,500 years ago.
Despite its age, the Hagia Sophia is as grand as any Imperial Mosque in Istanbul.
I wasn’t sure what to expect, but having come from the gorgeously wrought Byzantine interiors of the Palatine Chapel and also the Monreale Cathedral in Cefalu in Sicily, I half expected to see within the Hagia Sophia a greater exemplar of the Byzantine art I saw in Sicily.
But what I saw instead were some disappointing remnants of what must have been the grandest interior. They were literally the ruins of a vanished empire, left to wither within a monument to its own conquest.
Very little remains of the religious frescoes and mosaics that once filled the entire interior of this ancient seat of the Greek Orthodox world, a beacon once so bright that it convinced Russia and almost all Slav peoples to convert to Christianity.
You can still see a few remaining examples.
Here, the figures of Mary and the baby Christ. There, the faded depictions of six-winged seraphim in the corners of the great central dome.
And yet even these are crude Ottoman copies overlaid on the original Byzantine ones.
In the centre of the dome and scattered about the domes are shields in Arabic calligraphy. I am told that they carry the names of Muhammad and the first conquering Caliphs of Islam.
They are apparently the largest of their kind anywhere in the world and celebrate the fact that Hagia Sophia was taken by force of arms and is a war trophy.
As I stood there, I recalled a reproduction and rendering that purported to show what the interior of the Hagia Sophia was once like when Istanbul was still Constantinople.
Apparently, its vaults and domes used to be covered in gold mosaics like the Capella Palatina or the Monreale Cathedral in Cefalu in Sicily.
Standing in the hall of the Hagia Sophia, I tried to imagine the interior of the basilica as it must have looked in its heyday. The gold mosaics covering that vast central dome and the adjacent half domes must have been magnificent.
I can understand the impulse to claim something hard won on the part of the Turks. It is not uncommon and you also see it in victorious Catholic cathedrals built over conquered Moorish Islamic monuments in Spain.
And yet, I felt a sense of loss at the wasteful destruction of the old frescoes and mosaics.
Such was my bittersweet experience as I stood agape in the cavernous interior of the grand old monument that is the Hagia Sophia.
Last Words
Ruins and monuments are windows into past worlds.
They are symbols and markers of the many who came before us and in recalling their memory, we should acknowledge their achievements and respect them.
History can be cruel, and to the victors go the spoils of war and conquest.
But victorious people can build their own monuments like the Turks have done with the magnificent Suleymaniye and Blue Mosques.
So it was that I felt a sad wistfulness at what had been done to the interior of the Hagia Sophia, this callous desire for one people to impose their stamp on their conquered foes by erasing their pasts.
There are more generous ways to make a point, and how we treat the ruins and monuments of past people says something about our own current selves.
Other Ruinous Reads :)
If you would like similar stories about visiting ruins and the multicultural nature of many historic sites and places, you can read Sajjad Choudhury’s account about Sicily here:
And Brad Yonaka writes a fascinating piece about Roman Emperors immortalised in the ruins of the ancient Egyptian Temple of Hathor:
If you’d like to support me and other writers you read, you can use my referral page to subscribe to Medium. You’ll not only be helping me out a bit but also get full access to every story on Medium.
