What yet remains…..

                        Sonnet 64

Assos

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced

    The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;

And sometime lofty towers I see down-razed

     And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;

When I have seen the hungry ocean gain

  Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,

  And the firm soil win of the watery main,

Increasing store with loss and loss with store;

 When I have seen such interchange of state;

       Of state itself confounded to decay;

     Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,

 That Time will come and take my love away.

This thought is as a death, which cannot choose

  But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

                                                   - William Shakespeare

In Venice one comes across many old things - some many hundreds of years old:  Houses, churches, streets, canals, ceremonies  and sea-scapes.  La Serenissima is filled full of touching reminders of a former glory that's faded but which has not yet been totally extinguished.  But more important than faded glory to me  is that one can still read and understand the stones of Venice. One can - as with a friend of long acquaintance - understand her and her history from an examination of the "wrinkles of her face".

But in Turkey the situation is different.  Anatolia (the Asian part of Turkey) is filled full of partly glimpsed reminders of the past.  Everywhere there are ancient cities that have turned to dust, broken columns and  undoubtedly the unknown names of gods no longer worshiped are engraved on stones in scripts which no one can any longer decipher .

Indeed, there are whole civilizations which have come and gone and whose mortal remains -  the fragments that are their posterity - sit in the dust here along side the dried animal scat and the dusty weeds .

So how do you bring them to life? How do you make these dead stones speak? - And even if you could  understand the stories that they  would tell, even if you could eavesdrop on the dead , indeed, what would be the point?

Necropolis, Assos

"Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining

We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,

Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand,

Forgetting themselves and each other, united

In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye

Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity

Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance. "

                                           From Ash Wednesday by T. S. Eliot