Et tu, Brute

April 28, 2014

We followed a lady with her cow up a crumbly hill to find the ruins of Xanthos where the proud and independent Lycians once had their capital. We have been reading the tales of their city kingdoms since Dalyan. Their ancient ruins, rock tombs and sarcophagi dot many of these south western Mediterranean hill towns. Xanthos, itself, was once the heart of their kingdom and in recognition of that has been inscribed as a UNESCO site: tho, like a few other sites here in the south, it could benefit from better signage.

Like many coastal kingdoms Xanthos was eventually taken over by the Romans, but our interest was in the Lycian remnants, before then: of which there are few.Most were carted off by Charles Fellows, commissioned by the British Museum to bring back his discoveries after digs at Xanthos in 1838. Entire monuments were lifted and taken to Britain along with some of the finest tomb art. Much of what remains are copies of what has been lost.

The Lycians were into tombs in a big way. At Xanthos they needed to be. Their history is tragic. Here, in 546 BC they were besieged by the Persians. Outnumbered and outmanoeuvred, they resisted as long as they could. When the end was predictable, they gathered their women, children, servants and animals into the acropolis and slayed them; then set their beautiful city afire. They fought to the death, leaving the Persians with nothing to win. Eighty Lycians survived, as they were from home at the time; but on their return they, and their descendants, rebuilt their city.

This tragedy happened twice in Xanthos: so proud and defiant were the Lycians. In 42 BC, after his assassination of Caesar, Brutus passed through Asia Minor collecting soldiers and taxes for the Roman cause. The Lycians of Xanthos refused to contribute to Brutus’s demands, whereupon he attacked them. They, again, razed their city to the ground, and committed mass suicide rather than succumb. Though Marcus Antonios did rebuild the city and, on the second hill at Xanthos, Roman ruins remain. Et tu, Brute.

Today the villages around Xanthos have similar, but different, tombs: the dead who are buried have their right hand set facing Mecca. At lunch in one of the villages, we heard the Adhan remind three men in knitted caps to hurry to prayer at their little mosque across the road. Many others around us stayed unmoved by the megaphoned exhortation, and continued drinking çay and talking.

Today, the valley below Xanthos can hardly be seen for greenhouses. They cover almost every square inch of arable land. This is a vast vegetable growing valley: one of the best in the world, apparently. Maybe it was even back in Lycian times.

Here, we saw the local vegetable market in action. Large empty trucks, heading to markets to deliver produce nationally and internationally, waited on dusty roads in the shade of the pine forests in the hills. Dozens of them. Farmers drove up in their trucks and tractors with trailers loaded with freshproduce. Tomatoes, today. Rich red tomatoes fully ripened on the vine, which is why they taste so good. A man with a blue book surfaced, inspected the produce, then offered what looked like a book price for the harvest, which was then all loaded onto the trucks to head out of the valley. Turkey farmers at work.

oooOOOooo