byzantine empire

Last Roman church in Ankara (Turkey) close to disappearing

~ matthewjordanstorm ~ 1 Comment

Saint Clement - ruins

It’s easy to forget that all of Turkey was once the heart of the Roman Empire after the far-sighted Emperor Constantine moved the Empire’s capital from Italy to Turkey (to Byzantium-Constantinople-Nova Roma-Istanbul).

Yet evidence of Rome’s presence in Turkey (not to mention Syria/Libya/Israel/Egypt/Algeria etc.) is everywhere, sitting patiently in the shadows, enduring benign and not so benign neglect by the country’s current government.

Hence this intriguing article.  There seems to be a rebirth of interest in Turkey’s Roman past among academics and ordinary citizens, and a growing movement to preserve and promote that past.  As you will see in the link below, the paper, Hurriyet, references what appears to be the last Roman church where traces (ruins) are still visible in the capital of modern Turkey, Ankara – far from Istanbul / Constantinople, wedged in between modern buildings, almost forgotten and rapidly disappearing.

The article speculates that the church known as Saint Clement’s was built as early as the 4th century, and the paper calls for the Roman building to be preserved.  From a glimpse at the picture above, one cannot help but hope that the call to action is heeded.  Saint Clement the man (and the structure) is described by Wikipedia as:

In 303, Ancyra was one of the towns where the co-Emperors Diocletian and his deputy Galerius launched their anti-Christian persecution. In Ancyra, their first target was the 38-year-old Bishop of the town, whose name was Clement. Clement’s life describes how he was taken to Rome, then sent back, and forced to undergo many interrogations and hardship before he, and his brother, and various companions were put to death. The remains of the church of St. Clement can be found today in a building just off Işıklar Caddesi in the Ulus district. Quite possibly this marks the site where Clement was originally buried.

Other Roman structures still exist in Ankara, including traces of the Roman Baths below.  See this Wikipedia on Roman Ankara for more on Ankara’s Roman past.

220px-AnkaraRomanBaths1

 

Roman Grave Discovered in Istanbul Shopping District

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I love when a little piece of ancient Rome pops up unexpectedly in modern Istanbul reminding everyone of the city’s prior and longest tenured residents – the Romans!

The skeletons were found beneath the “Casa Garibaldi”, also known as “Societa Operaia Italiana di Mutuo Soccorso in Costantinopoli,” built in 1863 and located close to Taksim Square in a part of Istanbul closely associated with the city’s Ottoman past.  Taksim Square lies across the Golden Horn from Sultanahmet – the historical center of the Roman and Greek city.

What were the Romans doing in this fashionable Ottoman district?Beyoglu, the neighborhood where the Casa Garibaldi is located was once in fact a Roman suburb of Constantinople.  It’s not known precisely when these Romans were buried, or why, or what precisely had been located on this spot in Justinian’s day and perhaps we will never know.  But I am heartened by the fact that more attention is being given to these types of discoveries in Istanbul despite the clear opposition of the Turkish state to archaeological studies of the city’s Roman past.  A recently founded department of Byzantine (Roman) Studies at Istanbul’s Bosporus (Bogazici) University is a reflection of this movement.

Orthodox Christian monks from the monastery at Mount Athos were invited to bless the skeletons before they were moved to the Istanbul Archaeological Museum.

For more on this discovery, see the article in Hurriyet.

General Belisarius Enters Rome – on this day in 536CE

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On this day, December 9th in 536CE, Roman General Flavius Belisarius (pictured above) entered the city of Rome through the Asinarian Gate (seen below) with his small cohort of Roman knights.

250px-Porta_Asinaria_2948

The city’s residents had not seen a Roman Legionnaire for almost exactly 60 years, when what remained of the Western armies deserted the Eternal City when the Goth warlord Odoacer toppled the last Western Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus.

Since that time, Rome (the city) had been under the control of a series of Goth rulers, including Odoacer, Theodoric (the “Great”), Amalasuntha (daughter of Theodoric), Theodad (cousin of Amalasuntha and her murderer) and at the time of Belisarius’ arrival, the Goth King Vitiges.

Imagine that!  For 60 years, the Roman Empire had gone about its business with an Emperor mounted on a throne in Constantinople, while Rome herself – the birthplace of Empire – was held by barbarians.  Imagine a United States continuing to exist, and to thrive, with a Washington D.C. belonging to a foreign power.  It sounds inconceivable and so it was to the Emperor Justinian who was determined to accomplish what none had dared, to return Rome to Rome.

By the time that Belisarius arrived in Rome his exploits (in Persia and Africa) were the stuff of legend.  But he arrived woefully understaffed and soon faced a Goth army that exceeded 100,000 in number surrounding the city, determined to crush Belisarius and with it, Justinian’s aspirations of restoration.

Absolutely fascinating stuff!

Following is a Wikipedia link which does a decent job of summarizing the ensuing Siege of Rome.

Justinian’s “Flat-Pack” Church, Raised from the Seabed

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“We hope it will be easier [to assemble] than an Ikea wardrobe.”
– Dr Alexander Sturgis, Oxford University

A prefabricated church, built in Justinian’s Constantinople and lost at sea off the coast of Sicily 1,500 years ago will soon be reassembled in Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum.

Justinian had such buildings constructed with interlocking pieces that might be be readily shipped and assembled in distant locations – the image above shows the ruins of one such Justinian construct from Libya.  They were transported by specially designed cargo vessels across his restored Roman Empire, and this particular church spent nearly fifteen hundred years on the Mediterranean seabed before it was discovered in the 1960’s.  While many pieces still lie submerged, Oxford will mount the structure with what they have to give museum-goers an opportunity to ‘visit’ a vestige of Justinian’s Rome.

For me, the sheer brilliance of the lego-like, prefabricated concept that Roman engineers invented fifteen centuries ago is an absolute marvel.  Cutting edge architectural magazines like Dwell now expound the pre-fab ‘trend’!   Just imagine Justinian’s ships plying Mare Nostrum fifteen centuries ago with civilization in their holds, exporting tangible proof of Rome’s continued strength long after the West had fallen away.

Click here for an article in the UK Telegraph (loaded with factual inaccuracies but fascinating nonetheless).

Roman Mosaic Floor Found in Turkey, near Syria

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“The city is one of the few places where Syrian urban culture from the Hellenistic-Roman era can currently still be studied.” – Prof. Dr. Engelbert Winter from University of Münster

Archaeologists from Germany’s University of Munster have discovered a beautiful mosaic floor in Gaziantep, Turkey (just 60 miles from Aleppo, Syria),. once known as Doliche in Rome’s Syrian province.

This part of Turkey is one of the last protected parts of this once flourishing region of the Roman Empire.  Most of Roman Syria is now off-limits and under assault, as per the lead quote above making this corner of Turkey, and this find, that much more valuable.

Though the date in which the floor was set has not yet been disclosed it is of a late Roman vintage and very reminiscent of work seen in Istanbul’s Great Palace Mosaic Museum (once Constantinople’s Imperial Palace).

For more on the discovery see this link to the University of Munster’s press release.

 

Belisarius – the “Africanus of New Rome” – in the news

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It’s not often that a mainstream blog or news outlet posts something on General Flavius Belisarius so I thought that I would pass along this link to a recent post in the Ancient Origins blog which does a decent job of providing an overview of Belisarius’ life and achievements.

The piece also repeats many of the fallacies pioneered by Sir Edward Gibbon 300 years ago that have been repeated in similar pieces and histories about the Justinian era ever since (i.e. the Roman Empire is the “Byzantine” empire, Romans are”Greeks”, etc.).

That said, it’s entertaining nonetheless for those not familiar with the General.

Please click here for the full article.

And please note that for a fictional account of General Belisarius’ life and times, my Legend of Africanus trilogy in which he figures most prominently is now available on amazon.com here.

9/13/533 – Belisarius and the battle of Ad Decimum

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Humble milestones like the one picture above marked each mile throughout the Roman highway system, spanning the 250,000 miles of roadway that once stretched from modern Scotland to Yemen.

The milestones allowed the traveller to know precisely where they stood in relation to their departure point and destination, long before our slavish devotion to smart phones and GPS.

In what had been Roman Africa,  stolen by the Vandals 100 years before, there stood such a stone on the approach to Carthage from the east on the ancient Roman highway that ran along the coast.  It was the tenth milestone from Carthage, known simply as Decimum Miliare (the tenth mile).

At the tenth milestone (Ad Decimum), on September 13th of 533, the Roman Army led by General Flavius Belisarius met the Vandal King Gaiseric in a battle that would change the course of history.

The world fully expected the Romans to fail as Roman armies had failed in the field against the Vandals and their Germanic ‘barbarian’ cousins for generations.  The Romans were 1,000 miles from home – having set sail with an invasion armada for the first time in decades (on ships that were specially built for the purpose since Rome no longer possessed a deep water navy).  If they lost to the Vandals there would be no retreat and no hope of reinforcements.  The Western Roman Empire had already ceased to exist with Romulus Augustulus’ abdication in 476 (in great part due to the Vandal theft of Africa and their brutal sack of the City of Rome).  If Belisarius lost the battle at the tenth milestone, the Eastern Roman Empire would be in grave jeopardy.

Belisarius and his Roman knights would triumph at Decimum Miliare against all odds and went on to extinguish the upstart Vandal kingdom and to bring Africa back into the Roman fold.  This was the first in a string of stunning victories engineered by Belisarius that would restore much of the lost Western Empire in the name of the reigning Caesar, the Emperor Justinian.  These recuperated lands (Africa, Italy, parts of Gaul and Hispania) would remain part of the Roman Empire until after Justinian’s death – the moment when the ancient world truly ended and the Dark Ages began.

This moment, the battle that became known as Ad Decimum, figures prominently in the second book of the Legend of Africanus series: Avenging Africanus (available at amazon.com here).

For those that would like to read more of the military history of Ad Decimum, see the excellent Byzantine Military blog by clicking here.

9/4/476 – Romulus Augustulus, Last Western Roman Emperor, Abdicates

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On this day (September 4th) in 476CE, the last Western Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by the Goth warlord Odoacer.

When Romulus, who was little more than a boy, stepped down from the throne in Ravenna (then capital of the Western Empire), Odoacer took the Imperial regalia and sent it to the Eastern Emperor, Zeno, claiming that Italy no longer needed a Caesar and that the Goths would rule Italy in Zeno’s name, as his vassals.

It’s a fascinating moment in time, one often misinterpreted as marking the “fall” of Rome – a fallacy created in large part by the great historian Edward Gibbon.  The truth is much more complex!

In reality the Western Empire had ceased to exist, in all but name, decades before.  Yet at the same time the essence of Rome would continue in its former Western territories for centuries to come.  And Italy herself would be brought formally back into the Empire during the reign of Justinian, thanks to the extraordinary efforts of General Flavius Belisarius.  There she would remain until after Justinian’s death.

Nonetheless, the day the boy Emperor abdicated and retired to live peacefully on a Goth-provided pension in the Castellum Lucullanum at Neapolis (Naples) was indeed a turning point in human history and deserves to be remembered.

On a final note, though the Roman fortifications on the site were subsequently replaced by the Normans in the 12th century (see image to the right)Il_Castello_dell'Ovo_In_Napoli, one can’t help but imagine the melancholic Caesar looking out from the battlements, dreaming of Empire lost…

Though nothing is known of Romulus’ death he could not have lived to have witnessed Belisarius’ reconquest of Italy (completed in in 540CE).

Following is a post in today’s “New Historian” for those looking for more on the Last Western Emperor.

http://www.newhistorian.com/romulus-augustus-deposed-by-odoacer/4754/