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Originally posted by aurguplu:
i dont know much about tigranakert, so i am not in a position to reply.
Some armenians use "Tigranakert" to refer to Diyarbekir. The deserted site of the original "Tigranakert" was mostly destroyed during the 1980s according to published accounts. No archaeological investigations were undertaken.
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my point was - still is - the fact that an enormous amount of stuff still survives in excellent condition, and a good deal of it has always been on the surface, which means turks could have destroyed/exploited them if they wanted. the fact that they didn't is to their credit.
Very, very little actually survives - stop believing tourism ministry propaganda, Ali!
Destruction is massive in scale and shows no sign of decrease, indeed it is increasing rapidly. Destruction of classical sites and monuments is easy to assess by just reading old accounts and comparing old photos and engravings.
Far more serious for Turkey is the near total destruction of anatolia's traditional towns and cities. For most Turkish cities, in a decade or so at most there may be one of two traditional houses preserved amid a sea of apartment blocks. There is no concept of preserving an entire zone of a town like what would be normal practice in Europe.
Soon almost nothing from the past will remain - I went to one museum in Turkey a few days ago and on display was a laughable load of junk - stuff like 1930s oil lamps from Germany - cheap 1950s imported radios, Turkish money from the 1970s! No European museum would be seen dead with such stuff, yet that was almost all this particular town had left of its past to show.
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also, not all destruction was recent, and not all of it was turkish in origin: in my hometown of urgup (cappadocia) there are about four hundred rock-cut churches in an area of aout ten square miles. to the best of my knowledge this is one of the highest concentrations of churches in a single area in the world. now the churches have frescoes in them, in many cases severely damaged. there are three types of destruction visible:
1. the uppermost layer. this is the most recent type of vandalism, and is in the form of tourist inscriptions "kilroy was here" in a myriad languages (which include most european tongues, incl. greek).
2. the middle layer. this is in the form of litte dents on the surface of the frescoes and the gouged-out eyes. this was done by the local turkish peasants in the 1940s (some twenty years after the local greeks were expelled in the population exchange with the greeks) after two or three years of exceptionally severe draughts. a local imam (muslim priest) said "how do you expect god's forgiveness (fancy term for rain) to fall upon this ground when it is littered with so many infidel churches with engraved images in them?" and the population gathered pebbles and went into the churches to "stone satan". this is still called "şeytan taşlamak" (stoning satan) in the area. the authorities did make life very difficult for the peasants once they found out about it, and now they are protecting them very efficiently, but the damage is done.
3. the first layer. this is the oldest episode of the destruction, and it was perpetrated by .... guess who? the local greeks themselves. it is in the form of entire pieces of frescoes hacked out of the inner surface of the walls, with an accompanying inscription next to them giving the name of the perpetrator and the date and reason of the deed. you see, the local greeks believed that the frescoes had magical properties and a potion made of them would cure all ills! this had given more damage than the other two forms of vandalism combined.
Reason 3 sounds a little like a local myth to me - but maybe it is true. At that time it was normal for believers to write prayers and dedications onto frescoes.
However you miss the point of frescoes. They were, until the expulsion of the Greeks, a living art form. The worshipers would think that if they were destroyed then "so what - they could easily be repainted". They were not things to be automatically preserved.
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thorny rose
the thing about secret schools etc. are rubbish (they might have existed, but not because greek was suppressed). greek was even used as a state language by the ottoman empire, and most dragomans (translators) of the empire, who were so powerful then, were greek. there is no end to the amount of greek printed matter from the ottoman period still found in the bookseller shops in istanbul.
I know that there were secret schools in the black sea region. These were for Greeks who had converted to Islam during oppression in the 17th and 18th centuries - but were secretly still Greek orthodox believers. To openly profess their faith would have resulted in execution. Outside of Constantinople, Greek and especially Armenian publications were also actively surpressed, and had to be read in secret (a bit like modern Kurdish literature and newspapers).
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steve
with all due respect - and the good points in your arguments re the marbles - don't you find that you sound a bit like a spokesman for the british museum? (no offence intended).
regards[/QB]
Not like a spokesman for the British museum (I have never actually seen the statues!) but like a spokesman for every European cıtızen who looks around their built environment and sees and apreciates the influences of the rebirth of Greek and Roman architecture for the 1780s onwards. The removal of the statues and their history since then should be treated as a different issue from their return to Greece.
regards
Steve
