Back in Podunk after 10 days on an archaeological tour of Sicily, I come bearing jet lag and anecdotes. My fellow travelers were a half dozen Americans and a dozen Brits, all of a certain age. We were doctors, lawyers, merchant chiefs, teachers, a publisher, a forensic investigator, a government bureaucrat, and a lowly scrivener.
We were overseen by a pair of men I came to think of as Mommy and Daddy. Cem Boyvadaoglu is a Turk who is married to an Italian art historian. They live in Florence, but she is now teaching a class in England. When asked about Turkey, Cem laments the ruin Erdogan has brought to his country. Brits unhappy with Brexit and Americans with Trump felt his pain. He was our mommy, making sure we didn’t get lost or miss the bus, got fed and watered, and had no complaints.
Our Daddy was in charge of improving our minds, introducing us to the antique history of Sicily, its many invasions and cultural crosscurrents, museums, temples, palaces, cathedrals, graveyards, catacombs, quarries and artifacts. He was a Romanian archaeologist, Doru Bogdan, who has participated in digs in Pompeii, on the Black Sea, and in his native forests, uncovering the history of the Dacians and their Roman occupiers.
He was unfailingly interesting, informative, experienced and mordantly funny. For example, he identified himself not as Romanian but a Transylvanian because his region is obviously superior to the rest of the country. He also complained about the confusing design of the modern archaeological museum in Syracuse, suggesting it had been designed by the same guy who did the Labyrinth.
When asked what, if he had thirty more years in his field, he would hope to see discovered, Doru said immediately, “a time machine, so we can prove how many of the things historians claim are true are actually false.” When pressed to get more serious, he said, “Okay, Atlantis.” Finally, he admitted many of the actual locations of the decisive battles of the ancient world are unclear. Identifying them would be good. But his first answer addressed a recurring theme. Historians may have theories, but it is the spadework of the archaeologist that often tells the tale.
The entire trip was a lesson in cultural diversity, starting with Americans and Brits escorted by a Turk and a Romanian, sorry, Transylvanian, but also because Sicily from 800 BC to 1200 AD was the crossroads of the Mediterranean and its cultures, occupied by Carthaginians, Greeks,
Romans, North African Muslims, crusading Normans, Aragonese. A DNA look at a cross section of the Sicilian population might well paint a picture as eclectic as the continent.
Though the history of the place is one of constant contention, Doru was at pains to suggest war was far from the whole story. Commerce was the basis of the island’s appeal. It produced wine and olive oil, grains, timber, fruits and vegetables, salt and so on. Arabs introduced lemon trees, And someone introduced the prickly pear, also know as the Fig of Barbary and the India Fig. But it actually originated not in India, but the Indies — Mexico specifically, so was probably brought back by Spaniards.
Several of the island’s most glorious buildings, from the vast 300 AD Villa Romana del Casale, to Monreale Cathedral and Cappella Palatina created by Norman rulers in the 1100s are wonders of craftsmanship. But those craftsmen were often imported from afar — mosaicists from Islamic North Africa and Eastern Orthodox Byzantium. Doru suggested the wealth of the master of the Villa was so great that it was as if a 20th century plutocrat had hired Picasso, Matisse and Chagall for three years to decorate his house. And the court of the Normans was staffed with a Byzantine admiral from Antioch and an Islamic geographer from the East. For several centuries such harmonious cultural cross-pollination was the norm.
Lest we get too cheerful about the past, however, Doru also reminded us often that the labor behind many of the sites we visited was that of enslaved men and women. The losers of battles frequently became the motive power of the conquerers. They farmed, built, served, and at a quarry, the Cave di Cusa, cut with only chisel and hammer and transported five miles the stones that became the temples of Silenus.
Ancient empires and economies ran on the backs of those in bondage. We are likely to regard this practice as an artifact of the bad old days, but our own “one percent” floats on a vast sea of sweat from Asian assembly lines, minimum wage home health workers, ill-paid teachers, cops and firefighters and so on.
Another theme we were exposed to repeatedly was how cosmopolitan the ancient world really was, and the immense journeys its peoples undertook. Vandals from Scandinavia sacked Rome, a Roman galley is discovered in the waters off China, Phoenicians from around today’s Lebanon colonized Tunis, Sicily, and Spain, Norsemen, by way of France, conquered Sicily with a paltry 750 men.
And then there is the rise and fall of empires. In my daily journal of the trip, I began a brief rant one day about Sicilian shortcomings — trash dumped in beautiful countryside, roads in need of repair, unclean public toilets, cheap, ugly buildings next to ancient grandeur, but was brought up short. Yes, some grand 18th and 19th century buildings in Catania have a sad, sooty air of neglect and decline. Doru noted that as recently as 200 years ago Sicily was still prosperous, but no more.
Yet an air of superiority is hardly becoming to an American these days. I grew up in a booming rust belt city, once mighty but now fallen on hard times, and seemingly left behind by history. The Carthaginians, Moors, Greeks, Romans, Normans, and all the rest had their day, and may have thought it would never end, as did Detroit and Pittsburgh and Cleveland 40 years ago.
Now the remnants of Sicily’s past are on display — elegant red figure ware behind glass, abandoned temples on lonely hilltops, the inlaid floors tourists photograph, mute reminders that only change is eternal, mutability inevitable, hubris dangerous, civilizations fragile, and “many ingenious lovely things are gone.”
On the final night of our voyage, after dinner, a few of us sat at a cafe table outdoors near the harbor and had a drink as music played. There was a bit of hilarity and some sadness at parting. “Thinking of what is past, or passing, or to come,” we might have been travelers or traders any day since the founding of the city in the bronze age, stopping briefly on the quays of Ortygia, before sailing away on the next tide and taking our memories with us.