Zeugma

This Sunday Zirve University arranged for a bus to take any of us who wanted to go on a field trip to the Euphrates. We made three stops and I’m going to write separate entries on each. So bear with me.

As we drove out of Gaziantep heading east, one of the Turkish faculty members said: you’re riding on the Silk Road. In fact, the highway is built on the old trade route from China to Antioch, when goods were traded or put on ships for Venice, among other destinations. Except for the pistachio orchard here and there, the landscape felt quite empty. It was hilly but barren and dry. We passed through one medium-sized town, Nizip, on the way, but other than that, nothing. I commented to one of the Turkish teachers that it felt strange not to see any people. As we got closer to the Euphrates, the pistachio orchards got larger, but still no people. She commented that the people had their orchards outside the village but lived in the village and they were probably all home. That may be true, but we saw few villages and when we went through a village, you didn’t see many people.

As we got closer to Zeugma, the roads got narrower. They twisted and turned over steep hillsides. Finally, we crested a hill and there it was, the mighty Euphrates. Actually, it was more of a lake created by a new dam built just downstream from Zuegma. Historically, Zeugma was the easiest place in the region to cross the Eurprates. While there is archeological evidence that the area has been settled since early Bronze Age, the actual city was built by one of Alexander the Great’s Macedonian generals, Seleucus Nicator, who also built a town on the other side of the river and named it after his Persian wife Apama. Until the Romans captured the city, it was called Seleukeia ad Euphrates. The Romans renamed it Zeugma, which means something like “bridge” or “passage.” Located as it was on the Silk Road trade route and home to Legion IIII (not Legion IV, as one might expect) the city became quite prosperous and was used as a staging area for many of the campaigns the Romans undertook against eastern rulers – usually one of the dynasties ruling present day Iran. However, the city was overrun by the Persian Sassanids in 256 (“ravaged with fire and sword,” to quote the book I bought on Zeugma mosaics) and never recovered its former prosperity. There are no written records of the settlement after 1048. It remained essentially “lost” for over 900 years.

I mention this little bit of history because it’s so hard to image that in this empty, somewhat dusty, silent place you might once have seen the camps of the army of Alexander the Great or of Cassius, as he was about to launch an attack against the Parthians (Iranian empire) under the reign of the emperor Claudius. Or just think of the arrival of the caravans carrying goods from the East. Now nothing but pistachio orchards right down to the water’s edge – and silence. Scarcely a trace of all those momentous events in history. If it hadn’t been for the building of the dam, the actual site of Zeugma might never have come to light. There is one villa above the waterline – the rest are under water – that is still being excavated. At the moment they are building a structure over it. Eventually, it will become a kind of open-air museum. If you want to see the mosaics or frescos from the other villas, you have to go to a museum in Gaziantep.