Spolia in Fortifications:
Turkey, Syria and North
Africa
Michael Greenhalgh,
Department of Art History
Australian National
University
After briefly explaining why the East is worthy of
study for its use of spolia, setting both the geographical scene and the
chronologies involved, and examining the reasons for their very survival and
availability, this paper will focus on their military reuse in fortresses and
city walls. It provides an overview of the antique structures which were the
models, set against the decline of civic life from late antiquity onwards, and
concentrates on the aesthetic and the practical reasons for reuse, which
include both strengthening and structural support, and conspicuous display,
such as the widespread reuse of column shafts in fortress walls. Fortifications
at Nicaea and Korykos, Ankara and Byblos will be examined, together with the
reuse of antique reliefs at Seljuk and Halicarnassus, and of antique
‘architectural furniture’ at Myra. Finally, we shall look briefly at French
experiences in Algeria in the 19th century, because these were
probably analogous to those of our mediaeval forbears in Europe over a thousand
years beforehand, when the antique monuments in the West were in a roughly
similar state to those when the French invaded Algeria in 1830. If the French
made very practical use of the spolia they found, then so did armourers: and
details will be given of the reuse, well into the 19th century, of
marble and granite columns as cannon balls.
Because of the special circumstances of Turkey and
North Africa, the concept of alto medioevo is stretched beyond
breaking-point, but with the bonus that studying such areas can provide us with
insights into how the ancient monuments may have appeared to our mediaeval
forbears - evidence largely unavailable in the West because of the pressure of
further development in succeeding centuries, and hence obliteration of the
majority of source monuments. The French, for example, benefitted from this
apparent “time shift” in Algeria. Given the very variable takeup of
city-dwelling in that country, it much impressed the French when they invaded
Algeria in 1830 that their direct predecessors as city-dwellers (and hence as
architecturally aware, for both civilian and military works - indeed, as
civilized people rather than barbarians) were the Romans, including their
Byzantine successors. Their establishment there of a colonial empire provides
the most recent thoroughgoing practical use of spolia, analogous to mediaeval
usage.
In Turkey, the population has never (until our
century) been sufficient to devastate all the monuments (and one can still find
classical sites there occupied by nomads, although fewer now than decades ago);
as a thirteenth-century dervish put it, in a lament which might stand as a leitmotif
for this paper, and which is repeated down the centuries: It is for the work
of demolition that Turkish workmen must be hired. For the construction of the
world is special to the Greeks [...] They erected numerous cities and mountain
fortresses [...] so that after centuries these constructions serve as models to
the men of recent times [...] [God] created the people of the Turks in order to
demolish, without respect or pity, all the constructions which they see…[1].
However, destruction was necessary in order to build: many Turks took up alien
traditions, and were as enthusiastic users of spolia as the Crusaders, as we
shall see from the walls of Konya, where the Seljuk Turks, especially prizing
Greek and Roman architecture, reused it for aesthetic ends. Their successors
generally lived off spolia, often using it in a purely utilitarian manner.
However, Mehmet’s reported reaction to the glories of Constantinople (cavalco
da un luogo all’altro, considerande con grandissima maraviglia fabriche tanto
rare[2])
suggests something more
programmatic, as perhaps does that of Tamerlane before him, who wondered at
the costly buildings of the temples, the faire ingraven pillars, the high
pyramides; whilst at Jerusalem, he sought out all the antiquities of
that auncient citie.[3]