The Agora of Smyrna

The Great Smyrniote Adventure, which has been the subject of my past three posts, shows no signs of stopping. This week, let's go on a trip to the Agora of Smyrna, which has been the city's center in the Classical Era. With the modern expansion of the city into the seaside and beyond, the Agora has been surrounded by a rather nasty neighborhood of Kurdish immigrants called Kadifekale.

Despite its fall from grace, the Agora is still in use as an open air museum, and preserves layers upon layers of Izmir's (or Smyrna's) history from the Antiquity, to the Ottomans, the Graeco-Turkish war of 1921-22 and beyond.

Some of the ancient arcades where hellenistic merchants used to do business have been lovingly restored to their "original" status.

More interesting than the Classical ruins, however, is the collection of Muslim graves from the Ottoman centuries, when the Agora used to be a graveyard. Unfortunately, they are not kept in a tidy state.

Here, a curiously beheaded bust with a bow tie stands among piles of stone turbans. I think this bust is a very recent sculpture, possibly depicting a prominent Greek figure from the early twentieth or late nineteenth centuries. It might even be a bust of Venizelos from the brief period of Greek occupation. That would certainly explain why it was beheaded and cast aside later on.

Elsewhere, the older Ottoman graves are decorated with beautiful and usually mystifying patterns. These people may have been too scared to paint human figures, but they were certainly no strangers to art and beauty.

I couldn't decide whether this was an antique pattern or a later, Ottoman copy of one.

This was one of the most atypical Ottoman graves I saw in the agora. It has a curiously neoclassical, even baroque pattern and an obelisk-like column instead of the usual headstone. I wish I could read the inscriptions.

The weirdness goes on. Later on, I came across a Muslim grave with an unmistakable star of David on its side. Was this a sign of the Sabbateans, the Muslim-mimicking community of mystical Jews, whose trail had led me to this particular trip to Smyrna? Maybe.

Or maybe not? The six-pointed star, it turned out, was also a very popular pattern in Muslim art and architecture between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Here, we can see an engraving in the nearby Kemeraltı district that has mosques, the names God and six-pointed stars side by side. So, these images might be anachronistic only to our modern eyes.

Co-incidentally, I did not take this photo, but instead borrowed it from tatilgezisi.com, a Turkish tourism site.

As I left the Agora through the ancient gates still flanked by disfigured statues of lions, my mind was on only one thing...

... were those graves those of "normal" Mohammedans? Or were they genuine graves of the Sabbateans? What was the significance of that weird "obelisk grave?" Here, by the way, is one of the ancient lion statues, its face disfigured by the scars of time.

I had lunch in a cheap nearby restaurant. On its doorstep I noticed a simillar, albeit more hysterical modern "agoran lion" made out of cast concrete.

Little did I know then, that after lunch I would wander into a shocking revelation about the Sabbateans in Smynra. But that, dear readers, is the subject of next week's post. Until then, keep watching... this blog!