The belief that understanding a person, a school of thought or a phenomenon requires contact with the setting in which they emerged – that, for example, one must visit Ipotești or Botoșani to understand Eminescu better, was fervently championed here by George Călinescu. However, the father of this method was Nicolae Iorga. With this in mind, I sought to visit a few places in Asia Minor, a region where some of the earliest Christian communities were founded and where the revealed religion subsequently took root; a region familiar to many of the Apostles, led by Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Paul the Apostle. For Asia Minor established the link between the Near East – between Jerusalem, where God had descended to earth, taking on our human condition – and Europe, destined to become a ‘land of the Cross and of culture’, according to yet another definition by Iorga.
Before arriving in Asia Minor, I had the chance to travel to Malta and the opportunity to witness, late in the evening on Good Friday, processions of a deeply moving mystical realism: by torchlight, in streets teeming with locals, in profound silence, people dressed as in Roman times passed by, portraying Jesus, His disciples, Pontius Pilate, Anna, Caiaphas... It was an atmosphere that made you feel as though you were in Jerusalem two millennia ago, all the more so as I had been twice to La Baia di San Paolo, the bay where the ship carrying Saint Paul the Apostle to Rome had run aground, a place where an imposing church stands today. I remember it glowing in an overwhelming twilight. And it seemed only natural that Țuțea’s adage, which equated Paul with the entire Mediterranean, should spring to mind there.
The Cathedral of Ephesus was dedicated to the Dormition of the Mother of God; it was under its vaults that, in June and July of the year 431, the third of the seven Ecumenical Councils took place. Convened by Emperor Theodosius II, this Council was intended to resolve the dogmatic dispute between Nestorius and Saint Cyril of Alexandria. Nestorius was the proponent of the heresy which held that there were two distinct persons in the Incarnate Word, which is why – he argued – the Virgin Mary could not be called the Mother of God, but only ‘the mother of Christ’. In the end, the Council rejected the heresy, to the joy and enthusiasm of the faithful, and defined the doctrine concerning the union of the two natures in the single person of the Word, as well as the doctrine concerning the Virgin Mary – Mother of God.
In Ephesus, on a high hill, or rather on a plateau, one can see the ruins of the church where the Third Ecumenical Council took place – a church built over the tomb of Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist. The cathedral must have been impressive, as suggested by its remains, which combine the marble of the pagan world – columns and capitals with a pearly sheen and silky surfaces – with the thin, austere, bright-red bricks of early Byzantine architecture, bricks which struck me as identical to those in the royal church at Curtea de Argeș. The capitals of the sanctuary in Ephesus bear marble crosses of indescribable delicacy, and in the fluid air of the place there sometimes drifts a scent reminiscent of basil, which in reality comes from the branches and resin of the maritime pines. Visible on the horizon, as blue as in a postcard, the Aegean Sea enhances the sense of atmospheric purity from the dawn of the century, characteristic of the pagan world. Perhaps that is why the cathedral of the Third Ecumenical Council was built threeto four kilometres from ancient Ephesus and its great pre-Christian edifices, be it the Temple of Diana or the impressive funnel-shaped theatre that could seat 25,000 spectators. Its image graced the cover of my first ancient history textbook, at an age when I could neither have imagined nor hoped that I would have the opportunity to linger upon its stone benches.
There is a tradition which holds that the Blessed Virgin spent the last days of her life in Ephesus, in a cave hewn into the mountain. What is certain is that in this great city of Antiquity, St Paul the Apostle founded a strong Christian community, appointing his disciple Timothy as bishop—the recipient of the two Pauline epistles to which Father Sabin Verzan, a remarkable theologian, has devoted an extensive exegesis.
Whether in Ephesus or in ancient Smyrna, where Saint Polycrates was martyred – a settlement which, known as Izmir, a city and port of overwhelming size – as well as along the entire eastern coast of the Aegean Sea, one is struck by the rugged, dolomitic, steep landscape, its austere geology contrasting with the candour and clarity of the water. On the coast, the land is fertile and bountiful, the vegetation lush; yet, as one ventures into the heart of the mainland, it becomes bleak and barren. This is also the case in Myra, in southern Lycia, where Saint Nicholas served as bishop and was buried, his relics later being transferred to Bari. The church in Myra – a town now known as Demre – where he was originally buried, has remained intact. On the floor of this small, beautifully proportioned church lies an expressive mosaic.
Leaving Lycia and the Aegean Sea behind, you enter Pamphylia, on the Mediterranean coast. As a settlement, its capital, Attalia, strikingly resembles Constanța (and the old town – Dubrovnik), with the difference that the former lies a few dozen metres not on a bank of red clay, but on one of cyclopean cliffs. The contrast between the coastline and its almost tropical vegetation is even more striking. A few kilometres away lies Mortuna, the place where Saint Paul preached Christ, and 400 kilometres to the east, Tarsus in Cilicia, his birthplace, where I would have liked to go.
In Antalya, home to one of the world’s richest archaeological museums, you can sit at a table in its vast garden, sipping tea or coffee amongst Hellenistic columns, funerary stelae and Roman tombstones. Inside, countless statues, most of them intact, exude the sweet languor of decadence, such as a Harpocrates with his finger to his lips, looking almost… postmodern. Also in Asia Minor, in Alanya, in a horseshoe-shaped bay of the Mediterranean, whilst climbing towards the city’s defensive walls and taking a wrong turn, I stumbled upon a small inn – more of a shack – perched like a birdcage above the sea. It had three tables, two of which stood on a sort of balcony propped up by two struts on the edge of the hillside, which contained more Roman stone and Byzantine brick than soil. Each little table was sheltered by a parasol and the canopy of vines. From a height of 40–50 metres, one could see the left-hand side of the bay – stretching further than the beach – crammed with blocks of flats and villas. Beyond the endless, slender and radiant buildings loomed the Taurus Mountains, rising to heights of over 3,000 metres.
The shortest route to Asia Minor, as is well known, is across the Bosphorus, Constantinople being a city straddling two continents. The ferry can take you to another town – the seat of an ecumenical council – in Chalcedon, which today is merely a neighbourhood of the former imperial city, lapped by the waters of the Sea of Marmara, and known to the Turks as Kadıköy.
When I first arrived in the city of Constantine, seen up close, Hagia Sophia seemed to me to be constrained by its surroundings. It was enough to gaze upon it from the shores of Asia Minor – and then, on my return journey, from the deck of the steamship – to discern its splendour and unrivalled beauty.
