The Chambers of the Sun - A Journey in Asia Minor

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Preliminary Thoughts

Evening of 1st September - UK

Having done a quick count on my fingers, I reckon that this trip must be about Plan C. Plan A was to find work in Istanbul with a friend from the alma mater and loaf in a flat for a month, popping out to drink arak, sticky sedimentary coffees and eat stickier baklawa over a game of backgammon in some shady Karakoy avenue. This all collapsed at the "finding a job" phase; having applied to some 72 hotels, 13 restaurants, 8 schools, 2 universities and a family in need of a governess, I was forced to draw useless stumps after two months. Just to rub salt into the wound, the university's Classics department awarded their travel grant elsewhere.

Luckily, I had an inspired contingency up my sleeve. Any amateur can lounge around in his slippers in Turkey - even Lord Byron managed it - but it takes real grit to travel into a country with a different alphabet. Syria beckoned, and with it the chance to bring back some disreputable street Arabic, a few scars and a dishtash. Plan B was therefore to fly in to Gaziantep and take the train to Aleppo, within easy reach of Damascus, Apamea, Palmyra, Homs and a copy of Runciman's History of the Crusades. I had printed out a copy of Iamblichus, been vaccinated for polio, rabies and housemaid's knee, and taken on the ta'marbuta before I even started to think about certain niggling practicalities, such as...uh...the visa. In fairness to the Syrian embassy, their requirements are not outrageous, but my grasp of forward planning is. Something about "plans," "mice" and "men" comes to mind.

Back to the drawing board.

Plan C has the all the simplicity and and naivite of a Jerome K. Jerome story. Stage 1: land in Istanbul on September 3rd. Stage 2: wander. Stage 3: return to Istanbul for September 23rd. What could possibly go wrong?

Having been assembled in two days, Plan C is poorly researched, vague and falls some way short of the elegant In the Steps of (Insert Intellectual) template. The trouble is that all the interesting travellers took the wrong route: Marco Polo gives Ottoman Turkey a single cursory page in his Milione, Alexander's a bit of a cliche, Robert Byron took the long way round to Persia, John Moscus' journey is great if you happen to have a spare six months and Xenophon did it the wrong way round. Despairing of a theme, I came across some lines of William Blake's To the Muses:

"Whether on Ida's shady brow,
Or in the chambers of the East,
The chambers of the sun, that now
From ancient melody have ceased..."

"The chambers of the sun" is a fair description of the western coast of Asia Minor. For three centuries from the first clarion dawn of poetry, the Greek colonies of Aeolia and Ionia monopolised the Muses in a way that has never since been matched. Sweetness and light abound in some verses that have come as close to the heart of Man as anything written in the following three millennia, not just in the Homeric epics but in many poets whose fate has been as obscure as it has been undeserved.

This journey, then, will be a homage to that fertile soil which brought forth elegy, folly, men as high as gods and gods who wander among men, and above all a love that set empires at strife, broke nations and made heroes. To Ionia.

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