Between the mountains and the sea: Ancient Aspendos

What links an ancient Roman theater, alluringly situated between the crags, precipices and peaks of the Toros Mountains and the coruscating expanse of the Mediterranean, with a renowned ballet company from the Japanese capital, Tokyo?

The answer, of course, is the annual three-week-long Aspendos International Opera and Ballet Festival, which this year saw the Tokyo Ballet perform a stunning trio of contemporary dance routines to the music of Ravel, Bizet and Theodrakis in, quite remarkably, a theater built in honor of Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome, between A.D. 161 and 180.

The best ancient theater in Turkey

But even outside of the festival period, Aspendos is a “must see” sight and has attracted droves of admirers over the years.

Britain’s finest travel writer of her generation, Freya Stark, visiting the site of Aspendos in the 1950s, describes the theater as “the most perfect of its age that remains, and it stands with scarcely anything structural missing, built for 7,500 spectators, with the latest devices of its age still there, such as a racked sounding board to improve acoustics.”

A more recent source, www.touropia.com, an “Ultimate Travel List” website, rates Aspendos as the fourth best ancient Greek or Roman theater in the world and the best in Turkey — ahead of spectacular examples at nearby Side and, further afield, at both Ephesus and Pergamum.

What is it, then, that makes the theater at Aspendos so special? Stark rather underestimated its capacity, as it could (and can still) hold over 10,000 spectators. But it is not the size of the theater which most impresses, it is its remarkable degree of preservation. This is partly down to luck. Most theaters in Anatolia were abandoned and fell into ruin as Byzantine power declined with the arrival of the Arabs and then the Selçuk Turks, neither of whom had a tradition of performing the tragedies, comedies and gladiator shows which had been the staples of the Roman theater.

At Aspendos, however, the pragmatic Selçuks, who knew a fine building when they saw one, shored up the already 1,000-year-old structure and turned it into a spectacular palace. Another 800 years or so later Atatürk visited the neglected but still wonderfully well-preserved building and declared that this should be no open-air museum piece but a “living” theater dedicated to bringing the arts to the people.

Taken into the hands of the state, it was given a face-lift and performances recommenced after a millennium-plus hiatus.

A travel writer’s favorite

In the mid-1950s Lord Kinross, author of the classic English-language biography of Atatürk, visited the theater at Aspendos and wrote, “Today, in the summer, Turks still use the theater for periodic performances of Shakespeare in Turkish or bouts of wrestling, their favorite sport.” Travel writer Michael Pereira, journeying along Turkey’s southern shores a decade later than Kinross, managed to time his meanderings to coincide with what he calls “the Fifth Antalya Festival,” then running from May 25 to June 10.

Finding out about performances, tickets and transport to the Aspendos Opera and Ballet Festival is relatively easy today, with posters plastered up all over Antalya (even covering every surface of the 1950s German-made tram which plies along the sea-front), programs dished out like confetti and a dedicated website. For Pereira it was frustrating — as late as two days before the opening even the town’s tourist office had no news of what was on or how to get there.

Eventually, however, he learned that a municipality bus was laid on (as it still is today) from Antalya, and within an hour and half he found himself in the theater surrounded by thousands of avid Turkish music lovers, writing, “Children whispered and laughed excitedly, peasant women dressed in their best and brightest flowered blouses, many with babies strapped in tight little cocoons, sat demurely in rows while their husbands smoked and gossiped.” They’d come to listen to “four girls and three men … all stars of Radio Ankara, who received often tumultuous applause after their individual performances.”

Pereira was clearly confused by the strange, discordant (to him) sounds of Turkish music, but as many a contemporary festival-goer today would concur, the Aspendos experience is as much about absorbing the atmosphere of a 2,000-year-old Roman theater on a sultry Mediterranean night as it is about the show, and concludes his description thus: “We sat in the darkness, and as I listened to the songs with their slow, falling cadences, sometimes so reminiscent of Corelli and Bach, I looked up and saw above me the vast dome of the sky glittering with a million stars. The night was warm, but a breeze from the hills lapped like cool waters against the surrounding walls, bringing with it the scent of pine and cedar. The songs had changed, but the harmony of stone and wind and sky had altered little in 2,000 years.”

nauticweb | Read more on www.todayszaman.com

If you like to join the “Aspendos Tour Turkey” see the Tour we offer for June 2011:

Cruise on modern gulets with cultural program and opera performance at the ancient Aspendos theater in Antalya. (English version comes soon. Please stay connected!)

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Posted by nauticweb on February 20, 2011. Filed under Destinations, Europe, Featured Destinations, Turkey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry