Lost and Found and Lost Again

On Day 5 we woke in Manisa. This sizeable city between Sardis and Izmir was known in classical times as Magnesia ad Sipylum (to distinguish it from the other Magnesia on the Maeander River). It is perhaps most famous as the site of the final battle in the Roman-Seleucid War. We were there to track down and if possible see in person another unique setting for my book: the Kybele Anıtı, a monolithic rock carving found halfway up Mount Sipylus. The night before we had pulled into town with a flat tire, but a nice fellow at our hotel helped us get that patched with relative ease, so we used the last of our daylight to seek out the Ağlayan Kaya or Weeping Rock/Niobe with which the Kybele Anıtı is often confused. Both are stone images of women drawn from myth, both were mentioned by Pausanias in his 2nd-century AD work Descriptions of Greece, and both have a familial connection with Tantalus, but the former is man made and the latter is natural. The Niobe is not that hard to find or reach, provided you don't mind driving Manisa's narrow back streets. She was the daughter of Tantalus, sibling to Pelops and Broteas. She weeps because all fourteen of her children--seven daughters and seven sons--were killed by Artemis and Apollo, respectively, as punishment for her boasting about her fecundity to the pair's mother, Leto. Whereupon she fled back to Mount Sipylus and was turned to stone, condemned to weep alone forever. Pretty grim. A public park and amphitheater now provide her with frequent company but both were empty when we arrived right at sunset, save a small klatch of shifty eyed young men sipping beer in paper bags. A few hundred yards away is a cool Roman bridge and nicely situated cafe that further insures Niobe never stays lost or alone for long.

The Kybele Anıtı is a different story. First off, she is a native Anatolian deity, not an imported Greek myth. Secondly, she is way way older. Nobody really knows how old exactly but a clay figurine found at Çatalhöyük (a Neolithic site in Central Turkey) which bears a striking resemblance to statues of her from the Classical period dates to the seventh millennium BC. Which puts her at the very dawn of history--twice as old as Stonehenge or the Pyramids. The third thing that makes the Kybele Monument different from the Niobe Rock is that, nowadays at least, it is much much harder to reach. Strangely, this doesn't seem to have been the case in the 19th and first quarter of the 20th centuries. While doing research for the book, I've read about a dozen early traveler reports and collected almost as many drawings and photos (see below for a little timeline I put together) that suggest it was a fairly regular stop on antiquarian tours of Asia Minor. Pausanias, who was born nearby, dubbed it the "most ancient of all the images of the Mother of the gods." Dutch-Levantine minister and missionary Henry Van Lennep had this to say about it in 1870: "We here look upon a monument which was even to Homer an object of venerable and unknown antiquity, a monument antecedent not only to history, but in some sense to mythology itself." Pioneering archaeologist, spy, stateswoman, confidant of kings and all around badass Gertrude Bell (about whom Werner Herzog just made a movie starring Nicole Kidman) visited the Kybele in 1902 and wrote this in a private letter: "She looks so old - her face indistinguishable, her body leaning forward over her knees - marred as she is I think she is still the most impressive figure I have seen since the Sphinx."

Greek legend attributes creation of the relief to Broteas, brother of Niobe. Current scholarship dates it to 1300 BC and credits the Hittites. Whatever the case, given that kind of pedigree and historical prominence, you'd think the site might warrant a modicum of attention or respect. I don't know, maybe a sign? Perhaps a parking lot. Something resembling a trail. I would have settled for a map. Instead, a podunk amusement park abuts the highway beneath the mountain and completely obscures the Kybele's existence. It's not there because the Kybele is there, it just happens to be there. I know this because neither the concierge at our hotel nor the lone fellow we found manning the gate of the park (closed for the winter) had any idea a 3,300-year-old work of art worthy of mention by Homer even existed in this town, let alone a thousand- odd feet overhead. I get such a kick out of this kind of cultural nonchalance. I'm not sure whether it can be better explained by the embarrassment of ancient riches in Turkey or just a fundamental disconnect with nature and history. Then again, maybe we're just weird. Yeah, that's probably it.

Kybele Anıtı , hiding in the jungle of underbrush.

I had scoured the Internet for some kind of trail map and the best I came up with was something from a website cataloging dubious proofs for Atlantis. I overlaid that on a Google Earth satellite image to get a sense of distance and terrain but forgot the damned thing at home. It probably wouldn't have helped anyway because the trail it marked simply did not exist, at least not when we were there. I found one other blog of a guy who had tried and failed twice to find it (kind of like my trials at Aizanoi). This guy is a minor personality in the field of fringe archaeology and I was determined to succeed in his wake, despite the fact that he had hired a guide and didn't have two eleven-year-olds attempting it with him. One paragraph from his blog is worth quoting: "Three hours later I had aborted the journey. I was shattered. I mean, devastatingly exhausted. My heart was pounding and I was physically incapable of continuing. Although I could see the Cybele relief a few hundred metres in the distance, for the life of me I could not reach it; the terrain was too inhospitable. Even if I had had a machete, I would have struggled to penetrate the brutal undergrowth."

That pretty well sums up the task at hand. Nothing worth doing is ever easy, though, right? Shortly after we plunged into the briars we lost our vantage on the relief and had little to no real sense of where it was or where we were going.  Surprise, surprise, we ended up way off track and didn't realize this until an hour later when I left Lizzie and the girls behind to do some reconnaissance. Scrambling straight up a rockfall, I finally broke through the trees and underbrush enough to get a bead on the Kybele and saw we had been heading in the wrong direction all along. I went back to retrieve the ladies and deliver the bad news. Then we doubled back up the way I had come. I thought getting out of the thicket at least would speed our progress but I had led us to a precarious spot where going on was just as dicey as trying to get back down. The girls were game, though, and so we went for it. The next hour was pretty white knuckle, with a lot of butt shimmying to keep from falling down a series of steep pitches with bad footing. We hit a few impassable crevasses and had to descend a bit and then regain our altitude but in due time we made it across.

After all that effort, seeing the Kybele up close and personal was an ambivalent experience. Her sheer size is humbling and perhaps explains her arrested state. She is not merely weathered, she is also stillborn. Maybe her anonymous sculptor just took on a bigger project than he or she could finish. Maybe fate had other plans. Then again, from a postmodern perspective, this nascent quality captures the act of creation, or birth, much better than something complete and wholly realized. In the book I describe her as looking like a cicada that died trying to shed its shell. From many angles she is more monstrosity than Great Mother, more golem than goddess, but like her stone sister Niobe a certain startling recognition snaps into place when you circle just so and you spot the all too human tension between stoicism and imperfection, strength and frailty. Her throne is a great many-colored thing, striated and moist. Signs of previous visitors were more abundant than I would have liked. Graffiti marred much of her lower surfaces, and some gonzo adrenaline junkies had left foot and hand loops in the thinnest climbing rope I have ever seen as an invitation to scale the cliff from which she had been carved. I stopped short of accepting and ate an apple instead. When our sweat had cooled and dried, and we lingered long enough for time to slip its tether, and the sun had crossed its bittersweet meridian and was throwing the shadow of Mt. Sipylus across the vast fertile plain below us, we bid the Kybele goodbye and began our descent. A wadi, or dry stream bed, made the first section much easier, for now we decided to head straight down until we hit the fence behind the abandoned amusement park and try to cheat the briars along its supporting wall. This strategy worked for the most part and before we knew it we were lifting the girls over a section of barbed wire and heading to the car. Before we left, I ran out onto the road and took one last look back at her, tucked into her aeonian alcove far above the passing world, and felt a childish thrill at the thought of how many times she had been and would yet be lost and found and lost again. May the way to her never be signed or mapped, and that parking lot never built.