Broken Bits: Stagnation or Curation?

Did Christians smash up the ancient city? This is a question often answered in the affirmative in contemporary popular publications and film. It is a point of view often reinforced by scholars sympathetic to the political narratives weaved in such work, as has been seen in the production of Catherine Nixey’s ‘Darkening Age’, when some chapters were written or crafted by academics. It does sound very good to the modern ear, eager to shoo religion beyond the bounds of acceptability, but it has little basis in the archaeology of Asia Minor. Here things are a little more complex. To start with, we simply have to ‘park’ certain popular topics such as temple destruction or library burning, as having no credible basis. It would not do to waste ink on them in the shadow of Constantinople with its preserved temples and great library, opposite Hagia Sophia. I say this despite a fire in the library at Sagalassos being interpreted locally as being the result of Christianisation. The basis for this is relatively weak and we cannot see any anti-intellectual movement in Asia Minor at this time. Iconoclasm towards classical art overall looks slight. It is confined to a few images, especially over gates, and tends to be late and often unrepresentative. This is an age, whether at Ephesus or Side, of the re-display of classical mythological statues in nymphaea and elsewhere, with only genitals removed. Ancient art was appreciated throughout the 4th-6th c. across the region, being reused in the gates and streets of Sagalassos.

But there is the wider question of the degree of care or indifference for the late antique city. Is there are Christian take-over of the classical city? Late antique Sagalassos was full of old buildings and old statues, but to what extent were they just rotting away or were they actually appreciated by the people who lived in the city, or, actively maintained as part of some highly-conservative view of the past, in which old structures were cherished beyond their useful life? Well, evidence for small-scale repairs, especially seen around the Upper Agora, suggests that the ancient fabric was maintained wherever possible. Sometimes, a destructive event came along, after which comprehensive replanning was needed. However, amidst the removal of some small monuments, the preservation of columnar monuments, or the re-erection of fragile decorative structures, such as the nymphaea, is striking. After a devastating earthquake, what was still ‘needed’ by the city was a rebuild of a monumental fountain, complete with a new statuary display, something that today took around 7 million euros to achieve.

On an everyday level, we can see more than statue preservation or monument movement (acts now marked by a central cross-sign): we can see the reproduction of old forms of secular architecture, in either building types such as classical stoas, or in masonry built in pseudo-isodomic style, pretending to be ashlar when actually it was built of flipped paving slabs with rubble masonry behind, all within 6th c. structures. When one contrasts Asia Minor to other regions of the late empire, one also finds an active attempt to preserve and invest in very traditional architectural forms, looking back to earlier Greek cities: propylaea structures, colonnaded porticoes, and monumental art getting more investment than paved surfaces in other regions. The inscriptions and literary sources that we have for Asia Minor give the same impression: of cities led by councils made up of a cultivated civilian elite, now under the chairmanship of the bishop. Despite this, the authorities were deeply attached to the cultural memory and monumental heritage of their forebears, running back to the 5th c. BC and before in many cases. These leaders were predominantly Christian but were also without conflict or direct syncretism in how they held their beliefs or intellect. That impression is felt all over late antique Sagalassos, from its carefully thought-out water systems, decorated with a great red cross, to its professionally-cut gameboards, or re-displayed classical mythological sculpture, peering down from nymphaea or from gates leading out to large extra-mural churches.

25.1 Upper Agora Nymphaeum

25.2 Statue from the Upper Agora Nyphaeum, showing genital removal. This statue was placed back in the nymphaeum when it was rebuilt, ca. 500. The artwork was subsequently mortared over, covering the broken genitals. Thus the statues must have been modified and displayed after the rebuilding but before the final walling-in.

(copyright Sagalassos Archaeological Project )

25.3 Redisplay of statues, Lower Agora. This group of blank statue bases, recomposed from other monuments is likely to be a group of mythological statues, which is how similar groups are interpreted, with the help of inscriptions or surviving sculptures.