Page 117 - Life of Gertrude Bell

ASIA MINOR 103
a.d. 660. In the terrible centuries which followed, when every
year one or more raids swept over Anatolia, such a city was
necessarily deserted...’
Gertrude was assured in her detail and emphatic in her con­
clusions: ‘No. 1 is the largest church in the Kara Dagh ... It is a
true basilica, the nave being raised above the aisles and lightened
by round-headed windows pierced in the upper walls, five on
either side.’ And then: ‘In Mahaletch we have an admirable
example of Anatolian custom. The Christians must have re-
sanctified a mountain, immcmorially honoured, by crowning it
with a mausoleum chapel and a church. So at Ivriz the sacred
valley was consecrated by chapels, so on the Lake of Egerdir the
pagan shrine on the north-eastern shore was taken over and is
still used by the Christians. The custom of the country enforced
itself on all new-comers, and when in their turn the Turkish
invaders found a Christian chapel on the hill-tops, they too
adopted the site as a place of pilgrimage and sanctified it with the
grave of a holy man ... For in Anatolia, custom is stronger than
the strongest. Conquerors come and go, but the final victor is the
land itself.’
Her chapter on Ecclesiastical Architecture opens like a rondo
after a comparatively solemn middle movement, and becomes in
the end a testament to a new-found faith:
One of the most remarkable experiences of travel is that which
assails him who passes from the seaboard of Asia Minor and
gains the central plateau. He leaves behind him a smiling
country full of the sound of waters, with fertile valleys, hills
clad in secular forests, coasts that the Greek made his own,
settling them with cities, crowning them with temples,
charging the very atmosphere with the restless activity of his
temper ... If this is the first it is also the final impression ...
Race, culture, art, religion, pick them up at any point you
please down the long course of history, and you shall find
them to be essentially Asiatic.
Her journey in 1907 was beset with difficulties, but nothing quite
compared with the problems of archaeological research at Maden
Sheher. Sir William Ramsay was, in her word, a ‘chaotic’ traveller.
His mind was so full of ecclesiastical history that he seldom knew
where he was and if left to his own devices would forget where
his camp or his hotel was; on occasion he even lost his clothes.