The Romance of Zenobia's Palmyra

While I was looking for Georg Niemann's images of Split ca. 1907 I happened across a reference to Robert Wood's The Ruins of Palmyra, otherwise Tadmor, in the desert (London, 1753), and it actually made me sit up and clap my hands, because Palmyra is one of my favorite places, and to find such a plethora of wonderful images is like getting the best kind of birthday presents.


I went to Palmyra in the early 1990's, before Americans were persona non grata in the Middle East (yes, that recently. We were actually welcome a lot of places back then). I went on a 5-week trip with my good friend Gwyan, who was working in London with me doing graphics at the time, to Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Israel. It was a fabulous trip, and one of the best places was the long-lost desert city of Palmyra, destroyed as an example by a Roman emperor.

We went from by bus from Hamma before going on to Damascus. I remember seeing a many-pointered sign-post on the way of which one of the pointers (pointing off into sandy flatness) said, "Baghdad 413 km" (or something), and feeling completely surreal. When we got there, we were blown away: across the desert, scattered around like toothpicks after a storm, were hundreds of beautiful sandstone columns, statues, carved cornices, and so on - carved from a beautiful orangey stone, like the desert itself. Some of it still stood (or stood again), some of it lay flat, and some was piled up randomly like pick-up sticks.


Nearby was a podunk little town of cement-block housing and boiling-hot, straight, lonely streets crammed up against high earthen walls. Within these walls lay the delicate heaven of the oasis itself: acre after acre of green trees and bushes, surrounded by ditches and pools of water, soaking into the fine desert soil. Where the wall grew lower we would linger, staring at the bounty and the lushness, and wish we could go inside.

The town was full of bored Arabs and on the outskirts, and in the ruins themselves, one could see Beduin folk hanging out, making tea or riding their camels or horses in lovely dark blue robes, the horses or camels arrayed in hand-woven saddlecloths with long tasseled bits. It was almost shockingly romantic.


Several of the buildings in the town housed trinket stores and sold things such as Beduin cloth, souvenirs, postcards of the Godforsaken main street, and any number of other things. I had always wanted a Beduin camel-blanket and found one in a little store run by a young man who looked as if he were about fifteen. After seeing the ruins we went in and bargained with him in a desultory way, drinking cups of sweet tea and discussing the price in a very slow and roundabout flirtation between buyer and seller. After awhile, he heard we were glassblowers and offered to show us his secret room. But more about that below.

Palmyra itself began as an oasis town:

"...[it] was made part of the Roman province of Syria during the reign of Tiberius (14–37). It steadily grew in importance as a trade route linking Persia, India, China, and the Roman empire. In 129, Hadrian visited the city and was so enthralled by it that he proclaimed it a free city and renamed it Palmyra Hadriana." [wiki]

The city is cited in a number of texts (under the name of Tadmor) as having been built by King Solomon, and with Roman conquest grew to be an extremely prosperous and elegant city, with a key part to play in the importation of desirables from the East to the Roman empire.

"Beginning in 212, Palmyra's trade diminished as the Sassanids occupied the mouth of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Septimius Odaenathus, a Prince of Palmyra, was appointed by Valerian as the governor of the province of Syria. After Valerian was captured by the Sassanids and died in captivity in Bishapur, Odaenathus campaigned as far as Ctesiphon (near modern-day Baghdad) for revenge, invading the city twice. When Odaenathus was assassinated by his nephew Maconius, his wife Septimia Zenobia took power, ruling Palmyra on the behalf of her son, Vabalathus. Zenobia rebelled against Roman authority with the help of Cassius Dionysius Longinus and took over Bosra and lands as far to the west as Egypt, establishing the short-lived Palmyrene Empire. Next, she attempted to take Antioch to the north. In 272, the Roman Emperor Aurelian finally retaliated and captured her and brought her back to Rome." [wiki]


Zenobia, known as "the Warrior Queen", expanded her empire and took over Egypt at the age of twenty-nine with her mounted desert-tribe soldiers and a great deal of skill, but was doomed to lose it within a very few years:

"In her short lived empire, Zenobia took the vital trade routes in these areas from the Romans. Roman Emperor Aurelian, who was at that time campaigning with his forces in the Gallic Empire, probably did recognise the authority of Zenobia and Vaballathus. However this relationship began to degenerate when Aurelian began a military campaign to reunite the Roman Empire in 272-273. Aurelian and his forces left the Gallic Empire and arrived in Syria. The forces of Aurelian and Zenobia met and fought near Antioch. After a crushing defeat, the remaining Palmyrenes briefly fled into Antioch and into Emesa.
Zenobia was unable to remove her treasury at Emesa before Aurelian successfully entered and besieged Emesa. Zenobia and her son escaped from Emesa on camel back with help from the Sassanids, but they were captured on the Euphrates River by Aurelian’s horsemen. Zenobia’s short lived Egyptian kingdom and the Palmyrene Empire had ended. The remaining Palmyrenes who refused to surrender were captured by Aurelian and were executed on Aurelian’s orders."


Except for Zenobia: she was taken back to Rome and paraded through the streets in golden chains. Aurelian was so impressed with her beauty, dignity, intelligence and general queenly bearing, however, that he pardoned her quickly and gave her a villa in Tibur (now Tivoli) where she lived in luxury, becoming a respected socialite, prominent philosopher and wife of a Roman governor and senator - and bearing the ancestors of many prominent Roman citizens.

I think this is one of the most interesting stories I know about this time period. And the ruins themselves live up to it, that's the best part. The rug dealer's secret room, however, did not.

It was a tiny room with florescent lighting. All along one wall were shelves and shelves of ancient Roman artifacts - small ones, such as coins and dusty, devitrified little bottles and shards of Roman pottery. "Glass," he told us, gesturing, "Roman glass."

Not my fake: this is what it's supposed to look like!

We looked at the glass with the practiced eye of glass people, and shook our heads, smiling. "This isn't old," we said. "Come on, admit it!" We said this with smiles and the sort of gentle nod-and-wink conspiratorial air of people who had been drinking tea with another person for two days. "No, no, really," he protested, his hands held out palms up, "Roman glass!"

We began to point out all the ways the glass didn't really look like truly aged glass. The oily sheen, we said, that was supposed to be age, wasn't on the surface of the glass, it was somewhere...inside it. We weren't sure how, but it seemed awfully like Mylar stuffed down inside.

He began to grin - he just couldn't help it. He was only fifteen, after all. Picking up one bottle, he showed it to us: "This one, made of a light bulb, cut off on the bottom. The neck - only plastic! See? Easy to melt so the top looks like it's hand-made."

We peered at the thing closely. Covered with a layer of sprayed-on grit, there was a little window for the Mylar to peek out, and the neck really was plastic! We started laughing, and couldn't stop. It was hilarious! A light bulb! Cut off! He showed us some of his other things, and described how it was done. In the end, we bought the light bulb one from him, along with some other ones that we thought were wonderfully inventive - AND the Beduin camel-blanket - and shook hands with him, thanking him for making our trip so much more interesting.

So who was laughing all the way to the bank? Who cares? I still have the light bulb bottle, and it still makes me smile. More, perhaps, than my beautiful pictures of the fabled city of Palmyra.


(The two modern images of the ruins are from an unknown website with beautiful travel photos)

Stamps!

Found these images of Split via World Cultural Heritage As Seen Through Postage Stamps. Very cool.

Inside, Outside, Upside Down (And Inside Out)

I'm thrilled to have discovered the Ruins of the palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia by Robert Adam, a Scottish neoclassical architect who is "considered by many to be the greatest architect of the late 18th century" [wiki]. Spalatro, in this case, being a Scottish architect's spelling of Spalato, the Italian (and more importantly, Venetian) name for Split.

I've been slowly becoming obsessed with this city. I wander the streets when I have time, trying to figure it out, making sketches and peering through archways. It's not just that the city is old, that the streets are crooked and narrow (sometimes extraordinarily narrow) and the buildings are an interesting hodgepodge of eras and styles; it's not even that every part of the Old Town is full of Roman bits, arching over streets and providing structure for other, less well-planned building efforts. It's really more about a strange Escher-esque quality. The city feels as if, sometime in the past, parts of its stony, unforgiving insides have been turned inside out.


Disembodied arches sprout from the sides of walls, going nowhere; ancient stoneworks stride through shiny boutiques, contemptuous of their surroundings. In some places, ancient corridors have shed their roofs and become alleyways, complete with balconies and shutters - and turning, without warning, into corridors again, which lead unceremoniously into rooms whose arched Roman windows look out over the waterfront: rooms without roofs, patios with glass windows.


My favorite alleyway dead-ends in a half dome which springs from the walls of two houses, covering the end of the little street with its lost interior. Who knows what living-space the dome used to cover? And below it, a lovely Venetian window, complete with stone tracery, which used to look out on some view of the Temple of Aesculapius, perhaps; but now it is filled in by a modern window-frame which looks through the same window in the opposite direction, out into the alleyway which, perhaps, used to be a corridor.


I marvel at this ability of a town to twist itself around, passing through the eye of a tracery and back again. It seems to me different than any other place I've been, and yet I keep remembering cities - York, Jerusalem, Istanbul - full of the layerings of past and present. They, too, have the richly overembellished rooflines; they, too, have achieved a fanciful arrangement of spaces possible only through centuries of adding structure onto structure onto ruin.

But Split defies them, somehow. There is something about the core of this town which is different from the organic growth-patterns of other ancient cities, and I think I may have finally put my finger on what it is. It stems from the origin of the city as a 9-acre Roman palace, planned and executed with typical Roman efficiency, strength and symmetry.

Only part of the massive Iron Gate peeks out at you from behind a Venetian palace. The rest of the buildings came later still.

It is these, the strong 1700 year old bones built by tidy minds, which poke resolutely through the 300 odd years of high Venetian dash and dazzle, 10 years of Napoleonic facelifting, and 100 years of Austrian absentee-landlording. As you walk, you encounter a mobius strip of sorts, as the city flips around you - but then there they are, those tenacious bones, marking that single few years in history when a Roman emperor built a special place for himself to retire to.

Diocletian, the emperor who retired to this singular palace, was an extraordinary man, lowborn and local (from near Solano, just around the corner of the bay), who rose through the ranks of the Roman legions to be declared Emperor on a hilltop near Antioch. He co-ruled for twenty years (284-305) with his friend and fellow-officer Maximian, securing previously unsecurable borders and restructuring the governing system so that what was a crumbling Empire lasted another hundred years. In 305, after a prolonged illness, he became the first Roman emperor to voluntarily abdicate from his position - and moved to his palace to live out the next seven years, gardening and looking out over the sea. He was said to be proud of the cabbages he had planted with his own hands.


(By the way, I recommend the Wikipedia article on Diocletian. Sometimes Wikipedia can be a bit dry, but Diocletian's inimitable personality seems to simply pop through the listing of battles, conflict, and death, much as the bones of his palace continue to pop through the modern walls of everyday Split. The Roman ruling class always reads like a cheesy soap-opera, with people poisoning people and other people sleeping with their sisters; but Diocletian comes across as a really smart, straightforward idealist with plenty of discipline who was... well, charismatic).

So now I'm letting all this stuff run around inside my head, in the hopes that some interesting fiction will come out of it. I leave the back of my head open as I go about the business of living, and hope the spores come and settle - and grow. Is that enough mixing of metaphors? Mushrooms with legs come to mind.


But back to the wonderous book by the blessed Robert Adam: the man came during the Venetian reign, at a time when those lovely bones were still very much out in the open, and - thank you, thank you! - the man did engravings of familiar places all around the city. Not only that, but he did sectionals of the Palace as it must have been, comparison drawings of the ruins all around him and what they must have looked like originally, and a complete floor-plan of the Palace as it was in his own time and as it likely was when it was brand-new (based, in part, on his own studies in Rome, where he read all the ancient architectural writers such as Vitruvius and Pliny the Younger).


Included - get this! -is also a comprehensive description of the uses of all the spaces within the original palace.

Check it out at the Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture, a resource I won't be forgetting soon.

So, in the interests of capturing a bit of the fascination, I've included a few of his fabulously Picturesque plates below, with my own pictures of the same angle and the same spot. Okay, this turned out to be harder than I thought, so I'm saving it for a whole 'nother blog post, probably in the next day or two, so hang with me, please. Cheers!

How Comics Should Look

Recently, I took it on myself to write to the editors at Fantagraphics, who among other things translate French and Belgian comic books, and ask them why, oh why they haven't translated more of one of my favorite bandes dessinées series, the Spiffy Adventures of McConey, by Lewis Trondheim? The Hoodoodad* and Harum Scarum are great, and I'd like to read the other eight.

The answer, it turns out, is that Americans (and other English speakers, apparently) don't seem to like those big "album" style books. Fantagraphics' Kim Thomson very kindly wrote me back:

"Alas, the two books, especially the second, didn't do at all well for us, and then NBM went ahead and translated two more of the McConey albums in their ODDBALLZ comic book series. (But you'll notice they discontinued the series and never released the McConey work in album format themselves either.)

I think part of the problem with our series was using the French album format which American retailers and most
fans seem to resist. I'm toying with the idea of someday repackaging the McCONEY material in the smaller and
thicker (2 or 3 French albums to one album) format, but alas again, I'm so backed up with my foreign-comics commitments that it doesn't look likely to be soon... Keep your fingers crossed..."

Curiously, when I asked my children whether they preferred the big (French-style) album format for Asterix and Tintin or the smaller format that both series seem to be released in nowadays, their response was a resounding "The big one!" And I remember discovering Tintin long ago, in the Berkeley Co-op (which would tell you how long, if you're in the know) and being fascinated and impressed with the large, beautiful, brightly-colored format. Particularly, I loved the hardcover books, and how with the large format it felt I was opening a magic book to another universe. I was so taken with them that within a year I had all of them, out of my own pocket-money, despite the fact that they were so intensely expensive compared to the cheap American comics at the local store. And unlike the cheap comics on newsprint, the Tintins held up to years of re-reading, looking neither smudged nor murky at the end of it all (though a little soft around the edges).

So why don't grownups like the Big Ones? Do they take up too much shelf space? Too much space on the table next to your bed, or the space next to your bowl of cereal? What, exactly, is there to dislike? Perhaps, and I hope this is not true, people like things that are familiar, and these aren't a familiar size.

For a number of years now, I have gone to France as often as I and my family can afford, and each time we make a pilgrimage to a particular store in St. Michel that sells literally thousands of these kinds of comic books, along with videos, manga, and other things. Imagine going into a shop that rises up on several levels, with at least two of them literally solid with the spines of comic book albums. Every book on the shelves is large format, beautifully printed, and relatively reasonably priced (considering you can get ten or twenty years out of them; the terrible bindings I've been finding on modern American softcover graphic novels only last a few months in the hands of enthusiastic readers before they start giving up their pages like moulting birds). We always choose two or three books to buy. They have to be readable in our lame high-school French, and at least one of them has to be readable to my daughters, because we can only fit a couple in our luggage. But they're worth it.

Sigh.


I've discovered any number of gems this way, over the years, beginning in the 1980's (pre-children, of course) with The Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec (above), and by extension, Jacques Tardi (the author), who has created any number of interesting and memorable characters over the years. Several have been translated into English, though not, alas, for any great length of time (Adele Blanc-Sec in English costs, used, up to $45 now and is not all that easy to find).



On the lighter side, I discovered Lewis Trondheim this way, too. Or, rather, I saw his stuff there, and then was able to find some of them at home. I gobbled down any of his stuff I could find in English: the high-school French simply doesn't cut it, though, as his dialogue is witty and full of colloquialisms. Except, of course, for the hilarious Mr. O, and The Fly (La Mouche), neither of whom need any dialogue at all to be funny.


And Melusine, who we all adore, is not likely to be found this side of the Atlantic anytime soon, more's the pity.

So what I want to know is, what's wrong with the album format? I'm not a huge comic person, despite enjoying the above folk, as well as Pogo (who I had a crush on as a child), Los Bros Hernandez, old Donald Duck, Maus, Sandman, and various other newer bits and bobs. I'm not one of the True Believers, who can cite names and dates and so on by heart. But I will always remember that shining moment of discovering the Tintins under the stairs at the Co-op. And I wish, with all my heart, that somewhere, sometime, perhaps when I'm old and creaky, there will be a comic book store -in English! - that rivals Boulinier on Boulevard St Michel.




Links (etc.):

More, and even more, about Lewis Trondheim.


Rowrbazzle

*Don't be discouraged by Amazon; they have a terrible description of the Hoodoodad, making it sound annoying in the extreme.

Lost in Split

The sun is finally out.

Having no trousers is a problem, since they seem to be de rigeur here, except for old ladies. Both my pairs of jeans fell apart two days or so before I left the states, and I’m not an easy person to fit. But it is time, time to post a blog, and I am not so easily deterred.

The Saturday afternoon foot-traffic along the road from Meje is quiet, only picking up as I near the ultra-clean Riva, the plaza along the waterfront downtown. As usual, I get many stares in my long skirt and thin green sweater, either because of my intense red hair or because I am simply dressed like a weirdo, I'm never sure. The Split style seems to be a uniform, uh, uniform: a sort of italianate obsession with jeans, sportswear, and glam. My French hiking sandals are far too practical for what is considered normal here.

Plus, the tourists hadn’t arrived yet.

I cannot find an internet cafe that is open on a Saturday afternoon. There are three marked on the map, and I actually think that might be all of them. The first one contains only one person: a tired, housewifely person who has just finished mopping the floor. She shakes her head at me. The next one, somewhere near the East side of Diocletian’s Palace, is closed. The third one, near the Fish Market (dead right now, of course, as are nearly all the streets except the little back ones with the sounds of children playing) is open.

“Internet and games,” claims a sign, and points up an unprepossessing stairwell. Hmm. At the top is a closed door with a backpack-y sign on it proclaiming it open every day until 21:00 hours. I hesitate, then reach for the door, only to have it snatched open under my hands.

Two young men with Italian-style front-faded jeans leap backwards and gesture inward, but I’m there first, smiling and gesturing outwards. They move past me, and the smell of cigarrettes comes with them. I step in: a darkened room, several dark-haired guys with earphones on play CarJack 900 (or something) with earphones on and cigarettes dangling from their lips. They puff away while silently jerking at the controls.

I back out quietly.

Now I’m sitting on the limestone steps of an alley in the middle of Diocletian's Palace, typing this to the sound of neighborhood kids home playing without fear of strangers, climbing around on 2,000 year old walls and steps and one of the 4,000 year old sphinxes that Diocletian had imported to decorate the place. The air is chill but dry, pigeons fly by with that peculiar whiff, whiff sound they make, and I’m happy to be here. Despite a back injury, a sinus infection, and a month of not writing, children who won’t eat local food and the unfortunate tendency to become locally famous for my hair and eccentric dress, I’m here.

What a great place.