In Search of George Seferis, Klazomenai / Urla
38° 19′ 20″ N, 26° 45′ 53″ E
By Peter Mark Adams
The Harbour
The sea, shifting through variegated shades of cerulean, turquoise, and Aegean green, finally achieves a limpid translucence to reveal the ripple-combed sand of the bay. The surface casts shards of blinding light, reflecting off the net-strewn wharf whose moorings hold small, blue-hulled fishing boats brimming with tackle, swaying to the rhythms of the sea. Tangy odors permeate the fisherman’s wharf, filling one's senses and halting the slow process of thought, bestowing a timeless acuity to the billowing present. In this heat and at this hour, the quays are deserted - too late to catch the fresh morning breeze and too early for the bustle that precedes late-afternoon departures. In this interval, the town lies in quiet abeyance.
Amphora
An old snapshot of the quay shows it laden with serried ranks of Klazomenai terracotta - swollen amphora brimful of olive oil and sweet wine, arrayed and ready for the deep bellies of the awaiting caïques. This old, faded photograph almost succeeds in redeeming, in a momentary confusion of time, both the proximity and the infinite remoteness of the past. Though our memories might as well lay drowned amidst the broken remnants of the Bronze Age quay just visible there, beneath the glistening surface of the bay.
Klazomenai Tetradrachma
A silver tetradrachma with a nubbed surface rubbed smooth with use, its bright ridges succumbing to the darker intricacies of its depressions and crevices. The obverse features a radiant Apollo with hair cascading in a great wave of light, effulgent as the sun, caught in three-quarter profile as though to avert his fateful gaze from the duplicitous world of commerce beneath. As Appaliunas, the Hittite 'x-ap-pa-li-u-na-aš', derived from the archaic Luwian root '-appal-', meaning to trap, to ensnare, a pitfall or ambush, we can discern the god's more deadly nature and grasp his effortless cruelty in stripping Marsyas of his skin.
Mantiké
Forsaking antlers, the archaic iconography of the ‘Stag-God’ or ‘God-on-a-Stag’ mutated through millennia to become our more familiar, classicised Apollo; the presiding deity of mantiké-inspired prophecy - one of the four great boons enumerated by Plato as amongst the greatest gifts of the gods to humanity. His oracles punctuate the Anatolian littoral from Troy to the Letoon, the sanctuary of his mother, Leto, in distant Lykia; though never alone, for we find his temple ever twinned with that of his equally deadly sister, Artemis. The reverse discloses a Swan, sacred to the Sun god, wing outstretched, neck turned gracefully back upon itself; daily assigned to heft the Sun god’s chariot across the sky; whose klaxon calls - klazo, klazo - in popular etymology at least, rendered the Hellenistic name of this city: Klazomenai, rich in oil.
Daldal Kahvehane
Seeking refuge from this harsh light, this fierce heat, I enter a rundown, centuries-old coffee house, whose dim interior inheres behind the peeling paint of its arcaded patio. Deserted at this hour, its broken tiled floor, walls a grainy orange, rickety wooden chairs and tables, exude aged hospitality whose bric-à-brac (stacked glasses, tin ashtrays) enjoin a casual ambiance (as though one dropped in at this hour, every day); for to enter is to slip, effortlessly, into an unknown and undocumented past, a forgetful forever; and as one’s eyes adjust to the diffused light, the outer world disappears in dazzling sunlight.
Mythistorema
This search for the past in an ever-present now contends with the only time we ever wholly possess; the mercurial, ever-transmuting moment, as it slips from our immediate grasp; yet another fragment of our half-remembered, half-forgotten past. This room may well have stood thus, unchanged, from the days when George Seferis lived in this tiny harbour town (his family home just around the corner) little knowing what the future held or that all that he held dear would, one day, be left behind, forever. Better, then, to never set foot, once more, amidst the debris of the past; instead, leave your memories unredeemed; the better to leaven the leaden slough of time.
NOOΣ / NOUS
Did this fierce light bestow a commensurate clarity upon Anaxagoras? The greatest of Ionian philosophers, who, in this town, perceived sheltered, as it were, behind the disparate world of appearances, pure, unadulterated mind; wherein knowledge of past, present, and future lays, alike, in-folded into each and every infinitesimal moment. But if so, what then of time? This eternal presencing is not of our world; though sensed, rather than seen, it nevertheless inheres, nestled behind the fluid world of appearances, from where it emits the faintest of sounds, the purest of melodies, echoes, distant and barely grasped, of Apollo’s deathless lyre. For this many-named enduring landscape, its restless seas, its ravening heat, whether as Urla, Yourla, Kilizman, Klazomenai or Limantepe, are all no more than so many variations played upon an Anatolian syllabary of ageless depth.
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Peter Mark Adams is a long-term resident of Istanbul (Asian side!) and a professional author specialising in landscape, myth and esoterica. Published works include: Mystai (Scarlet Imprint, 2019); A Guide to the Sola-Busca Tarocchi (Scarlet Imprint, 2017); The Game of Saturn (Scarlet Imprint, 2017); The Healing Field (Balboa Press, 2014); Altered States/Parallel Worlds (Ceres Yayinlari, 2011). Shorter literary pieces and poems have appeared in Reliquiae, a literary journal specialising in landscape, nature and mythology. A review of a poetry collection, Autumn Richardson’s ‘An Almost-Gone Radiance’ has appeared on Abegail Morley’s ‘The Poetry Shed’; and a range of spooky essays in the peer-reviewed journals Paranthropology and The Journal of Exceptional Experience & Psychology.