Before Alexander

In 334 BC Alexander the Great set out from Thrace on his eastern campaign—by very nearly the same route we took, only without the aeroplane. He put an end to the Achaemenid empire and created one of his own, running from Egypt to India. The Armenian Highland, including the territory of modern Erzurum, went into it.

But the Greeks had already been here, and in less imperial circumstances.

The lost army

Sixty-odd years before Alexander, in the winter of 401–400 BC, ten thousand Greek mercenaries found themselves stranded in Mesopotamia after backing the wrong claimant to the Persian throne. They decided to walk home—north, over the Armenian Highland, in deep snow, harassed the whole way by people whose country they were crossing without permission.

One of their officers wrote it up afterwards, and the Anabasis of Xenophon is the reason we know what these mountains looked like to a Greek: frostbite, snow-blindness, villages dug into hillsides, and locals who fired arrows at anything that moved. They came down at last to the Black Sea at Trebizond, where the survivors saw the water and shouted.

So Greek culture arrived in this country twice: once on foot and running away, and once on horseback and conquering.

The carve-up

After Alexander’s early death in 323 BC his generals divided the empire. Most of Anatolia, Erzurum included, fell to the state founded by Seleucus I. Under Antiochus III (242–187 BC) the Seleucids made peace with Rome in 188 BC, and the region passed into the hands of independent satraps. For a short time it belonged to the Armenian king Tigranes II (95–55 BC), and in 69 BC it was finally taken by the Romans.

The Erzurum country, with its severe climate and awkward terrain, largely stayed out of the ferocious wars of the Hellenistic kingdoms. Even so, the traces of the period are visible: archaeologists found them in the tumuli of İkiztepeler—literally “the Twin Hills,” which is also, as it happens, exactly how Turkish translated the title of Twin Peaks. Excavations in 1965 showed that Hellenistic culture had penetrated even these mountain districts, tying the region to the wider Mediterranean world.

A face with nobody behind it

To the Hellenistic period belongs this terracotta head, probably part of a votive figurine or a decorative element.

Greek tradition, unlike Roman, was not aiming at a likeness. This is not an individual portrait but a generalised image in the Hellenistic manner—a deity, a figure from myth, or a conventional type.

The difference is worth dwelling on, because it is one of the great forks in the history of art. Greek sculpture shows you an idea of a face; Roman sculpture shows you a particular man, warts, jowls, receding hairline and all. Stand in front of a Roman bust and you feel you could pick him out of a crowd. Stand in front of a Greek one and you understand you are looking at youth, or grief, or victory, and that nobody has ever had that face.

So the Hellenistic world reached Erzurum by three routes: a retreating army, a conquering one, and the slow drift of taste. But it did not stay long. A new power was on its way—Rome.