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Freya
Stark:
A spring was splashing into a sarcophagus by a shed
of scattered tables, and drivers to the plateau stopped for a glass of
tea. From here a shepherd boy led us
for two hours along a path that slants through woods, to where the town is
slung like a hammock between sharp ridges.... Out of Pisidian roughness and
tribal foundations easily Hellenized, Termessus emerged and flourished with
many temples. Their doors and pediments
and tumbled columns survive in the descending basins of the valley; the
pedestals of stoas show Greek inscriptions, where lichens and spring shadows
blur the forgotten names. A great wall,
six feet wide or more, still stands across the iner valley, with the disc
carvbed upon it which seems to be the sign of Termessus, so frequent is it on
all the tombs that scatter the crests of the enclosing hills. Beyond it,the street led to temples, a grass
grown market, a gymnasium shaddowed by budding plane trees like an Oxfcord quad
in spring; and at last, on the tip of the defile, to the most beautifully sited
of all Pamphylian theatres, whose shallow stone seats and endfolding crags look
three thousand feet down a straight ravine to the sea.
Aspendos:
Freya Stark:
The theatre
stands on flat ground, like a box from which the lid has been lifted. Proud,
limited and magnificent, there is a prison air about it - a difference as of
death and life that one feels between the Roman and the Greek. No landscape
stretches here beyond a low and unobtrusive stage, for the easy coming and going
of the gods. Human experience, that moved with freedom and mystery, is here
walled-in with balconies and columns; its pure transparency, the far horizon
window, is lost.
In the Greek theatre, with its simple three-doored stage and chorus undertone of
sorrow, the drama of life could penetrate, without any barrier between them, the
surround vastness of the dark. I have listened to the Hippolytus of Euripides in
Epidaurus where the words of Artemis and Aphrodite with the mountain pines and
the sunset behind them, become a limpid fear - a play no longer, but nature and
all that ever has been, anguish and waste of days, speaking to men.
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