Trojan Horse of Western History
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Anatoly V. Belyakov, Ph.D. Oleg A. Matveychev, Ph.D. Scientific readers: Victor V. Kondrashin, Doctor of Historical Sciences Vladimir B. Kulikov, Doctor of Philosophy Special thanks: This book was published thanks to the Russian philanthropists Artem Suetin and Gennadiy Chernushkin 1 Dedicated to children: Lidia, Maria, Elizaveta, Svetlana, Gleb, Platon. You must be kind, cultivate your talents and love the truth! 2 Table of contents Alternative Introduction ................................................................................. 5 Chapter 1. Mega-mall to megaron. Pilgramage to the land of Homer ............. 7 Chapter 2. The Adventurer Toppled Troy ...................................................... 22 Chapter 3. The War for Troy, twentieth century ............................................. 43 Chapter 4. They came back ignominiously ..................................................... 64 Chapter 5. The Poet who composed Greece ................................................... 87 In lieu of an afterword. Two hours of Turkish tea .......................................... 119 Authors of Antiquity ...................................................................................... 149 Bibliography selection ................................................................................... 151 3 4 Alternative Introduction We decided not to write a traditional foreword, but instead offer ten phrases with different answers to the question: what kind of book have we produced? Here are these ten phrases: 1. This book is about the fact that the Trojans defeated the Greeks and not the other way around, as is commonly believed. 2. This book is about the fact that the well-known Greek religion, with its specific anthropomorphism, was artificially created for political reasons. 3. This book is about the fact that soft power, information warfare, and the falsification of history do not constitute innovations, but that they are the oldest essential characteristic of Western thinking. 4. This book refutes the conventional wisdom that "history is written by the victors". On the contrary, we have shown that the victors are those who have managed to write history. 5. This is a book about our postmodern world, where universals contradict each other, each of them entailing other universals as "my other" and we have shown the horizons in terms of solving the problem of post-modernism. 6. This book tells the story of an exciting journey to Troy — both to ancient Troy and to modern Troy. 7. This is a book that will be clear to everyone, and not only those educated in the humanities, because it is written in a way that is as bright, lively and interesting as a mystery thriller. 8. This is a book of science, which opposes the fashionable sensational historical fast food that has recently appeared on bookstore shelves under the anarchic banner “anything goes”1. 9. This book is about the struggle for historical truth and justice, immersing us in the world, because without truth we are orphans. 10. This is a book about how history unfolds like a musical piece and we, by an audible note, wouldn’t be able to guess which note occurred previously or predict which one comes next or project the present into the past and the future. To hear the music of history, one must have the historical ability to hear. 1 Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchist Theory of Knowledge. London, 1975. 5 6 Chapter 1. Mega-mall to megaron. Pilgramage to the land of Homer It takes half an hour to travel from Europe to Asia. This it the exact amount of time it takes for a car-ferry, connecting the Gallipoli peninsula with the Anatolian coast, to cross the Dardanelles. It takes about one hour from the fishing town of Gelibolu to reach our final destination. During this last stretch in our journey, we are overtaken with a special feeling. The road to Troy! This phrase is full of solemnity, and puts us into a poetic mindset. We echo Homer’s Zeus: For of all cities beneath sun and starry heaven wherein men that dwell upon the face of the earth have their abodes, of these sacred Ilios was most honoured of my heart Iliad. IV. 45-46. The landscape outside the window, however, is at odds with the soul’s condition. Scant vegetated low hills alternate with sunflower and small pine wood plantations. Only a thin blue band on the horizon reminds us that we are coming to the centre of what was once a mighty marine state in ancient times. Behind a stunted cornfield, we turn onto a rural road. In other five minutes we arrive at the village of Tevfikye. Today is Ramazan, and Troy is opened for visitors only after one o'clock in the afternoon. In a cafe near the souvenir shop we have that very Turkish tea in small glasses and stare at the Greek tourists who have arrived here on a huge bus. Deciding to not wait for the opening, but instead to buy wooden horses and fridge magnets, they get on the bus and continue on their way to various battle sites related to the ancient Greeks’ glory. Making a pilgrimage to these lands constitutes an extremely ancient tradition. Every pilgrimage itself represents a plot for an individual book and often even a key event in world history. 7 The Troad is the ancient name of the Biga Peninsula, where the infamous Troy is located. In 480 B.C., while marching against the Greeks, Persian King Xerxes stopped his troops on the Hellespont coast. Two boat bridges were built across the narrow strait. Suddenly a storm occurred, destroying the constructions, which were fastened with papyrus ropes, after which the King commanded that the defiant waters be punished by lashes and that the builders be beheaded. Before a new ferry is built, Xerxes visits the legendary fortress. This is how Herodotus describes his visit as follows: “The King … wishing to examine the Kremlin of Priam’s city, climbed to its top. Having examined the Kremlin and listened to all the stories about what happened there, the King sacrificed 1000 bulls for Ilion Athena. Magi’s made sacrificial libation in honour of [local] heroes”2. The generous hecatomb did not help Xerxes to break the Greek spirit down or to conquer Greece. Having suffered a few crushing defeats at the hands of the Greeks, having ceded them as part of his territory and having reduced the country to famine with his military adventures, Xerxes was murdered in the bedroom of his own palace. In 334 B.C., the flotilla of another great conqueror entered the Hellespont waters. Having stopped his ship in the middle of the channel, Alexander the Great sacrificed a bull to Poseidon, the god of the seas. Then he approached the Troad coast and threw a lance onto the dusty ground. For the young king, this was a signal as to 2 Herodotus, Histories, VII, 43. 8 the beginning of the conquest of Asia: the “lance conquered” lands were considered to be a gift of the gods. Then he jumped off the ship and was the first one to go ashore. Since Alexander believed Achilles to be his ancestor, he laid a wreath on the grave of his great grandparent. He took the shield and weapon from Athena temple, which would soon bring him luck on the battle field. The first battle with the Persians took place on the Granicus River near Troy. The forty-thousand-strong army of Persian satraps was smashed in one fell swoop, after which groups of Macedonians penetrated the lands of the Asian continent like a knife … Later, Alexander ordered to release Ilion from duties and to equip it with the necessary facilities, because he was seriously intent on founding the capital of his world empire there. His early death broke his plans, the great empire was cracked into parts, and the Troad lands, together with a larger part of Thrace, was passed to Alexander’s comrade Lysimachus to lead. Lysimachus built a high fence around the town, made local people settle at this site, and named it Alexandria3. In 48 B.C. after the victory over Gnaeus Pompeius in the crucial battle at Pharsalia, Julius Caesar visited the Troad. He is wandering about the ruins of famous Troy, Looking for tracks of the great wall erected by Phoebe. The depths of the dead forests and sponks are Where the Assaracus palace was — and The Divine’s temples can hardly stand on the ramshackle stones; And all Pergamon is covered with thick blackthorn: Even fragments died!4 Having traced his family tree back to Aeneas, he, like Alexander, pondered transferring the throne to Troy, which had been deserted. Moreover, having visited Troy, Constantine the Great had also planned to found a new capital here until 330, when he changed his mind and instead chose to establish Byzantium on the shore of another channel connecting the Black and Mediterranean seas — the Bosporus. The Troad even seemed more preferable as the site for the capital: from there, it would be possible to control not only the narrow straits, but also the land roads of Asia Minor facing all the Ecumene5. However, the 3 Strabo, Geography, XIII, 26. 4 Lucan, Pharsalia, IX, 964-969. 5 Термин «ойкумена» употребляется для обозначения освоенной человечеством части мира. Введен древнегреческим географом Гекатеем Милетским (550—490 вв. до н.э.) для обозначения известной грекам части Земли с центром в Элладе. 9 sea was already far from Ilion, and it had lost the key element of its existence — the harbour. The emperor gave this city on the Bosporus, which was fated to become the centre of this thousand-year empire, a significant name ‘New Rome’; however, within his life, he approved another name: Constantinople - ‘the city of Constantine’. In 354, Constantine’s nephew Flavius Claudius Julian made a pilgrimage to Ilion. He was an antagonist of Christianity, which, became the national religion of the Roman state under Emperor Constantine, Julian was eager to find desecrated sanctuaries in Troy.