In south west Turkey, there is a region that was once inhabited by a fascinating culture, lost to history. These were The Lycians. Their geographical homeland was this bulge of land protruding into the Mediterranean, called The Teke peninsula, or Lycia And in modern Turkish, Likya This is a rugged mountainous terrain, with steep slopes going right up to the sea. The Lycians didn’t leave us a lot of writing, so much of their history is lost to time. But they did leave us magnificent tombs carved into cliffs, and beautiful ruins. They’re not very well known, but they have surprising connections to the present. Their politics partly inspired the framing of the US constitution and democratic system. And their city of Myra, was the home of the original Santa Claus. This is not a joke so keep watching, and I'll tell you more. The ruggedness of the Teke Peninsula shaped their history. It created a fragmented landscape where each Lycian city, was relatively isolated from its neighbors, so they each governed themselves separately, but shared a collective cultural identity. There's a famous hiking trail called The Lycian Way, which passes though these stunning landscapes, and connects all the ruins. These people called themselves the Trimilli, and their land, Trimmisa. It was outsiders who called them Lycians, mainly the ancient Greeks, who were contemporary to them. Classical Greece which we all know and love, with the Parthenon, Plato, Persians, and Peloponnesian War, was all happening at the same time. So we’re starting our journey around 500 BC. The Lycians were indigenous to Anatolia, which is the main landmass that forms modern day Turkey. We know this because their language belonged to the Anatolian language family. All the Anatolian languages are now extinct. They were their own distinct culture, but being so close to the Aegean Sea and the Greek world, they were naturally influenced by the ancient Greeks. Just west of Lycia, the Aegean coast of Anatolia was populated with numerous large Greek city states. Some of the famous ones were Miletus, Didyma Ephesus and Smyrna, which today is completely
covered up by the modern city of Izmir. so this reconstruction drawing is very helpful for us to imagine. And of course we can’t go without mentioning Halicarnassus, just down the coast from Lycia, which is covered by the modern city of Bodrum. Just something interesting, this was the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the seven ancient wonders of the world. These were rich and powerful trading cities, and their sphere of influence reached far and wide. So a large part of the Greek influence on Lycia would have come from them, as they were close by and easy to travel to, both overland and by sea. One example was the Greek alphabet. Although Lycian was not related to Greek, they took their alphabet and customized it. They changed some letters, and then added a few extra ones to represent sounds in their own language, that did not exist in Greek. They then rearranged the order of the letters. So just like the Greeks modified their alphabet from the Phoenicians, the Lycians modified theirs from the Greek. Culture is never isolated. There’s always someone else’s influence. And the Greek influence on the Lycians is even more evident in architecture, especially the theaters. The Greeks always built their theaters into hillsides, and often facing the sea, or facing landscapes that served as beautiful backdrops for the plays performed in them, and the Lycians did the same. Good ideas are contagious. Their cities were decorated with Ionic capitals, a style originating from the Greek cities of Anatolia, the Ionian cities. But what makes the Lycians unique, are their cliff tombs. There are over 1000 tombs, and they’re the most distinctive feature of the Lycian landscape. However, even there you can see the Greek influence, as the facades of these tombs look like Greek temples, with Ionic capitals and triangular roofs. The largest and most famous one, is the tomb of Amyntas, above the modern city of Fethiye. It dates from 350 BC and looks like a temple. They even carved out what looks like a steel door. But that is no steel. These tombs are not constructions. They are literally the rock itself. One complete block of stone, chiseled out of the cliff face. You can see this clearly by looking at the ones with the bottom half of the column broken off, and the top part left hanging. These columns are not there to support the roof above, they are just there as decorative pieces, connected to the entire block of rock. However, it’s likely that the Lycians got the crazy idea of carving tombs out of the cliffs, from someone else. Lycia was a crossroads between east and west, and these tombs reflect that, showing the Greek influence, but I also think Persian. The Persians also buried their kings in cliff tombs. And Lycia did get absorbed into the Persian Empire in the middle of the 6th century BC, when it was expanding west, absorbing all the kingdoms of Anatolia, including the Greek city states. They would be under the Persians for over 200 years, and were actually given a lot of autonomy and cultural independence. In fact, it was in this period that the Lycians started carving these cliff tombs, sometime in the 5th century BC. So it seems likely that it was the Persians who gave them this influence. What makes them distinctly Lycian then, is the hybridization of a Persian cliff tomb, with a Greek style. But how did they achieve this seemingly impossible task of chiseling out these gigantic tombs? Straight out of the cliff face, and so high up! Well we don’t really know, and the Lycians don’t tell us, so any theory is mere speculation. But let’s look at this unfinished tomb to help us imagine. The spaces between the columns are not fully chiseled out yet. Maybe the guy ran out of money. One obvious possibility is a massive scaffolding. Imagine how scary it would be to work on one of those. You’d be standing on this questionable structure, built with wood and nails, chiseling at the rock all day long in the baking sun, and with no proper safety gear. Or even worse, if the height was too great for a scaffolding, just guys hanging off ropes from above. You’d be dangerously suspended, with the ropes digging into your body. Or maybe have a hanging board to sit on. I’m sure many of them fell to their death. Just my own hypothesis, once the workers got enough stone out from the top part, they could have hopped into that space and continued chiseling downwards and inwards, but from the safety of the rock itself. This would not only make the chiseling more effective, because you’d be standing on solid rock, but it would be safer, and maybe even in the shade for part of the day. These tombs were made for the elite of course, the ruling class, or the wealthy ones who could afford them. The rest of the population would have been buried in sarcophagi like these. One very striking thing about the Lycian landscape, and this I haven’t seen anywhere else, is that some places are littered with sarcophagi. Just hundreds of them all over the hills and valleys. It is truly an enchanting landscape to experience. The reason why they had the cliff tombs built so high up, was one, everyone could see them. You could be traveling on a boat along the river way down below, and there they were, visible for all to see and admire, and most importantly, be remembered for generations later. They had a lasting impression, and they still do on us today, over 2000 years later. They also believed that their souls would be carried from the tombs into the afterworld by a winged creature, so placing the dead high up, made it easier for the creature to take them to the afterlife. But also for protecting the tombs. Building them on vertical cliffs provided a natural defense against looting and vandalism. So a deterrent against potential thieves who were after the treasures buried inside with the dead. But of course that didn’t stop the most determined tomb raiders over the centuries, as all these tombs are completely empty today. Tomb raiding was a common practice not only in the ancient world, but throughout much of history, and there would be plenty of time for all kinds of ambitious tomb raiders, to make sure that nothing would be left inside for modern archeologists. The Lycians were famous in the ancient world for their coin craftsmanship. They were one of the first ancient people to mint their own coins, as early as the 6th century BC. It was their neighbors, The Lydians, who are credited with the very first coins, but the Lycians weren’t far behind. And they certainly pulled their weight, as these are beautiful. When I first saw pictures of them, I was stuck by their beauty. And they give us a window into what the Lycians looked like. All of a sudden we get real faces for an otherwise mysterious and little understood people. A people who don’t even say much about themselves. It was outsiders who wrote about them. Herodotus, the Greek historian of the 5th century BC, described the Lycians as a fierce people, highly skilled in archery and seafaring. He mentioned that they had a unique way of tying their hair, unlike any other culture at the time. He didn’t go into any details on that, but looking at some of these coins, I wonder if these special hair styles are what he was talking about. It’s unfortunate that we don’t get to hear their own voice. Even though they had their own alphabet, they don’t seem to use it much. We don’t have a great deal of Lycian writing that survived, and definitely no literature, poetry, or history, like the Greeks and Romans had so much of. Just short inscriptions for religious or burial purposes, and dedications to gods and important people. And the existence of the Lycian alphabet is short lived as well, showing up in the archeological record from the 5th century BC, and only lasting for about 3 centuries. We don’t know why they wrote so little. Either it wasn’t that important to them, or they wrote on perishable materials that didn’t survive, or none of their literature was passed down to us through later generations of scribes, like it did for the Greeks and Romans. But despite the limited amount, linguists were still able to partly decipher the language, thanks to two trilingual inscriptions that were found. One with Lycian, Greek and Milyan, another Anatolian language and another with Lycian, Greek and Aramaic. These were the relics that allowed linguists to decipher the language. They’re like the Rosetta Stones of the Lycians, with the Greek translation being the key to deciphering it. If fact, many Greek inscriptions are also found in their cities, indicating that it was also widely used in Lycia. And it was this ever increasing dominance of Greek that would eventually cause the extinction of the Lycian language. When Alexander The Great invaded Anatolia in 334 BC, the Lycians put up quite a stiff resistance against him, utilizing their rugged terrain to conduct guerilla warfare against his army. But eventually he overwhelmed them. He recognized their bravery and fighting capability, and incorporated them into his army, as he continued marching eastwards against the Persians. His death marks the beginning of the Hellenistic Age, when his empire was split up, and ruled by Greek speaking dynasties for the next 3 centuries, and Greek became even more dominant in the Eastern Mediterranean. Immersed in such a Hellenized world, the Lycian language may have continued to be spoken orally, but their alphabet died. And by 200 BC, we find no more Lycian inscriptions in the archeological record. Just Greek. The Hellenistic Age saw complex power struggles between these Greek speaking dynasties, and smaller regional powers like the city of Pergamon and the island of Rhodes. Lycia was tossed around between them like a pawn. In the 2nd century BC, things got even more complicated, when Rome entered the scene. It was still an expanding Republic, and hadn’t quite conquered the Eastern Mediterranean. But it was already powerful enough to be meddling in the politics of the region, and exerting its influence. This was a moment when the Lycians finally decided to officially unite, and they allied themselves to Rome, which was a smart move. They formed The Lycian League, or Lycian Confederation. It consisted of 23 Lycian city states, each maintaining their individual sovereignty, but also cooperating as one political body, a bit like the European Union. They met in the city of Patara, and held their council in this building, the Bouleuterion. And all this was sanctioned by Rome. The Roman senate gave the league a lot of autonomy to govern their domestic affairs, but their foreign policy had to align with Rome’s agenda. It was the first time in their history that they truly united, and as long as they stayed friendly to Rome, they would receive its blessing, and continue enjoying this political autonomy. What’s interesting about the league is that its voting system, had an influence on the US political system. Each Lycian city had a vote in the League that was proportional to its size and influence. The 6 largest cities were Patara, Myra, Xanthos, and these 3. Each of these larger cities got 3 votes each. The medium cities got 2 votes each, and the smallest ones got 1 vote. When The Founding Fathers of the United States were drafting the US constitution and deciding how Congress would function, 3 of them were pushing for a system where each state, would receive a number of representatives proportional to its population size. These were Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. And it’s believed that the Lycian League partly inspired them, because they wrote a series of essays called the Federalist Papers, where they referenced the Lycian League 4 times. Today in the House of Representatives, the number of congressmen that each state gets, is proportional to its population size. This also affects the electoral college during presidential elections. So this forgotten ancient civilization, had a small part to play, in the formation of the modern world’s greatest super power. The Lycians thrived under the League. This is a reconstruction of the Sanctuary of Letoon from that period, the cult center of the goddess Leto, who was the mother of Apollo and Artemis. It shows an advanced urban development, in a serene religious center, where Apollo and Artemis were also revered. And this arrangement between the League and Rome would last for over 2 centuries, until Rome officially became an empire, and annexed Lycia as a Roman province in 43 AD. Rome was just too big by now, and it swallowed up all its client states. But Lycia was the last region in Anatolia to be annexed as a Roman province. Testimony to the success and longevity of the League. But even under direct control of Rome, the Lycian people would only stand to benefit, as they were now living during the Pax Romana, a period when the Roman Empire was experiencing 2 full centuries of relative peace and economic prosperity. Moreover, certain emperors spent lavishly on building projects in Lycian cities, which started looking more and more like Roman cities. Take this reconstruction of Patara, during the 2nd century AD. This right here is the Bouleuterion, a typical Roman theater, and bath houses. The Lycians were now enjoying all the trappings of Roman culture. This harbor by the way, which made Patara the biggest port in Lycia, has been completely silted up, as you can see by this photo taken from the same angle. So from above, it would have looked something like this. We can imagine a scenario during that period when Lycia was a mish mash of the original indigenous culture, the centuries old Greek influence, a now strong Roman influence, and that of a new historical force on the horizon. As I explained in my Caesarea video, the interconnected trade network of the Mediterranean during the Roman times, was an efficient conduit for the spread of Christianity, with port cities being some of the first to receive its message. Lycia was in the perfect position to receiving it quickly, as it was right there in the middle of the Eastern Mediterranean. Of course there was a lot of overland travel as well, like Saint Paul’s voyages, but the majority of movements of goods and people, was through the sea. I also mentioned in my last video, that Saint Paul came through Caesarea. Well he is also known to have passed through Lycia by boat, at least twice. Saint Paul completed 3 missionary voyages in his life, each lasting several years. On his 3rd journey, which roughly followed this route, he boarded a ship at Miletus, that sailed to the island of Kos, then Rhodes, and ended its trip in Patara. In Patara he and his companions changed ships, after finding a ship that was heading to Phoenicia. They then continued on to Caesarea and the Holy Land, their final destination. So you could say that Saint Paul had an ancient layover in Patara. After getting arrested in Jerusalem, he was imprisoned in Caesarea for 2 years, and then sent to Rome to be tried in court. This would be his 4th and final journey. He was put on a ship that took him from Caesarea to Myra. At Myra, the centurion guarding him found another ship coming from Alexandria, and bound for Rome, and transferred Paul to that ship. So he barely spent any time in Lycia, and he didn’t establish any churches like he did at other cities. But these anecdotes from the Book of Acts, illustrate how Lycia was an important traffic hub in that Mediterranean trade network. Which would have brought Christianity to its shores fairly early on. Unlike the spectacular Lycian tombs, Christianity had completely different burial practices, with more emphasis on catacombs and humble burials. And so as Lycia became more and more Christianized, the tomb carving tradition declined, and eventually died off, and with it, the distinctiveness of the original Lycian culture, disappeared forever. And this is a perfect segway to what I promised you at the beginning, the Santa Claus story. I wasn’t joking when I said that. Turns out that the very first origins of Santa Claus, are not in the frozen Scandinavian north, but in the hot Mediterranean sun. Who would have thought. Saint Nicholas was his name, and he was the bishop of Myra in the 4th century. The language that he spoke was, you guessed it, Greek. I do have to point out though, that a lot about his life is not confirmed history, but tradition, so take what I say about the person, with a nice pinch of Mediterranean salt. According to tradition, he was born in Patara in 270 AD. It’s not clear when he became bishop of Myra, but he traveled to the Holy Land as a young man, and upon his return, was when he was made bishop, possibly in the first years of the 4th century. Christianity at this point is picking up a lot of momentum, despite the countless persecutions it went through ever since its inception. Of course the old Roman establishment resisted this fast growth, and the emperor at the time, Diocletian, decided to start one last big persecution, in 303. This affected our old Saint Nick, who went to jail among many other Christian leaders, and maybe even tortured. When Constantine became emperor and issued the Edict of Milan in 313 A.D. which granted full tolerance to all Christians in the empire, Saint Nicholas was released from jail and continued his career in the church. He is even said to have attended the first Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. So if all this is true, the guy was right there during some of the most important milestones of early Christianity. When he died, he became the patron saint of sailors, travelers and merchants, archers, and get this, children as well. There are also many legends about his gift giving and generosity to his community, which might be the seed for the modern concept of Santa Claus. He was said to have been buried in a tomb on a tiny island in Lycia. It was called Saint Nicholas Island in antiquity. Today it’s called Gemiler Island, but if you search on google maps for Saint Nicholas Island, you’ll find it. In the 7th century, the Arabs started raiding this coast. Fearing for the safety of his bones, local Christians moved his remains to a church dedicated to him in Myra. This became a highly visited pilgrimage site for centuries, until 1087 A.D. when sailors from the Italian city of Bari, stole his bones, and brought them back to Bari. They built the church of San Nicola, which was dedicated to him, and made him the patron saint of their city. Pope Urban II, who was the pope that initiated the crusades, was the one who inaugurated that church, and placed the bones himself in the new tomb beneath the altar. Saint Nicholas is still buried in the church of San Nicola. You could go visit it today. That’s what they did in the Middle Ages. Just steal holy relics and claim them for themselves, in order to raise the status of a city. Just like Venice stole the bones of Saint Mark from Egypt, and made him their own. In fact, powerful Venice couldn’t let Bari have it all, and Saint Mark was not enough for them. They wanted a piece of Saint Nick as well. And lucky for them, the sailors from Bari didn’t take all the bones, and left the little ones behind. That’s such sloppy work! If you’re going to carry out a holy robbery, at least finish the job all the way. Maybe they were in a rush. So Venetian sailors, stole his leftover bones in Myra, and brought them back to Venice. And those are still buried in a church in Venice, called San Nicolò al Lido, right at the entrance to the lagoon. They must have put him there because he was the patron saint of sailors, so to bless all the ships leaving the lagoon for the open sea. I won’t get into the whole evolution of how Saint Nicholas morphed from this, to that, and how his name became Santa clause, as it’s out of the scope of this video, but read about it. So there you go. Santa Claus was a Lycian. And if you liked this video, do what Santa says.
