Old Smyrna: The Walls Fall Down
In Part 3 of my tale of Old Smyrna, the city rebuilds from an earthquake, but powerful inland kingdoms have Smyrna in their sights. Can the walls hold them back?
“Smyrna” was the name of an Amazon princess before it became the name of a city on the eastern coast of the Aegean Sea. Built on a cape around which the rushing River Meles collided with the salt waters of a gulf, the city was destined for conflict.
At the naming of the city, two gods vied to be Smyrna’s patron and namesake: the sea god, Poseidon, and the river god, Meles. When the princess became the namesake instead, the two gods vowed to destroy the city, each in their own way.
Poseidon leveled the city with an earthquake in 700 BCE. Its walls and buildings collapsed, but the Smyrneans vowed to rebuilt, and the god left the Gulf of Izmir for more welcoming ports elsewhere.
The river god, Meles, remained. His gift — a spring inside the walls — flowed on. His threat had not been fulfilled —
Yet.
Wall III, 690 - 600 BCE
Prior to the earthquake of 700 BCE, Smyrna had changed alliances. The city was taken in an act of subterfuge.
The Aeolian Greek colonists who had built the city’s first two walls were locked out of the city by asylees from the Ionian Greek citystate of Colophon. The Aeolians had left the city for a three-day festival to Dionysus, returning to find the gates locked shut. Their guests had taken control.
Through negotiations the Aeolians won the right to remove their portable possessions from Smyrna. They moved to other Aeolian cities northward along the Aegean coast. Smyrna became the 12th member of the Ionian League of city-states that lay southward and included Colophon, Ephesus, Samos and Miletus, among others.
The Ionians built square houses, not oval ones, and under their administration, the street plan of the city straightened. A wide, straight street connected the western Sea Gatewith the river-facing, eastern Harbor Gate. They paved the street with stone – in fact, it was one of the first paved streets in the world. Today the street is known as “Athena Street” for its route past the temple to the eastern gate. The side streets also straightened, creating a “grid” of streets that met at right angles.
The Ionians added a shrine to their goddess of war to the defensive mound next to the Land Wall. This raised her above the river and sea gods who had shared the patronage of the Lelegs and Aeolians. The temple was made of pale orange andesite blocks, and its columns were topped with Aeolian capitals (their high scrolls were forerunners of the Ionian capitals of later centuries).
The Ionians rebuilt the wall that the earthquake had destroyed. And quickly. Even with the alliance with the other Ionian League cities, a powerful inland kingdom threatened Smyrna: Lydia.
Based in Sardis, about 90 km to the east, Lydia had grown rich mining gold and silver from the mountain near their capital. They had invented coinage, exchanging lion-stamped gold and silver coins with other kingdoms in exchange for goods. Their mastery of this sophisticated, new economic system enriched Lydia’s kings and made them a military threat to their neighbors.
Beginning with King Gyges in 675, the Lydians probed Smyrna’s defenses. But they could not bring down the wall. After the earthquake, the Smyrneans moved quickly to rebuild their wall and improve upon the defenses.
And what a wall it was – this Third Wall. It was the largest wall to ever surround the city: higher than the Second Wall and 15 meters wide at its base. The days of adobe and mud-brick were in the past. This new wall would be built with stone – a stone wall for a mighty city.
The builders shaped huge stones into polygonal shapes with multiple straight edges. These stones fit into one another like puzzle pieces, a technique that gave the wall flexibility – an ability to bend with the trembling earth but not disintegrate as the adobe walls had. Another benefit of the polygonal-cut stone was the shape of the wall. The baked bricks had been stacked in a steep slope to make the wall. The fitted stones made the wall vertical, impossible for invaders to climb.
Once the huge, shaped blocks of andesite had been set into the wall, artisans decorated the exterior, hammering or “dressing” the stone so that the face looked uniform or “finished.” The gap between the exterior walls was filled with stones dredged up from the river.
This was a beautiful wall: the pride of the city once again. Wider than the second wall, it could withstand a tidal wave, its builders said, not to mention an earthquake. Chieftains came from the interior to inspect the wall and its guard towers. “The city is impregnable,” they whispered. “No army could tear down such a great wall.”
Ships from other ports across the Aegean Sea arrived. The high walls were visible from far out into the bay. “There are no cities like this in Attica,” they said. “Nor the Peloponnese.” As sunlight swept across the walls each day, the patterns in the finished stone walls moved, giving the proud walls the illusion that they were expanding and contracting – that the whole city breathed.
The Lydian Siege (600 BCE)
The Lydians didn’t give up. Led by a new king, Alyattes, they staged several raids on the city gates. But each time Smyrna’s defenders drove the attackers back from the walls.
Alyattes was relentless. He built a war camp at the base of Mount Yamanlar. Daily raids brought Lydian cavalry against the gates of the city. The Smyrneans fought them off every time, safe behind their high, stone walls.
Early one morning a strange machine approached the north gate of the city from the Lydian camp. Lookouts on the guard tower watched as a large wall of woven reeds emerged from the mist and approached the gate.
The Smyrneans fired arrows and slung stones at the wall, and at the soldiers that guarded its sides. Closer and closer it approached until it reached the gate. When the reed wall of the Lydians nearly touched the stone wall of Smyrna, a cart hidden behind the reeds tipped up and dropped a load of earth at the base of the gates. The Lydians hitched a horse to the empty cart and raced away.
Soldiers opened the gate to remove the pile of dirt, but another reed wall and more Lydian soldiers approached. The Smyrnean defenders ran back inside and pummeled the second wall with slung stones and arrows. Again, the reed wall met the stone wall, dumped another load of earth, and horses dragged the cart away.
By the end of the first day of the attack, a small pile of earth blocked the north gate. The defenders had used flaming arrows to set two of the reed walls aflame, but the Lydians had soaked the walls with sea water, and the carts kept coming. A ramp was forming against the north gate!
The Smyrnaeans sent out sorties against the Lydians, but Alyattes’ large army blocked their attacks. Day after day, the shielded carts left piles of earth at the gate. Soon the Lydian mound had reached the top of the gate. A few days more and it had reached the top of the wall. A further day it was higher than the wall, almost as high as the guard tower. Lydian skirmishers stood atop the siege mound shot at Smyrnaean defenders and civilians within its mighty walls.
There was no safe place inside the city. Early on the final morning of the assault, Lydian soldiers raced up the siege mound, over the wall, and into the city, quickly forcing a surrender.
Smyrna was now a part of the Lydian Empire. It would never again be an independent city-state. The siege mound remained. Smyrna’s Third Wall would be its last.
The Temple Wall
There is no evidence of a new wall after Alyattes’ conquest in 600 BCE. In fact, the siege mound that he built is still there, marking the highest point of the Old Smyrna/ Bayrakli Mound Archaeological Site.
The city of Smyrna endured, but it was smaller — a backwater on the periphery of Lydia for the next 55 years, after which a new conqueror, the Persian, Cyrus the Great, rose up in the east and conquered the Lydian citadel of Sardis.
The Persians continued from Sardis to the coast and attacked Smyrna. The siege mound still covered the land wall. There were few defenses remaining to block the greatest military power of its day.
A final wall was built in Smyrna, however. Three meters wide, it barricaded the entrance to the Temple of Athena – the fortress within the walls that the Aeolians had built beside the first wall of the city.
Smyrna fell once again, but the Persian Wall stands today, restored by archaeologists and blocking the entrance to the temple complex from Athena Street, just 30 meters from the main gate of the city. To reach the temple, visitors must circle to the back of the temple site and walk along the top of the Land Wall. Five of the temple’s red andesite columns have been restored, from their bases to their Aeolian capitals.
The End of Old Smyrna
The city’s founding had initiated a conflict between two gods: Meles, the river god, and Poseidon, lord of the sea. Meles’ gift – a fountain – had been accepted by the Smyrneans, and they had become a “water people” who depended on the river. Poseidon’s gift of flamingos had been welcome, but they had long ago moved away from the city to lagoons down the coast where there was less hunting.
Despite these divine gifts, Smyrna had taken the name of an Amazon princess, not the lord of the sea or the god of the river. This had led to a curse… and retribution. Poseidon leveled the second wall with an earthquake.
Meles’ revenge would take much longer, but it would result in the city’s destruction.
Poseidon removed his attention from the walled city. The tides of the Gulf of Smyrna were light. The sea didn’t push back against the Meles River as it once had.
And the river still poured silt into the bay every winter as the rains washed down dirt from the hills. The silt, with no strong tides to pull it out to sea, built up into a delta, and the shoreline pushed westward from the walls of Smyrna. Few ships made it up the river to the harbor at the eastern gate. The harbor filled in, too.
The Persian Era (545-334 BCE) saw the walls and the buildings of Smyrna fall into disrepair. A small, unwalled town was all that was left when a new conqueror arrived from Macedonia in 334 BCE: Alexander.
According to tradition, Alexander recommended that the Smyrneans move their city from the riverside to the gulf, and he identified a site about 10 km away that lay near a woodland spring and a remote temple to Nemesis, the twin goddesses of balance and justice. (This spring flows still today, from the heart of the Izmir Agora in central Izmir.)
The new site had an acropolis nearby, 186-meter-high Mount Pagus, a formidable line of defense on which the city erected a bastion.
The Smyrneans would build another new wall in this new location. This wall reached out into the gulf beside their new settlement and created a man-made harbor that exists to this very day.
And that’s how Old Smyrna (3,000 - 300 BCE) moved and became “New Smyrna” (300 BCE - present), as history-minded people differentiate the two sites. No matter the location, “Smyrna” was the name and remains so until this very day. “Izmir” is merely the Turkish form of the name.
Despite fallen walls and silted harbor — despite curses from the sea god, Poseidon, and the river god, Meles — the city and its name survived and endure to this very day, even as mere ruins of other ancient Ionian and Aeolian cities of the eastern Aegean — Troy, Miletus, Ephesus, Colophon and Sardis —remain.