The Wonders of Love

There are fourteen Wonders of the World - seven ancient and seven modern. Today I would like to talk about the only two that were created from love. What I call, The Wonders of Love.

One is very well-known of course, this being The Taj Mahal, built by the Mogul Emperor Shah Jahan in the year 1648 to honor his chief consort and the love of his life, Mumtaz Mahal.

But almost two thousand years before that, the very first Wonder of Love was created - right here in my new neighborhood.   And this one comes with some rather unusual trivia.  For instance, the word mausoleum is derived from the name of the person who is buried here.   Another tidbit:  It was built by the wife of the man buried there, ok that's not so unusual. What is unusual is that his wife was also his sister.  

Ok, here is the backstory. The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and located just a short drive from our house in Bodrum, was constructed around the year 350 B.C. by Artemisia II.  Artemisia was the wife - and yes, the sister - of King Mausol of Caria (aha - “Mausoleum”!).  At that time, Caria was a small kingdom on the southwest coast of Turkey and a part of the Persian Empire (map provided below). It's capital city was Halicarnassus.

But although Carians were indigenous to the area and were ruled by the Persians, they spoke Greek and identified strongly with the Greek culture.  They were getting their Greek on.

Artemisia was madly in love with her husband/brother, and completely devastated when he died.  So much so that - in addition to building one of the Seven Wonders of the World to honor him - it is rumored that after he died she mixed part of his ashes each day in her morning drink.  Ew, on several levels.  But before any of that, these kids were living it up.

Artemisia II and Mausol

(photos from the internet)

Mausol inherited the small kingdom of Caria from his dad and promptly turned it into a partier’s paradise. As mentioned earlier, this small kingdom was technically part of the Persian empire, but Mausol wanted the Greek lifestyle.  He started by building a massive Greek-style amphitheater for entertainment - music, drama, orators, perhaps even a sacrifice here and there.  The Romans came along later and made it grander and larger of course because, well, that’s what Romans do.

But Mausol started the party.  He and his people spoke Greek, they dressed like Greeks, they ate Greek yogurt, and they even drank wine like Greeks.  (Fun fact: wine is believed to have originated right here on this spot, invented by the Hittites nearly 15,000 years ago.)

The small kingdom of Caria, around 350 B.C.

(image from the internet)

About that amphitheater - walking distance from the Mausoleum by the way - it is up and running today.  It is in fact THE venue on the Bodrum peninsula for concerts, with shows by big-name artists nearly every night of the week during the summer.  (I haven’t been to a concert there yet, but I roamed around, and as you can see by my photos, it looks like an amazing venue. Imagine taking in a concert in those ancient ruins with its natural acoustics, the blue Aegean sea in the background….)

(photos by the author)

But I digress.  Back to this Wonder of Love.  

It is not known precisely what the Mausoleum looked like, because it was destroyed by a series of earthquakes sometime between the 12th and 14th centuries.  But from descriptions by Pliny the Elder - who claimed in his writings to have actually seen the Mausoleum intact - and from research and study of the remaining ruins, a fairly accurate picture can be formed.  Here are two of the typical renderings.

(images from the internet)

Hundreds of marble statues were placed all along the lower level and in between each column on the upper level. Sculptures of giant lions were placed on the corners. 

But most impressive of all was a marble sculpture of a larger-than-life, four-horse chariot (with wheels seven feet high) carrying the larger-than-life statues of Mausol and Artemisia, which was somehow placed smack-dab on the top of the roof.

So famous was this structure that it was visited by the likes of Alexander the Great - who, by the way, sacked and burned the city.  He did leave the mausoleum intact though, so that was nice.   

Today, this is all that’s left of the Wonder, which now sits in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

 

(photos by the author)

As you can see, only bits and pieces remain. The site was burglarized (as most ancient sites are) probably very early on by grave robbers who stole the very valuable jewelry and precious metals.  More than a thousand years later it was REALLY raided by the Crusader Knights of St. John (Hospitallers), in the late 1400’s - early 1500’s. They basically stole and repurposed most of the stone from the collapsed building in order to reinforce their castle nearby, known then as the Castle of St. Peter.

The Knights' castle had recently become vulnerable to that newfangled weapon of the Ottomans called the “Cannon”, and therefore it needed to be reinforced taller, wider, and stronger.  So, they hauled a great amount of the mausoleum’s marble and limestone to strengthen the castle, which was only a few hundred meters away.  Not that it did them much good.  The castle was conquered by the Ottomans a few years later.

The Castle of St. Peter today - now called the Bodrum Castle

Castle viewed from the water                                             Castle entrance - previously a drawbridge

Inside the walls - this was the castle cathedral, now a mosque.  

(photos by the author)

But even while they were raiding the mausoleum’s stone, the Hospitallers were appreciative enough to leave alone the more artistic works of beauty.  Sadly, the first modern archaeologist to uncover and preserve the site in the 1800’s - Englishman Sir Thomas Charles Newton - took the more impressive pieces back to Britain with him, where they remain today, despite repeated requests by the Turkish government to have them returned.

Some of the Mausoleum's pieces currently in the British Museum.

(photos from the internet)

How does this completely unusual love story end? 

Well, Artemisia assumed the throne upon her husband/brother's death. She was opposed during her short reign by the noblemen of the kingdom because they just didn’t like being ruled by a female. Nevertheless she was by all accounts a good ruler who became a rather successful military/naval commander in her own right.

In between successful military and naval campaigns, she spent a great deal of time and energy making sure her husband/brother was well and truly memorialized, including successfully lobbying a few Greek historians to write favorably of him, and, oh yeah, by building one of the Seven Wonders of the World for him. She died two years after he did, some say of a broken heart.  

Artemisia never got a mausoleum built for her, which is standard for folks who build Seven-Wonder-Mausoleums. Shah Jahan, the other builder of a Seven-Wonder-Mausoleum, died alone and imprisoned in a cell which had a view of the Taj Mahal, a sort of slow torture inflicted by his own son.  On the positive side, he didn't drink human ashes mixed into his orange juice every morning.

Several paintings of Artemisia exist, some of them semi-famous and in museums. None of them depict her as a strong military commander and ruler of a kingdom, rather, they are all of her sipping a drink made with her husband/brother's ashes.  

She never had a love later on in life like the one she had with her husband/brother. Does anyone?

Artemisia Prepares to Drink the Ashes of her Husband, Mausolus (c.1630) by Francesco Furini.

Artemisia, 1492, Italian Painter unknown, notname: Master of the Griselda Legend