Not Quite Ready for Prime Time: The Belevi Monument

You Don’t Get This on the Bus Tour, 1.

This is the first true post in my series “You Don’t Get This on the Bus Tour,” for which one should read my introduction. As noted there, I selected my first site to continue the theme of the introduction and serve as an exemplar of the kind of places I want to feature.

The Background: potentially boring, but necessary to connect to the aforementioned theme

One of the curious things about the Seven Wonders of the ancient world is that, except for the Pyramid(s) of Egypt, all are essentially or completely gone. The sites of most are reasonably well established; but even where vestiges remain, they hardly hint at the structure’s former splendor . . .  and certainly do not evoke wonder. This is especially ironic in the case of the one Wonder (apart from the Great Pyramid) that was built to preserve and amplify the memory of a single person: the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. An uninformed modern consideration of the name might create the assumption that this Wonder was a funeral building for some dude named Halicarnassus. That would be fake news.

Actually, Halicarnassus (Greek: Ἁλικαρνᾱσσός) was an ancient Greek city (modern Bodrum) in Caria (SW Turkey). It became the capital of a quasi-independent fourth-century BC kingdom under Mausolus, who was the dude. Mausolus was a “dynast,” nominally the satrap of the region under the Persian king, but with hereditary royal power. He built up his realm, and apparently his ego, through political savvy and occasional rebellion. At his death, his sister, wife, and successor Artemisia oversaw construction of his huge and elaborate funerary monument. The structure came to be known—as typically, with the Hellenistic Greek suffix –εῖον—as the Μαυσωλεῖον (“[the shrine] of Mausolus”), normalized through Latin as The Mausoleum. It became the epitome of, and thus the actual word for, an elaborate funeral structure. The irony for Mausolus is that everyone knows his name as a term for a memorial building, but hardly anyone remembers the man. And his monument is no longer there—it was reduced to construction material by the Knights Hospitaller to fortify the castle of St. Peter in Bodrum harbor in the 15^th century.

But this post is not about The Mausoleum.¹ It is about a similar, smaller, and actually preserved funerary monument some 110 kilometers to the north, not far from ancient Ephesus. It was apparently the second-largest tomb structure in Asia Minor—after The Mausoleum—and thus easily overlooked in compendia of Wonders.

The Belevi Monument

The Belevi Monument, so-called for its proximity to Belevi, a town near Selçuk (ancient Ephesus), is today a hulking mass of cut bedrock, fallen stone masonry, and heaps of marble decorative fragments. Its dilapidated state notwithstanding, the monument remains an impressive sight and ranks as a wondrous site in my book (if you haven’t read the introductory post for this series, do so now for that dichotomy!).

As there are no surviving inscriptions, opinions on the date of the monument rest on analysis of stylistic details of the decorative remains. Most favor a Hellenistic date of the third century BC, and suggest the occupant of the tomb must have been an important ruler after Alexander the Great. The Seleucid king Antiochus II is an intriguing possibility, given that he died in Ephesus in 246 BC. While his body would normally be returned to Syria for burial, political conditions of the day may have prompted burial near Ephesus. His wife Laodice, under suspicion of having poisoned him, also may have felt motivated to make an extravagant show of burying and memorializing Antiochus II. Others suggested a date in the 4^th century, during Persian domination,² in which case a nameless local nabob lay there. The most recent study claims that pottery suggests a date in the early 3^rd century,³ perhaps too early for Antiochus II.

In the final analysis, we cannot be sure who occupied this now most-fabulous, but relatively unappreciated, ancient tomb of Asia Minor. I cannot help but find more irony in that fact. But that is one of the things that makes the site intriguing.

The Site (38.0147° N, 27.4722° E)

The Belevi Monument is visible, if you know where to look, from the O-31 Izmir-Aydin Otoyol (Turkey has fantastic limited-access motorways). But to visit the site, one must exit at the Belevi interchange, drive through the town, cross under the O-31, turn through a tunnel back under the O-31 and arrive via a decent gravel road. The ruins are obvious and are surrounded by a rather effective fence. Before 2015, the gate was generally open but the site is now apparently closed and the official gate locked. There is another somewhat-official access (not involving climbing the fence!) which I used on my two most recent visits.

The monument itself is impressive for a tomb in its sheer bulk. The central rock block, created by cutting away the hillside, is almost 30 meters square and over 11 meters high. It was faced with marble blocks on a stepped base with a Doric frieze at the top—from which numerous triglyphs lie strewn about. The facing covered and concealed the burial chamber, cut in the central core opposite the remaining hill face.

Above the solid block core was a built (faux-burial?) chamber surrounded by a marble colonnade and topped by pairs of winged lions and urns. The roof was probably pyramidal in shape, but this is not certain. Some of the winged lions and the sarcophagus from the burial chamber are in the Selçuk museum, but a myriad of column, capital, frieze, and other decorative fragments remain scattered about the site for inspection.

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It is possible, but rather precarious and probably imprudent, to climb to the top of the ruins. Folks apparently have been doing so for some time, however, as there is an ancient mancala (game) board carved into the highest remaining masonry stone on the NE corner. Mancala (and other game) boards can be found on ancient ruins and streets around the eastern Mediterranean, but this one has perhaps the best setting of any I have seen.

A Digital Sight on a Site You Must Check Out:

Owing to the proximity of the hill from which the base was cut away and some large trees just opposite the burial chamber, the Belevi Monument is surprisingly difficult to photograph from the ground, so the following may compensate for my attempts.

I serendipitously stumbled upon a spectacular 3D photogrammetric model of the Belevi Monument ruins by a group in Istanbul. Presumably they used drone-produced pictures for this, as evidenced by the problematic trees and lack of detail of the burial chamber. In any case, it is awesome. If you look carefully and use my pic as a guide, you can even see the mancala board on the top stone at the NE corner! Go here to see it: https://www.oddviz.com/portfolio/the-belevi-mausoleum/.

While looking around for better photo angles in June 2016, my companions and I noticed an odd shape on top of the adjacent hill . . . and, of course, decided to investigate (if it involves a steep uphill climb in the heat, it must be good, right?). What we found will be the subject of a follow-up post—next time, on “You Won’t Get This on the Bus Tour!”

Thanks for looking!

¹ For The Mausoleum, see John and Elizabeth Romer, The Seven Wonders of the World: A History of the Modern Imagination (London: Seven Dials, 1995), 77-106; or Peter Clayton and Martin J. Price, eds., The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 1990), 100-123.

² See the overview in George E. Bean, Aegean Turkey 2d ed. (London: Benn, 1979), 148-49 (unfortunately, now out of print).

³ See the online summary of research by Austrian Academy of Sciences, “The Mausoleum of Belevi,” https://www.oeaw.ac.at/en/ancient/research/research-archive/ancient-cults-and-burials/belevi/.