entry
April 2013, update June 2018
Desultory
Notes on Calabria
—of Natural Beauty and Disaster, Obscure Archaeology
and Curious Jewish History
I say
"desultory" although I'm not really sure
what "desultory" means. If it means disconnected,
random, aimless, then I think I'm your man.
Calabria lends itself to desultoriness. There is
just too much stuff. The Italian region of
Calabria is the shin and most of the foot of the
Italian boot (though the heel is back over in
Puglia). The political sub-units—the provinces—are
Cosenza, Crotone, Catanzaro, Vibo Valentia, and
Reggio Calabria; those are also the names of the
capital cities in each respective province. The
entire region of Calabria covers 15,080 km2 (5,822
sq mi). (On the map, right, a straight diagonal
from lower left to upper right is about 240 km/150
miles.) The population of Calabria is just under 2
million, down slightly from 10 years ago. The
population density of the region is about 130
inhabitants/sq.km (350/sq.mile), well below the
national average. Of the some 400 villages, towns
and cities in Calabria, the largest is Reggio (di)
Calabria (the "di" is commonly omitted); it is at
the extreme lower left (map) just south of the
straits of Messina, across the waters from Sicily.
The city of Reggio Calabria has a population of
186,000 (or about the same number of people who
live on my street in Naples!). The new autostrada
from Naples to Reggio Calabria is 500 km long/300
miles); if you leave right after breakfast in
either direction, you can be in the other place
for a late lunch. Not bad, considering that it
took Giuseppe Garibaldi
and his army one month to cover the same route in
the summer of 1860.
If you have a month, however, you should
take it. Coming down from the north into Calabria,
you enter into a land of intensely lovely, rugged
mountains. Unlike central and northern Italy, it
can still be lonely and mysterious. Even
foreboding. These are not the neat, well-tended
fields of Umbria and Tuscany. You pass small
hill-towns that were once feudal estates, where
serfs walked miles down to their hard-scrabble
plots of land in the morning and miles back in the
evening, century after century, in a grueling and
unforgiving struggle just to stay alive. In
classical times, Calabria was home to the Sybarites and the
Pythagoreans and, much more recently, has known
infamous brigands (or Robin Hoods, depending on
who is telling the story) as well as famous
philosophers such as Tommaso
Campanella and saints such as St. Francis of Paola.
Times, of course, have changed, but Calabria is
still the land of the vicious man-made violence of
the 'ndrangheta, the Calabrian
version of what is generally known abroad as the
"Mafia" (a term that technically applies only to
Sicily). Yet, Calabria also boasts one of the
newest universities in the nation, the University
of Calabria, located near the town of Cosenza; it
is a truly modern campus where 35,000 students
follow degree programs in Engineering, Psychology,
Law, Economy, and Letters. Calabria, like much of
Italy, has also had its share of natural violence
in the form of earthquakes. Two particular nasty
ones come to mind: the truly cataclysmic quake of 1789 and the 1908 quake which
greatly damaged both the town of Reggio Calabria
on the mainland and the town of Messina on the
island of Sicily.
There are three
mountains ranges in Calabria: the Pollino
(which really extends down from the province of
Basilicata to the north, then La Sila in the
middle, and finally Aspromonte in the province
of Reggio Calabria, itself. All three have their
own typical flora and fauna, and all three have
national parks dedicated to preserving the
magnificent territory. Much of the area is
heavily wooded and sparsely populated, but the
parks boast several "entry points" placed at
strategic locations around their perimeters. You
can go in, wander around and easily get
lost—especially at night; it's a great learning
experience! Just think— "...when the wind is
in the trees, and the moon is a ghostly
galleon tossed upon stormy seas..."—that
howl you hear? The one you hope against hope is
the gentle lowing of a soprano cow behind that
tree? No, there are still wolves in the
mountains of Calabria. The name "Aspromonte" is
also well-known to Italian school children
because of a bizarre episode in recent Italian
history. Recent, here, means August, 1862.
Italy's great national hero, Garibaldi, two
years after his march up the peninsula to unify
Italy, decided to finish the job and march from
the same spot, this time all the way to Rome,
the last papal enclave holding out against
unification, and take it for Italy. At
Aspromonte Garibaldi ran into the regular (now
united) Italian army, who no longer wanted his
help. He was wounded, captured and sent packing
into exile on his private island of Caprera off
of Sardinia. (He came back, of course. See this item.)
It's hard to avoid mountains in Calabria,
but if you are allergic to mountains, wolves,
brigands and picturesque hill towns there is
another way. You can also drive the coast road
from the north. It is about 275 km (170 miles)
from Sapri on the Gulf of Policastro, still in
the Campania region, along water's edge down to
the town of Reggio Calabria. The coast is
totally different from the interior and has a
charm all its own. You'll pass through small
fishing villages and harbors, some of them well
known for various reasons, including Pizzo,
where king Murat,
Napoleon's brother-in-law was taken prisoner and
executed. You'll see a great number of so-called
Saracen Towers perched
on the hills above the sea, set in place to
watch for Arab and Ottoman invaders over the
centuries. If you want to go inland a bit, you
can see the results of the great urban rebuilding projects
of the 1780s and 90s in the wake of the 1783
earthquake, entire villages built from scratch
with orderly, straight streets and
earthquake-resistant architecture. This includes
the town of Filadelfia(!), indeed named for the
City of Brotherly Love in the United States. You
may also pass through, especially in the
province of Cosenza, some Arbëresh towns—that
is, of Albanian origin! (Fascinating
tale about that. Click
here!) Eventually, you'll be down at the
friendly little town of Scylla, the abode of the
famous monster in Greek mythology who, in
cahoots with Charybdis, a cross between another
monster and a sentient maelstom on the Sicilian
side, controlled the straits of Messina, and woe
unto you if you wound up between "between Scylla
and Charybdis," as they say...(if they still say
that, but they probably don't. And thus is our
classical heritage reduced to puny expressions
such as "between a rock and a hard place." Sigh.
I guess I'm old.)
Back
to the mountains. The Aspromonte massif,
itself, forms the southernmost tip of the Italian
peninsula. It has sea on all sides except the
north. The highest point is Montalto at about 2000
meters (6000 feet) in the center of the "toe,"
just a few miles inland from the town of Reggio
Calabria. As such, it's a stone's throw down to
the east coast and the Ionian Sea with towns such
as Locri, (originally Lokris) a site of Magna Grecia in Italy in
the first millennium BC. Now we are into the
"obscure archaeology" mentioned in the title of
this entry [see 2018 update, below, Good
Fences Make Good Neighbors], —obscure
because history and the shifting geology of
coastlines have not been as kind to the ancient
Greek settlements along the Ionian coast as they
have been to better-known colonies farther north,
such as Paestum, Herculaneum, Velia, etc., or the Greek
sites on Sicily. Locri was founded around 680 BC
as Epizephyrian Locris, meaning Lokris
(for the original town in Greece) "under the
west wind." (Note "zephyr" in the name, from
Zephyrus, the gentle Greek god of the west wind
and bringer of the soft breeze of spring and early
summer). The original Lokrians were an ancient
tribe that were among those who wandered down from
the Balkans into not-yet-Greece beginning around
2000 BC. The Greek (and then Roman) town of Locri
in Calabria was abandoned in the fifth century AD
and finally destroyed by the Saracens in 915. The
survivors fled inland about 10 km to found the
town of Gerace on the slopes of the Aspromonte. A
new town called Gerace Marina was built on the
coast in the 19th century and that name
was changed to Locri in 1934. Thus, Locri, at
least in name, has come full circle, though not
exactly in the same place as the original. [More on Epizephyrian Locris
below, in the 2018 update.]
In
1972 just a few miles up the coast from Locri off
the Riace beach, a scuba diver discovered two
statues that are now a solid part of Italy's great
wealth of classical treasures. They were submerged
about 300 meters off-shore in shallow water; after
years of restoration, these "Riace Bronzes"
(photo, right) may be seen in the town of Reggio
Calabria. (A very recent archaeology journal
[April 2013] laments that "In spite of being a
major tourist draw, the so-called Riace Bronzes
are still being housed in temporary quarters,
three years after they were moved for museum
renovations [of the National Archaeological
Museum]"; thus, the statues are currently in
Palazzo Campanella, seat of the Regional Council,
in the town of Reggio Calabria.) The statues are
slightly larger than life-sized and depict two
Greek nude, bearded warriors. They are estimated
to have been sculpted around 450 BC, but the rest
is mysterious. There are many competing theories
as to the origin. One of the few certainties is
that these are not Roman copies of Greek
originals. They are originals and, as such, are
two of fewer than a dozen such large Greek bronzes
in existence. They may have been crafted in Greece
and transported to the Ionian coast of Italy,
where somehow they wound up in the water. They may
have been gone down in a shipwreck, or they may
been on solid land and been overtaken by the sea
in some fashion. They may also have been of local
manufacture by the Italo-Locrians, themselves.
Underwater searches along the local coast have
failed to turn up other similar items, but that
doesn't mean there are none out there. That's
Calabria for you.
The
Ionian coast of Reggio Calabria has a subsequent
history in which the Greeks play an important
part. There are areas where archaic forms of Greek are still
spoken, and there are many reminders of the
Greek Orthodox faith in the architecture of
churches, inscriptions found in them, and even in
the persistence of Greek Orthodox religious rites
still practiced in some place. [Other related
items are here.)
On
to curious Jewish history. First of all,
Jewish presence in Italy is documented back to the
time of Maccabee consuls in Rome (see this link); that is,
slightly before the time of Christ. Later Jewish
influx into Italy occurred as part of the
diaspora, the forced expulsion of Jews from Judea
by the Roman Empire in 70 AD. But is there Jewish
presence in Calabria even before any of
that? Well, there is a legend that you want to be
true just because it's so fascinating. A few
blocks in from the beach of the town of Reggio
Calabria and running parallel to the water's edge
is a good-sized avenue named via Aschenez
(pronounced with a hard 'k', thus Askenez)
so similar to the word Ashkenazi that you
don't have to think twice about it. Ashkenazic
Jews represent an important, distinct subculture
of Judaism (another example, Sephardic Jews).
Generally, speaking, Ashkenazic Jews are those of
France, Germany, Eastern Europe, and, by later
emigration, North America. Italian Jewry, on the
other hand, has had a least a substantial number
of Sephardic Jews (inhabitants of Spain after the
diaspora). Yet, here in Reggio Calabria, there is
a via Ashkenez. It helps to look at the Biblical
etymology: the tenth chapter of the Book of
Genesis contains the so-called Table of Nations.
It starts:
Now these are the
generations of the sons of Noah: Shem,
Ham, and Japheth, and of their sons born
after the flood. The sons of Japheth:
Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan,
and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras. And the
sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz,
and Riphath, and Togarmah...
There is an intriguing
similarity between the name Japheth and the Greek
Titan Iapetus, the father of Prometheus,
who molded the first humans out of clay. It is not
the only such similarity between Biblical names
and those of Greek mythology; comparisons serve to
lend at least plausibility, if not credence, to
some legends. Also, the 1st-century Romano-Jewish
historian, Flavius, says this: "Aschenaz gave
birth to the Aschenazi, whom the Greeks now call Reggini..."[i.e.
inhabitants of Reggio Calabria]. So, the town of
Reggio Calabria not only has the street, but the
residents still recall the legend that their town
was, indeed, founded by Ashkenaz, a great-grandson
of Noah.
(note: There is an extended
comment on this below
this entry.*)
Gerace photo: L. Papallo
Finally,
I am indebted to Laura Papallo for inspiring me to
write some of this down, as meandering as it is.
Her father's family is from Martone, a small
hill-town near Gerace. She writes, "I am
interested in the fact that Gerace has a long time
connection to the Byzantine Church...The Cathedral
in Gerace has inscriptions in Greek and they say
that when John Paul visited, he allowed it to
remain a two-rite and two-language church...Gerace
is uphill from the Locri archaeological site and
the first time I looked up and was told that they
carted all the marble up those hills to build
Gerace, it took my breath away. It looked to me
like an Acropolis of sorts on the distant hill.
They have a great poem posted there about the
twins - i Gemelli - another name for the
Bronzes."
The poem in
Italian that Laura mentions is by Franco
Loschiavo. This English version is my own
translation and, with all due apologies to the
author, I did my best.
To
Gerace
They oft
take wing o'er the Locride
these myths
and legends of ancient Hellas.
Gerace, up
there for a thousand years,
part of the
peak itself.
In the
evening she rises in majesty
to reflect
the reds of a golden dusk,
Perhaps she
adorns herself for the ball
with all
the lamps ablaze.
Now she is
called to relive the age
of bygone
glory and splendor.
A gem
hanging midst heaven and earth
is now anew
resplendent,
this
celestial garden
gives
thanks for the magic
that has
happened below
when in the
magical light of the twins,
Gerace,
paradise of Europe, suddenly reappeared.
Laura
kindly included a picture (above) of Gerace, this
"acropolis of sorts on the distant hill". It
certainly looks like one. That's Calabria for you.
* note:
Lengthy
Footnote/a Flight
of Fancy on Ashkenaz
This started out to be a
footnote to the section, above, but sometimes I
can't stop.
I'm not a Biblical scholar
(although, upon the advice of Prof. Warren
Johnson, I did sneak a few glances into Julius
Wellhausen's (1844-1918) skull-crunching tome, Prolegomena
zur Geschichte Israels —Prolegomena to
the History of Israel, but I do know a good
legend when I hear one, and the legend that the
town of Reggio Calabria was founded by Ashkenaz,
Noah's great-grandson is a good one. This is
especially true when you consider that the rabbi
of Reggio Calabria says that the legend shows
"early Jewish presence in our area."
Assuming
"sons" to mean descendants or successors or
nations, and hoping that into each tale some truth
must fall, consider that, even according to the
legendary Jewish "begats" in the Table of Nations
in the Book of Genesis, Ashkenaz was not a Jew,
not even a Semite. (They are not the same thing.
Arabs are Semites, too, according to themselves,
because they descend from Ishmael, the son of
Abraham and Hagar, the maid of Abraham's wife and
not from Isaac, the son of Abraham and Sarah, his
real wife. But both Jews and Arabs descend from
Abraham and he descends from Shem, the eponym of
the "Semitic" people.) Not even Noah was a Jew.
Noah was the father who would repopulate all the
peoples of the world after the Great Flood. His
three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth would become
the Semitic, Hamitic, and Japhetic peoples.
To
make the world's longest story slightly shorter,
the Japhetic people would be what we now term
Indo-European, extending all the way from peoples
in northern India to most peoples in Europe. (In
older literature on anthropology and linguistics
even as late as the middle of the 1800s,
"Japhetic" was a synonym for "Indo-European"
[IE].) Genesis also says the Japheth had a son,
Gomer, who in turn had a son named — here it is —
Ashkenaz. Ashkenaz is thus mentioned three times
in the Bible—twice in the chronologies of Genesis
and 1 Chronicles, respectively, as the son of
Gomer, grandson of Japheth and great-grandson of
Noah, and once in Jeremiah: "...blow the
horn among the nations, prepare the nations
against her, call together against her the
kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashkenaz...".
Because of the similarity in sound to the old
Hebrew word, Ashkuz, for the ancient
kingdom of Scythia, some feel that, indeed, this
kingdom of Ashkenaz was Scythia, that area on the
Black Sea from which the IE's (or "Japhetic"
peoples), are supposed to have spread out.
But "Ashkenaz" today is a reference to the
"Ashkenazi Jews", a major, distinct sub-culture of
Judaism. How can a branch of Judaism be named for
someone who does not descend from Shem, someone
who is not a Jew? and then, to boot, winds up as
the legendary Jewish founder of a town in southern
Italy?
Ashkenaz is
also a Hebrew term for "Germany" and was the
designation of the first area of settlement of
Jews in NW Europe, initially on the banks of the
Rhine. It is difficult to determine when the term
Ashkenaz first acquired that meaning, that is,
when the term Ashkenaz started to mean "Germany"
in Hebrew and Ashkenazim to mean "German Jews,"
but scholarship converges roughly on the centuries
between 600 and 1000 AD. Before that, it is
unclear what the word meant. (Some sources read
into the word the stems for Saxon and
Scandinavia.) The root Hebrew etymology of
"Ashkenaz" is apparently "scattered fire".
(Jerome, writing in 400 AD, breaks it down into
the Hebrew word esh meaning fire, a
comparative particle ke, and the verb naza,
meaning to sprinkle or scatter. He renders it in
Latin as ignis sic asperus—Thus is fire
scattered.) Also, as noted above, there is at
least one reference to the name in Antiquities
of the Jews by the Jewish-Roman historian
Josephus, who wrote (in about 90 AD) "...And
so many were the countries that had the children
of Japheth for their inhabitants. Of the three
sons of Gomer, Aschanax founded the
Aschanaxians, who are now called by the Greeks
Rheginians."
It
would be nice to know where Josephus got that.
Maybe from a Greek historian? Josephus certainly
had access to documents that no longer exist.
Might the Greeks have been responsible in some way
for the legend? If you like words that sound alike
and are possibly related, such as Ashkenaz
and Ashkuz, try Ashkenaz and Ascanius,
a legendary king of Alba Longa (not far from Rome)
and said to have been the son of the Trojan hero,
Aeneas. Unless we get Rosetta Stone or Dead Sea
Scrolls lucky, however, and find some hidden cache
left from the library at Alexandria, all this is
fanciful. (But I never claimed otherwise!)
Speaking of fanciful, you might also wonder if the
"scattered fire" has anything to do with the Greek
legend of Prometheus (said to be the son of the
titan Iapetus/Japheth) punished for having stolen
fire from the gods and given it to mankind. His
punishment entailed being chained to Kazbek
mountain in the Caucasus, the root of our word
'Caucasian'.
Note,
in any event, that Josephus didn't say that
Ashkenaz founded the city, simply that he was the
progenitor of people that founded the city. Could
Indo-Europeans have wandered into Italy by 1500 BC
and done that? Certainly. The entire Italian
peninsula is full of Indo-Europeans from the north
as well as from the east (Greece).
According
to much Biblical scholarship, the Jewish
Bible was compiled in the course of the five or
six centuries before Christ, with commentaries on
it being written well into the Christian era. It
was late in this time frame that Hebrew scholars
started referring to Jews in Northern Europe as
Ashkenazi. That couldn't have happened until after
the arrival of Jews in "Germany" and that couldn't
have happened until after the diaspora started
resettling Middle Eastern Jews in Europe, that is,
after 70 AD. (Detour. When I say "Compiling the
Jewish Bible" I am dodging the debate over oral
transmission vs written transmission. In a way it
is similar to the debates on Homer. See this item.)
So
who is the Reggio Calabria legend really referring
to as the founder of the city? It's probably a
fusion of different events spread over a couple of
thousand years. Archaeology says that some early
sites of Magna Grecia in that area were preceded
by native Italic sites, including one at Reggio
Calabria in around 1500 BC. That is plausible both
in terms of a general IE expansion from the north
(the so-called "Italic" peoples) as well as from
the east, from Greece, itself. It corresponds to
the arrival of merchants, coming from the Aegean
Sea in the Middle Bronze Age (1700-1300 B.C.), of
which there is ample archaeological evidence. It
is also at about the same time as the great
eruption of Santorini that destroyed the Minoan
civilization on Crete, sending refugees to the
Greek mainland where they became Mycenaean Greeks,
those who would then fight the Trojan War in 1200
BC. It is likely that other refugees went west and
wound up in Italy. (Indeed, besides Alba Longa,
mentioned above, other "Trojan" sites in Italy
include Benevento, founded, they say, by Diomedes,
after the Trojan War.) Besides the language
similarities mentioned above (Japheth/Iapetus, not
to mention Jupiter in Latin and Pra-Japati in
Sanskrit), others are equally interesting; these
include a son of Japheth named Javan, plausibly
the source of "Ionian," the sea that washes the
shores of southern Italy. Thus, both the
northerners and the Greeks were Japhetic
(Indo-European) and they both helped in populating
southern Italy.
So, the date of 1500 is plausible. The legend
of Ashkenaz and "early Jewish presence" was
possibly tacked on later, when Hebrew scholars in
the Middle Ages were referring to the synagogue
and center of Jewish learning in the 4th-century
AD in Reggio Calabria as well as to similar
centers in Germany. It was originally a
geographical description; the founders were from
such and such a place, in any event, from the
peoples who spread from Japheth's grandson,
Ashkenaz. By our Middle Ages, however, the
transfer of meaning was complete; Ashkenaz meant
"northern Jew" and you have a legend, a fusion of
elements spread over many centuries.
The idea that Ashkenaz was "Jewish" is curious,
though. It can't mean "Jewish" in the sense of
Semite. Maybe it's a very general use of the word,
roughly meaning "a Biblical ancestor". Maybe
that's what Josephus meant. Maybe that's what the
legend means.
If you want your favorite legend filtered through
the tough jaws of rigorous academic scholarship,
please send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to
someone else.
^to place in main
text
sources:
-Conan, Robert. (2010) The Indo-German
Identification. Camden House, New York.
-Culley, Robert C. Culley. (1986) Oral Tradition
and Biblical Studies, Oral Tradition Journal,
1/1, 30-65. Center for Studies in Oral Tradition.
Columbia, Missouri.
-Jerome (400 AD) Liber interpretationis nominum
Hebraicorum (Book of Interpretation of Hebrew
names).
-Jones, Alfred (1997) Dictionary of Old
Testament Proper Names. Kregel Publications.
Grand Rapids, Michigan.
-Josephus (Titus Flavius Josephus) Antiquities
of the Jews , written c. 94 AD. English
translation by William Whiston, 1737.
-Leeming, David. (2003) From Olympus to Camelot:
The World of European Mythology. Oxford
University Press. Oxford.
-Murray, Hugh. (1834) An Encyclopedia of
Geography. Longman, etc. London.
-Parson, James. (1767) Remains of Japhet, Being
Historical Enquiries into the Affinity and Origins
of The European Languages. Dublin.
-Wellhausen, Julius. (German ed. 1883) Prolegomena
to the History of Ancient Israel. New York:
Meridian Books.
- - -
- - - - - -
Good Fences
Make Good
Neighbors - Ρόμπερτ
Φροστ
added June 19, 2018
There is some great
archeology going on in Calabria right now:
excavation of a network of ancient Greek
fortifications! To enjoy it, however, you should
know something about ancient Greece. The complete
page on that is here.
But here is the short version, the beginning of
that page:
Shortly
after the year 800 BC — and lasting for about
three-hundred years—the peoples of the Aegean
peninsula and archipelago, collectively
"Hellenes" —"Greeks"— but individually
Chalcidians, Euboeans, Messenians, Achaeans,
Spartans, Ionians and Peloponnesians, spread
to the west and colonized portions of Sicily
and the southern Italian peninsula. Those
settlements made up what was known as Magna
Graecia — Greater Greece.
Plus this from The Alphabet
in Italy, where Herodutus is cited as
calling the Phocaeans "... the first among the
Greeks to undertake long voyages; and it was
they who opened up ...Etruria and Spain,
traveling not in merchant-tubs but in
fifty-oared ships." (Magna Graecia also included sites
in north Africa and elsewhere in the Mediterranean
coastal areas of France and the Iberian
peninsula.)
The next thing is to understand that these
different Greek groups were often at odds —and
even at war— with one another when they were still
in the Aegean. They were bickering, obnoxious
city-states, and there is no reason to think they
would turn into friendly next-door neighbors just
by virtue of moving around.
If you now look at the southern
Italian coast from the Salento peninsula (the heel
of the boot, in the region of Puglia) and move
from the bottom of the heel straight across the
sea to the end of the toe, that's 300 km/200 mi
(as the crow sails). If however you sail up the
inside of the heel and then follow down along the
bottom of the "sole" along the coastline to the
same point at the toe, looking for nice places to
chase the natives away from so you can build your
Greek colony, that adds some distance — that's
about 560 km/350 mi. That arthritic looking toe,
right across the narrow straits of Messina) is
technically called the Bruttian peninsula after
the Bruttians, the natives whom the Greeks chased
off. In modern terms the toe is called Aspromonte,
part of the modern Italian region of Calabria. It
is the site of the Aspromonte National Park
and of the archeology I shall come to. Aspromonte
means "Bitter Mountain"; it is a pyramid-shaped
massif, very rugged country with peaks of 2,000
meters / 6,000 ft. It's the last bump in the
Italian Apennines, the mountain chain that runs
the length of peninsular Italy for 1200 km/750
miles. The Aspromonte National Park that contains
this massif has an area of about 650 sq. km / 250
sq mi.
At the time in question,
speaking of unfriendly neighbors, "Bitter
Mountain" was shared by the Greek colony of
Rhégion, (today, Reggio Calabria) settled by
Greeks from Chalcis in around 740 BC, located on
the (western) Tyrrhenian side just below the
straits of Messina and by a later arrival (but not
by much - 680 BC), Epizephyrian Locris. (Today,
simply Locri.) That lovely name means West Wind;
thus it was a poetic way of saying Western Locris,
named for the city of Locris back home*. In those
days, if you wanted to sail or row, say, from this
new Locris to Rhégion, it was a substantial trip — southwest along
what is left of the Ionian Sea, then around the
bend/end of the toe and up into the Tyrrhenian
toward the straits of Messina. That's about 105
km/70 miles.
* As I say further up this page here ..."The
original Lokrians were an ancient tribe that were
among those who wandered down from the Balkans
into not-yet-Greece beginning around 2000 BC. The
Greek (and then Roman) town of Locri in Calabria
was abandoned in the fifth century AD and finally
destroyed by the Saracens in 915. The survivors
fled inland about 10 km to found the town of
Gerace on the slopes of the Aspromonte. A new town
called Gerace Marina was built on the coast in the
19th century and that name was changed to Locri in
1934. Thus, Locri, at least in name, has come full
circle, though not exactly in the same place as
the original.
But there's a
better way (once you lay a little groundwork!) — over the river
and through the woods. In the course of the last
year, Lino Lucari, a guide and park ranger in the
Aspromonte National Park, in collaboration with a
cartographer, has scoured the thick woods in the
hills of the "toe" and they have identified the
ruins of a long series of fortifications built by
settlers of Epizephyrian Locris at the beginning
of the 7th century BC. The purpose was to get from
that primary colony on the Ionian to two of their
secondary colonies on the Tyrrehnian side,
situated well above Rhégion, thus by-passing that
powerful city and gaining independent access to
trade routes in the Tyrrehnian. It also hemmed in
both Rhégion and Zankle (Messina) from both sides,
or at least let them know that Lokris was right
around both corners. The two secondary colonies
were named Medma and Hipponian (respectively, today's
Rosarno and Vibo Valenta, the latter now its own
province in the region of Calabria).
The map shows
essentially two routes. The first stretch,
directly from east to west up from Locris,
marked in yellow, was a commercial route right
up to the pass and then down to Medma. The
second route ran up from the south and was the
main military road running along areas (marked
by red lines) potentially threatened by other
colonies at sea level below. The road then
turned away and joined the commercial route to
Medma.
The
team has identified 31 forts plus stretches of
stone road. Ceramic fragments and preliminary
examination of the structures indicate that the
network dates back to around 500 BC, that is,
around 150 years after the founding of the
original colony. Some of the structures are hefty
—
rectangular with more than one floor and thick
walls. Many of the walls are relatively well
preserved, which lets you see how they were made
and possibly determine whether a structure was a
true fort or maybe just a way-station, a place to
change horses, or get some rest and food, etc. The
route from Locri to Medma thus climbed up towards
the crests of the Aspromonte hump and crossed the
passes at an altitude of 950 meters (3000 ft)
before starting the descent towards the Pian delle
Vigne plateau. Mr. Licari explains that "All the
sites are filed and photographed and each of them
has its own topographic map that can be used to
locate it, indicating places of interest,
coordinates and ways to get there." Ideally, he
would like to see the ancient Greek network open
to the public.
Source: this material
appeared originally in Italian in the on-line
journal Fame di Sud on June 11, 2018.
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