Travel in Contexts

The New York Times travel section includes a slide show showing Cappadocia, where Sara and I visited.Yes, it really was that beautiful.

I asked myself then, and I still do: What did the Europeans who first saw this landscape think?

I am reminded of lunarscapes, of Salvador Dali, of vulviform and phallic shapes. That is my late twentieth-century context.

Now, the region was peopled from 2000 B.C, first by the Hittites who came from Europe. Then Persians from the East, Romans from the West, and Turks, again from the East.

But what about the modern European gaze? What is the first recorded reference to Cappadocia by a western European? Who was it? A Venetian on the Silk Road? A Russian? What did they see? What was their context for placing Anatolia's material culture?

A piece written by Hans Theunissen Ottoman-Venetian Diplomatics,suggests that Venetian trade in Anatolia may not have been disrupted by the Mongol invasion of 1243. And, the city of Sivas in Eastern Anatolia, while under mongolian rule in the 13th century, was an important center for European trade. The Genoese had a consulate (late 13th century)! By the early 14th century, however, Turkish and Venetian interests clashed. Enter the Ottomans, who wish to control Anatolia. Treaties with Venetians might indicated increased trade by late 14th century. By 1414, Venetian priveleges were negotiated solely with the Ottomans. See Chapter Seven

Theunissen, Hans, ‘Ottoman-Venetian Diplomatics: the ‘Ahd-names. The Historical Background and the Development of a Category of Political-Commercial Instruments together with an Annotated Edition of a Corpus of Relevant Documents’, Electronic Journal of Oriental Studies 1/2 (1998), 1-698

And if I'd only been to the Met this summer I might have seen an exhibit on Venice and and the Islamic World