In Turkey, the Amazons are regarded as a people. This surprised me because in Western scholarship the Amazons are so frequently belittled and regarded as a figment of the imagination. The Greeks, of course, had good reason to portray them like this because they feared the Amazons. Perhaps not only because the women were such skilled fighters, but what if the word got out among Greek women whose upper classes were meant to stay indoors and attend to the hearth, weaving and looking after the slaves (as we all know keeping a house functioning is no easy job).
Here are some things I know about the Amazons:
- The Greeks were in awe of them, enough to make a giant frieze called the amazonomachy, the war of the Amazons, in their most sacred temple, the Parthenon (a temple dedicated to a virgin [parthenos] goddess, Athena). This frieze shows the Amazons in battle against the Greeks.
- The Iliad, one of the most important Greek oral histories, is full of stories about the Amazons and their abilities in battle. Their finest warrior, Achilles, went up against Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons. She challenged him because of the way he treated the Trojan prince Hector. After fighting with him and killing Hector, Achilles tied Hector’s body to a chariot and dragged it around: a war crime in that period. Hector’s brother, Paris, later killed Achilles shooting an arrow into his (Achilles) heel.
- To get back to the Amazons, many had names with the word root hipp in it which is Greek for horse. So Hippolyta (release the horses), Philippis (loves horses), Lysippe (free horse), Melanippe (black horse) but these are mainly Scythian names. Where we were in Turkey was the stamping ground of the Black Sea Amazons and the fight between Penthesilea and Achilles is meant to have occurred some 350 miles east of Troy which is pretty much where we were.
If you want to go on an Amazon trip you will need a car. The places I found that had histories of – and sometimes monuments to – Amazons are along the stretch of the Black Sea coast starting west of Trabzon. Particular towns to explore are Ünye, Terme, Samsun and Sinop.
Just outside of Ünye on the sea side of the road is a statue to an Amazon in an open carpark attached to a petrol station.
Terme in ancient time was known as Thermiscyra. Apparently there is an annual festival celebrating the Amazons in Terme each year but I don’t know in which month this occurs. You should not believe what the sign under the Amazon statue says as it perpetuates the lies of the enemies of women including that Amazons had male slaves and killed them when done with them. But the woman with the bow and arrow is rather fantastic. whichever way you look at her.
One of my reasons for wanting to redo this road trip was that I knew there was an Amazon Park in Samsun. And indeed there is and it is much bigger than I expected. The Amazon warrior who is the centrepiece looks very tough indeed. Whoever made this Amazon Park had a better sense of history than the one at Ünye/Terme. Here, in addition to the giant Amazon, there are wall friezes. On one side is something close to the amazonomachy in Athens with paintings of Amazons fighting (presumably Greeks).
A second wall has an array of images of goddesses that many of us in Mago would immediately recognise. None of the signs ever mention that Amazon society was probably women-centred and that they were under sustained attack from the emerging patriarchies, especially the Greeks who at Troy (in today’s northwest Turkey) fought a ten-year war against the Trojans. The Queen of Troy, Hecuba, is quite a remarkable figure and I too would probably back the Trojans. It is also where Cassandra, daughter of Hecuba, comes from. These stories are so multilayered and complex it is only after reading them over a forty-year period and visiting so many places, that I begin to get a grasp of what is going on.
At the Amazon Park in Samsun they have built what is called an Amazon Village. This is one part of the Park I am critical of, but at least an attempt is made to show that these women lived in small houses and with one another. There is far too much of the warrior myth here, but the ruling classes always get to say what they think of their enemies. And while those who lived in this area were not enemies of Amazons, the patriarchy, which overran all the former matrifocal societies, certainly was (and is).
This is just one of Amazon houses in the park. It’s a bit like a theme park, but at least this history is not erased, just distorted!
Then there is Sinop, founded by the Amazons and named after their queen, Sinova. It was an important port in ancient times. (If you go and are looking for a hotel, don’t be fooled by Sinop in Brazil which seems to have many more hotels!)
In Sinop, a bit further west along the Black Sea Coast road, the Hotel Antik where we stayed, had this book on their reception desk. My Turkish is very basic, so I can’t read it, but it verified for me that they had also been in Sinop.
I expect that there are many more places along the Black Sea Coast with Amazon histories. The road is winding, the history is often hidden, The views are fantastic but it’s worth going to see the places these brave women inhabited as the world turned toward patriarchy.
© Susan Hawthorne, 2018
(Meet Mago Contributor) Susan Hawthorne.
Harriet Ann Ellenberger A year later I am reading Adrienne Mayer’s The Amazons. It’s very long (around 500 pages) and full of fascinating info.
Harriet, I missed seeing your comment earlier, maybe because I was travelling agin! I think the farm boys from the colonies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, all fought in similar ways, literally throwing themselves into the fight. I think that research on the Amazons is really only beginning, although there have been many books about Amazons, but whenever I try to read them, I’m disappointed Because they seem to believe their enemies far too readily.
I wonder what has been published in Turkey about the Black Sea Amazons … what I’ve seen published in English leaves me with the same feeling as you: disappointment. I hope you’re right, that research on Amazons is only beginning because the stories told so far don’t make a lot of sense. I was struck that military historians seem to treat them with more interest and respect than anyone else has.
After reading your piece on Turkey and the Black Sea Amazons, I told my partner about it and he said, if you’re in Turkey for more than 24 hours and you haven’t heard about the Amazons, you’re doing something wrong.
He also said that the Black Sea Amazons are taught in military-history classes in Canada. He couldn’t remember everything that he and the other students had been taught (this was in the late 1960s), but he did remember that some of the tactics the Amazons invented were still being used by militaries. And he remembered that other tribes didn’t want to fight the Amazons, not only because the Amazons had superior military skills, but because they fought to the death. The Amazons did not surrender and they did not take prisoners.
During WWII, German troops called Canadians “the Red Devils” because the Canadians fought the same way the Amazons had — they wouldn’t surrender and they wouldn’t take prisoners. Most of those troops were farm boys from the Canadian prairies, who were just very very mad at Hitler and had probably never heard of the Black Sea Amazons. But they were doing exactly what the Amazons had done, and it was effective. After awhile, groups of German soldiers would retreat rather than face them.