The investigation of ancient northern Anatolia got off to a promising start with the three-volume Studia Pontica (1903–1910), but work was cut short by World War I, and for most of the twentieth century research attention was focused elsewhere in Asia Minor. The dawn of the new millennium has witnessed a revival of interest in the region, and a number of new research projects, centred on Sinope (O. Doonan, Sinop Landscapes [2004]), Hadrianoupolis (http://web.deu.edu.tr/paphlagonia/), Comana Pontica (www.komana.org), Neoclaudiopolis (www.sdu.dk/halys) and Pompeiopolis (L. Summerer [ed.], Pompeiopolis I [2011]), to name only a few, have emerged. The present volume is a valuable contribution to the field, summarising and presenting the results of the Avkat Archaeological Project (AAP), which included three seasons of archaeological survey (2007–2009).
A short introduction by the editors outlining the background and aims of the AAP is followed by a series of thematic chapters dealing, in turn, with cultural geography and historical background (Elton), physical geography (W. Eastwood and H. Yiğitbaşıoğlu), survey methodology (Newhard), roads and lines of communication (S. Craft), the countryside (P. Bikoulis), ceramic and archaeobiological evidence (J. Vroom), city and hinterland (Elton). The two final contributions by the project director, Haldon, trace the history and development of Euchaïta in the longue durée and very briefly summarise the main results of the project.
Of the four appendices (pp. 257–318), two focus on theory and discuss the application of remote sensing (M. Watters Wilkes) and geospatial models (Newhard, N.S. Levine and O. Adams), while two present the coin finds (A. Stahl) and inscriptions (P. Nowakowski and F. Trombley). The volume concludes with a bibliography and a general index; there is no index of sources.
Compared to site excavation, surveying tends to be a more serendipitous process, new avenues of inquiry opening along the way while some of the original research questions remain unanswered. Also, compared to a site excavation, an archaeological survey is far more dependent on establishing a positive and trustful interaction with the local population (pp. 52–3). In this project, two of the original research objectives were to establish whether ancient Euchaïta was located at modern Avkat (as the similarity of the two names would suggest: pp. 212–13) and to trace its development from a late Roman village to an early Byzantine city and a middle Byzantine military base (pp. 8–9).
The focus of the AAP was on the period from the fifth to the eleventh centuries, a time for which the textual sources for northern Anatolia are sparse and often unreliable, for a large part consisting of saints’ lives. Indeed, the growth of late Roman Euchaïta and its transformation from a village to a city with its own bishop (and, eventually, archbishop) was thanks to the cult of an early fourth-century martyr, Theodore ‘the Recruit’. As his epithet indicates, Theodore was a recently enlisted soldier who refused to perform the mandatory sacrifice to the pagan gods and was summoned before a tribunal. After the preliminary hearing, he was permitted to go free while awaiting his sentence. During this interval, the ‘temple to the mythical mother of the gods standing by the river bank in the metropolis of Amaseia’ burned down (‘Homily in praise of Theodore’, Patrologia Graeca 46, 744a). Theodore was held responsible for the disaster and sentenced to be burned alive. His remains were later transferred from Amaseia to Euchaïta, where a shrine was erected over his tomb. The earliest source for his cult is a homily delivered at the martyr's tomb in Euchaïta and attributed to Gregory of Nyssa (d. ad 394).
The narrative of Theodore's martyrdom was embellished by fifth- and sixth-century hagiographers who added circumstantial detail such as the name of Theodore's company commander and dialogues in oratio recta between Theodore and his judges. A list of Theodore's miracles was also compiled; these included the slaying of a fire-spewing dragon, which had been infesting the region around Euchaïta. The martyr's cult spread outside his native region, and the secondary versions of Theodore's Life may have been composed elsewhere, since their authors find it necessary to explain that Amaseia is located ‘in Helenopontos’ or ‘by the Pontos’. By the ninth century, Theodore had evolved into two entirely separate holy men with different military ranks, Theodore the Recruit (tiro) and Theodore the Commander (stratelates), and his killing of the fire-spewing dragon was later attributed to saint George as well as the medieval Turkish gazi Melik Danişmend.
In the fifth and sixth centuries Euchaïta appears to be a classic example of consumption-driven urban growth, the main consumers being the pilgrims who crowded into the town for the feast of saint Theodore and the bishop's retinue. Haldon also assumes the existence of a monastic community, ‘probably but not certainly indicated by some of the epigraphy’ (p. 228), but the abbess Mousonia commemorated by a single inscription (no. 11, pp. 304–6) may have been a pilgrim, and the contemporary martyrion at Neoclaudiopolis apparently did not include a monastic component. Compared to other urban communities in Pontos, Euchaïta was modest in extent (c. 2 hectares intra muros, p. 231), but as the seat of a bishop, it held the formal rank of a polis from the reign of Anastasius (491–518) onwards.
In the seventh century Arab raiders began to make their presence felt in Anatolia, and the city's character as well as its appearance were transformed. Substantial defensive works were added to the older city wall; while precise dating evidence is lacking, the reign of Constans II in the mid-seventh century provides a plausible context (pp. 239–41). Euchaïta henceforth served a double purpose as a base for the imperial army and as a Fluchtburg for the villagers of the region. By the standards of northern Anatolia it appears to have enjoyed a modest prosperity until the Byzantine defeat at Manzikert in 1071. Deprived of its military importance, Euchaïta went into decline and by 1318 had ceased to be a bishopric (p. 252).
Pilgrims and armies need roads, and a study of Euchaita's place in the communication network of the region formed an integral part of the AAP, though Newhard does not have a great deal to say about the methods employed in the road survey, and the first part of the following chapter by Craft is taken up by generalities. The presentation of the actual findings is not always easy to follow. With good reason, Craft rejects A.A.M. Bryer and D. Winfield's hypothetical direct route Samsun–Euchaïta–Tavium (pp. 82–3), but the route is included on the map of ‘Euchaïta's connections’ (p. 77). On the methodological side, Craft offers a thoughtful discussion of the potential and problems of Least Cost Path Analysis (LCP) to identify long-distance routes whose endpoints or junctions lie outside the survey area (p. 85).
The chapters by Bikoulis and Vroom place Euchaïta within its economic and cultural landscape, striking a good balance between discussions of methodology and presentation of survey results, with statistical tables for present-day agricultural production (Bikoulis) and a synoptic table of archaeozoological results from surveys across Anatolia (Vroom) providing useful comparanda.
Elton's second chapter summarises the survey results from the city itself and its hinterland. The application of advanced intensive survey techniques including Ground Penetrating Radar failed to provide a positive identification of a large structure on the southern outskirts of the village as the church of St Theodore described by Gregory of Nyssa (pp. 189–92; 217–18). On the other hand, the extensive survey of the surrounding villages did not identify any other major structural remains that might qualify as the church of St Theodore. Given the available evidence, the investigators have good reason to retain the identification of Avkat/Beyözü with ancient Euchaïta (p. 208).
The special contribution of the AAP to our understanding of life in late Roman and early Byzantine northern Anatolia lies in the fact that unlike the other projects mentioned above, it is not focused on the hinterland of a Roman city but on a rural region far from the nearest polis (Amaseia, more than 40km distant). Such out-of-the-way enclaves were by no means uncommon in northern Anatolia, where cities were spaced far apart, sometimes at intervals of more than 100km. Roman cities have provided the bulk of the inscriptional finds from northern Anatolia, and it was to be expected that the epigraphic harvest from an early Byzantine site like Euchaïta would be modest (eighteen inscriptions in all), but this is to some extent compensated for by the authors’ judicious use of the hagiographical texts and their combined analysis of the textual, archaeological and climatological evidence. The pollen sequences indicate a transition from a broad range of arbori- and agricultural produce in the Roman period to a production strategy focused on a few crops, primarily grain, in the middle Byzantine. Since the climate data do not suggest a corresponding change in growing conditions and the main shift appears to take place in the seventh century, this may have been an indirect consequence of the Arab invasions leading to the imposition of a Byzantine command economy whose top priority was grain production to meet the needs of the army (pp. 35–41; 226–7).
The volume is well edited and produced, with only a few repetitions and even fewer typos. In their introduction the editors explain how they have dispensed with colour illustrations and limited the number of halftones, line drawings and maps in the volume to those considered ‘absolutely essential’. Instead, the reader is referred to a website where the images are accessible (and will hopefully remain so within the foreseeable future). The rationale has been to keep the price of the printed book down in order to ‘attract a broader historical and general readership’ (p. 7). At a time when the prices of scholarly publications are on a steep and apparently never-ending upward curve, such a concern for the reader's purse is both laudable and timely (although £90 can hardly be described as a bargain price), but the ‘broader readership’ unfamiliar with the rural landscape of northern Anatolia would no doubt have appreciated at least a handful of photographs to give them an idea of the physical environment. The magnificent image on the dust jacket offering a bird's-eye view over the plain south-west of Beyözü gives an impression of what might have been.
