I was driving from the Mexican border to the high
desert of Arizona. The heat was more than 100F and desert was all around me. Unending
open spaces of sand and cacti. To give an eclectic context to my 5 hours drive
I tuned the satellite radio to Montréal, Canada. Perfect anachronism both in
language and topics.
After a short while there was an interview with a
researcher about the history of walls around cities and countries. Walls and
open desert. And my car raising a cloud of dust behind it.
Élisabeth Vallet, a researcher from University of
Quebec in Montréal specializes in the history of walls. She said that since the
fall of the Berlin Wall, sixty five new ones have been built around the globe.
Sixty five! And that the latest under construction, the sixty sixth, is by
Macedonia.
…. Upon return I wanted to learn more about walls
and why people have erected them against other people. As I researched the
history of walls, a nagging question kept on bothering me: are all walls among and across people made of stone? Of course not.
We all build invisible walls around us, for our personal space, for our
comfort. But our walls are made to be porous – love passes through them, dreams
go out and sometimes return through these walls. But stony walls are for a different reason:
they are there to stop people, love, dreams, hopes and poetry to pass through.
Walls of stone have hearts of stone.
… Building walls is not a new human endeavor. The
oldest walls dug out of the desertic earth date almost 12,000 years back. These
are the walls the temple of Gopekli Tepe in Urfa, southeast Turkey. But these were not walls to separate people. In contrast, the oldest city walls which were
to defend the city are believed to be those of the city of Jericho (now in the
West Bank) built around the 10th century BC. Next were the walls of the Sumerian
city of Uruk which was founded shortly after Jericho. The walls of Uruk were built
by the great king Gilgamesh whose heroic epic is still read in schools around the
world today. Interestingly, I do not
recall reading much about the walls of Uruk in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
And the ancient history of walls continued in Mesopotamia.
Indeed, King Hammurabi enclosed his beloved city of Babylon within impressive
walls around 1792 BC to keep it safe. But the hanging gardens of Babylon and the
wonder city we know about was achieved by King Nebuchadnezzar II (634-562 BC) who
protected Babylon by building three walls around it at heights of forty feet.
The wall tops were so broad that mythology tells us chariots would race around
Babylon atop these walls.
… Walls have initially been for defense or
isolation. To protect what a city or country had from the envy of others. But
walls are said to also be part of the aesthetics of cities and neighborhoods.
While in ancient Egypt most private homes had walled courtyards to at least
keep the uninvited away, in ancient Athens decorative walls were found around courtyards
and patios. Even today, we often hear that “Fences
make good neighbors”…
However, Athens also had the Long Walls which were
two parallel stone structures which ran from the Acropolis down to the port of
Piraeus and protected the center of the city. Was Juliet too naïve when she
said to Romeo:
“What's
in a name? That which we call a rose
By
any other name would smell as sweet”
Will a wall in any other name still be just a wall?
A barrier? A pile of stone to keep poetry away?
… I used to think that today when asked to name
world’s most famous walls most would reply “The Great Wall of China, the Berlin
Wall, and the Walls of Troy.” The Great Wall of China is now a tourist
attraction, the Berlin Wall is gone, and Troy was defeated through the trickery
of the Trojan horse ruse. The walls of Troy held away King Agamemnon of Mycenae
and his Greek coalition for ten years. They kept Helena within, because they
had to keep love.
But, as I listened to Radio Canada on my satellite radio
while driving in the open desert, I realized that those fallen walls had given
rise to new ones. Sixty six new ones actually!
… Will centuries from now nations read a new Iliad
by a new Homer? Will the new walls hold safe all the Helenas of the world? What
will the new Trojan horse look like? Like the Internet?
…I do not have pictures of walls. Rather, I prefer
pictures of narrow streets where balconies almost touch each other across the
way. I have found such streets in two of my favorite cities, Barcelona and
Oporto. One can smell the fish fry in olive oil and garlic, talk to the
neighbors while sipping on coffee, hear them make love during the siesta hours,
and later together watch the pedestrian traffic below.
And, around midnight, recite a few lines from Neruda
and hear your neighbor complete the poem.
September 14, 2015
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015
About
the photo: I took it in Barcelona with a 1954 Canon
rangefinder camera sporting a 50mm Serenar 1.9 lens.
