Timeline of archaeological research on Samothrace

Cyriac of Ancona’s – Kyriacus Anconitanus de Picenicollibus (K.A.P.)’s visit to Samothrace (1444)

Cyriac of Ancona (1391–1452) was the most enterprising and prolific recorder of Greek and Roman antiquities, particularly inscriptions, in the 15^th century, and the general accuracy of his records entitles him to be called the founding father of modern classical archaeology. Raised and educated to be a merchant, he became, like most of the early humanists, a born-again convert, so to speak, to the revived interest in ancient Greek and Roman culture that we call Renaissance. But his conversion came about, not only through the rediscovery of classical manuscripts, but especially by his continued personal encounter with the physical remains of classical antiquity that littered both the Italian landscape and the islands and mainland of Greece and Asia Minor. From these travels which served his antiquarian rather than mercantile interests, came his diaries and letters filled with accounts of his wanderings. These verbal descriptions were often illustrated with amateurish drawings of the temples and other buildings, statues and city walls he had seen, many of which today either no longer exist or survive only in a far deteriorated state. Perhaps his most widely known contributions to classical research are his copies of about a thousand Latin and Greek inscriptions, many of which have disappeared since then.

In his first travels to the Levant, he did see Crete, Alexandria, some of the Greek islands, as well as some sites of the ancient Greek settlements on the Ionic coast of Asia Minor and in Sicily. Before he was thirty he had run the finances of an ambitious project of Ancona’s papal governor, Cardinal Gabriele Condulmer (the future Pop Eugene IV), to restore the city’s ancient harbor. Later, in 1427–1431, he sailed on commercial trading ships that made rounds of ports in the eastern Mediterranean, including Damascus, Cyprus, Constantinople, Adrianople, and Gallipoli. All this time he was gaining experience, apart from trade, in politics, governance, and diplomacy. Out of his experience of witnessing in Adrianople the pageantry of the sultan’s court and the misery of thousands of Greek prisoners of war came an ambitious plan that he rushed back to Rome to urge upon the new pope to convoke a council of the Church that would affect a reunion of the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches and to proclaim a crusade whose purpose would be to relieve the pressure on Constantinople by driving the Turks out of European Thrace (Eugene did both eventually, convoking the council of Ferrara-Florence in 1437 and proclaiming a crusade in 1443). Through his letters and diaries of 1443 to 1449, in the third and last period of his life (1443–1452), Cyriac runs a complex web of interests and skills – antiquarian, political, religious, and commercial. From these last travels survive 53 letters and brief diary excerpts as well as five more extensive fragments of his travel diaries which record visits to Propontis, many of the islands and coastal cities of the northern Aegean, Cycladic islands, Crete, and Peloponnesus; the Peloponnesian journal forms the best evidence of what Cyriac’s commentaria originally looked like: a mixture of narrative and descriptive texts interspersed with drawings, Greek and Latin inscriptions, and occasional brief literary testimonia pertinent to the location just described.

Cyriacus of Ancona was the most influential and remarkable of all visitors to Samothrace in modern times. The brief account of his short stay on the island, the earliest extant report on the ancient sanctuary and the city, is preserved in an eloquent, if fragmentary, extract from his lost journal in the Vatican Library.

Letter 18, Diary II

On the 2^nd of October we (departed) from Imbros in a small boat manned by four rowers provided by Governor Asan. Guided by an experienced Imbriot sailor named Manuel, on a voyage made uneventful by favoring winds, we came to Thracian Samos, a famous island in the Aegean, towering with mountains, which our [P. Vergilius] Maro recalls in his Aeneid in these words:

Thracian Samos, which is now called Samothrace.

The next day, guided by Manuel himself, we walked about a hundred stadia over steep, mountainous terrain to the island’s modern inland town. There, I first looked up Janos Laskaris, the governor [representing] Palamede Gattilusio, who received me very kindly and did me the honor of accompanying me on the following lucky Lord’s Day to the ancient city itself, which they call ‘the Old City’, situated by the sea in the northern part of the island.

There, under his personal guidance, we first looked at the ancient walls, built of large stones. Extending from a high, steep hill over a long stretch on a decline that slopes down to the sea, they survive to our day, provided in some part with towers and gates in marvelously diverse architectural styles. Moreover, to add to the island’s accumulation of celebrity, it was on it, according to Plutarch, that the young Philip came to know Olympias, the mother of that most noble king Alexander.

We saw also the vast remains of the marble temple of Neptune, fragments of immense columns, architraves and statue bases and doorways decorated with garlanded boukrania and other very beautifully and artistically sculptured figures.

And after we had gone from there to the new castle built by prince Palamede, we saw at the tower itself numerous ancient, artfully elaborated, complex marbles, on which we observed numerous sculptured dancing nymphs; and we discovered on every side numerous other extraordinary remains of antiquity of this great city and noteworthy, very old inscriptions in Greek, and even in our own countrymen’s lettering.