From The Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple

rising steadily with each stop.
    6 a.m.: We pull in to a particularly run-down kebabji which, with horrible inevitability, has suddenly materialised from nowhere amid the grey wastes of Anatolia. We stumble out of the bus and obediently line up for our breakfast, smelling like a collection of extras from some spectacular epic of an after-shave advertisement. Too weak to argue, too tired to care, I join the queue and load my plate with some slurry that must once have been an aubergine.
    8 a.m.: Issus, site of Alexander's great victory over the Persians. It may be one of the turning points in world history, but it's a miserable-looking place now: a scrappy village with a petrol pump, a derelict electricity station and the statutory seedy restaurant over which hangs a terrible smell of grease and dead animal.
    My neighbour in the bus, a garrulous traffic policeman from Istanbul, made the mistake of eating a kebab at the last stop and is now being noisily ill in the street; he has attracted a small circle of onlookers who appear to take the view that this is the most interesting thing to have happened in Issus for several months. Despite the early hour, it is already hot and muggy. We're through the Cilician Gates and heading into the plains. On the far side of the road parties of bedraggled peasants are standing in lines, hoeing the dead ground beside the cotton and tobacco fields - or at least some are: most have put down their implements to watch my friend's streetside evacuations.
    The men here are a rough-looking bunch, scowling, ill-kempt and unshaven. But - looking around the motley crew filling the tables around me, and glimpsing my own reflection in the mirror - who are we to talk?
    9 a.m.: Antioch: a gridiron of dirty alleyways surrounded on three sides by the crescent cliffs of Mount Silpius. As we leave the bus for the last time and stumble into the glare of the bus station the smirking Neanderthal offers us a last splash of eau de cologne. I shake my head, but get the horrible stuff poured all over me anyhow.
     
     
     
     
    B uyuk A ntakya O teli , A ntioch , n A ugust
     
    Cleansed, vowing never again to go on a night bus, nor ever again to touch eau de cologne, I went to bed for the rest of the morning, lulled to sleep by some of John Moschos's more soporific miracle stories: tales of doughty Byzantine hermits fending off the advances of demonic temptresses and saucy 'Ethiopic boys'.
    With the exception of the mosaics in the museum and a few fragments of the much-rebuilt town walls, it seems that barely one stone remains from what was once the third greatest metropolis in the Byzantine Empire and briefly, under Julian the Apostate, its capital. Of the city's famous buildings - Constantine's Golden Octagon, the Council Chamber where Libanius declaimed, the great hippodrome that could seat eighty thousand people - nothing now remains. Like Alexandria, its traditional rival, Byzantine Antioch is now just a city of memory, forgotten but for the conjectures of scholars.
    There is a reason for this. The city is built in the centre of an earthquake zone and has been levelled again and again, at least once every two hundred years. Today it is a sleepy, provincial place, architecturally undistinguished but for a few fine late-Ottoman villas decorated with carved wooden balustrades and with vines tumbling over the shuttered windows. Other than the occasional archaeologist, no one really bothers to come to Antioch any more: not the Turkish politicians, not the journalists, not the tourists, not even the PKK.
    It is odd to think that all Europe, much of the Middle East and the entire length of the North African coast was once ruled from this little market town, today a forgotten backwater even by Turkish standards. Perhaps one day Los Angeles or San Francisco will be like this.

     
    When John Moschos visited Antioch in the 590s, there were already many signs that the city was in serious decline. The School of Antioch, once