The Black Fields of Kula

East of Sardis, the black fields of Kula extend for some 1800 square kilometres, roughly south of the Gediz Valley to the towns of Katakekaume (today’s Kula) to the east, and Alaşehir, the ancient Philadelphia, to the south. They were praised in antiquity for their fertility: the wine, the Katakekaumenites caught Strabo’s attention (13.4.11). These days there are still vineyards, but the wine is strictly for export. Geology is the raison d’être of the place today and is what hopefully will put Kula on the tourist map.

The black fields are the result of comparatively recent volcanic episodes (roughly 10,000–15,000 years ago). Turkey is not short of volcanoes: think of the Erciyes overlooking Kayseri or of the Nemrut and the Suphan on the west edge of Lake Van. Here, however, everything is small, almost miniature, lending itself to the creation of a geopark. The Kula Volcanic Geopark, complete with UNESCO blessing, covers a number of sites dotted over an area of 300 square kilometres, where one can observe at first hand textbook examples of phenomena related to volcanism.

An infrastructure of trails, walkways, shelters and explanatory panels has been set up to guide people around; tour guides are being trained. On offer are extensive lava fields, barren, black and forbidding, in places several kilometres deep, now eroded into strange shapes and overlooked by cinder cones complete with craters. Lava caves and lava tubes are another feature of interest: they are formed when the lava flow develops a hard exterior crust while inside the hot stream is still flowing. In other places the lava cooled rapidly, forming basalt columns. The area’s bedrock is limestone. The flow of the hot lava has resulted in a modification of its chemistry in the contact area; it is in this way that marble is formed. Spectacular dykes show where the lava found its way into fissures: black snakes into white limestone. Erosion played its part here as well, creating a nursery of hoodoos (fairy chimneys) where one can see how they form and eventually topple over. The list is long; there are even fossilised human footprints in the cooling ash.

Back in town, the unusual geology of the black fields is apparent in the 18th-century Ottoman houses, all built in stones of a bewildering variety. A number have been lovingly restored and are open to the public. One is a guesthouse (Anemon Otel). A well-appointed museum in the main square rounds up the visit with hands-on exhibits, explanatory panels and maps.

One can only wish plenty of luck to such an ambitious project. It might prove an uphill struggle to entice tourists to see ‘just stones’ (to quote a disappointed visitor). But for anyone interested in the ground on which monuments stand this is a must. At the moment the site is little advertised. Anyone arriving in Kula would be hard put to to find it. The solution is very simple. This writer went to the police and found the trail with a police escort via a sequence of secondary unmade roads while a guide was summoned. The trails are ready but not the roads. Anyone wishing to visit without a police escort should ring Ali Karataş on 05432 177 581. He is the head of the guides and he will give you a guided tour in English.

by Paola Pugsley. Paola is the author of four Blue Guides ebooks on Turkey. She is currently working on a volume covering the coastal area between Troy and Bodrum.

Leonardo’s “Adoration of the Magi” restored

One of the Uffizi’s masterpieces, the unfinished Adoration of the Magi by Leonardo da Vinci, has been absent from the gallery since 2011 undergoing a meticulous but complicated restoration in Florence’s famous state restoration laboratory. It has just been returned and is currently on view in a special exhibition on the first floor (it will remain there until 24th Sept, when it will once again take its place in the gallery, but in a new room specially designed for it). Centuries of surface dirt have been removed as well as the varnishes added over the years, and a microscopic restoration of the paint has been completed. The result is outstanding: the work is now thought to be as Leonardo left it, an unfinished painting, with some areas more complete and others just sketched, some with paint, others with charcoal.

The “Adoration of the Magi” before restoration.

The room which leads into the exhibition has been newly arranged with just two works superbly lit: the famous Annunciation by Leonardo, and his master Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ, on which it is known that Leonardo worked (it is traditionally thought he painted the angel in profile, and it is now suggested he intervened also on the figure of Christ himself, and part of the landscape). We know that the Annunciation was painted while Leonardo was still in Verrocchio’s workshop but strangely we know nothing about who commissioned it or where it was to be placed. It is a truly wonderful painting, with every detail highly finished, from the landscape to the flowery meadow, from the classical sarcophagus to the transparent white veil of the Madonna. So it is all the more fascinating to be confronted in the next room with the Adoration of the Magi where one feels one can experience Leonardo’s moods and whims as he experiments with placing a horse here or there; inserting a strange classical building under construction (with its architect observing the work); deciding whether to include a camel, an elephant, a group of dogs; inserting some dark trees in certain places, as the entire scene begins to take shape.

The Madonna herself seems isolated in the middle of all this action, in her beautiful calm serenity, even though her cloak seems to have been caught up in a bizarre fold beneath her thigh. And the Child (with some of his curls still to be completed by the artist) has been given a superior air as he blesses the genuflecting king before him, but amusingly decides to ‘receive’ his gift by playfully just taking off its lid and leaving the heavy vessel in the old man’s hands. (One wonders if that is why Joseph in the background is seen holding just the lid of one of the other king’s gifts and why Leonardo decided to alter this detail from the drawing in which the Child takes the entire vessel from the king, resulting in the Virgin having to hold on tight to him because of its weight). The Three Kings are interpreted by Leonardo as rather terrifying old men, and the thoughtful figure conspicuous on the extreme left, painted in shades of dark brown, remains a mysterious onlooker (just one of the many enigmatic figures present). The numerous horses, one shown perfectly head-on to us and others only just taking form, are amongst the most fascinating details. Leonardo left the work at this stage since he was called away to Milan in 1482.

The exhibition also includes photographic reproductions of two of Leonardo’s drawings (one from the Louvre and one from the Uffizi’s prints and drawings collection) related to the Adoration, blown up so that one can see the various details. The former is interesting above all to show not how it relates to the ‘finished’ work but how it differs from it, and also shows just where Leonardo thought at first to place the kings, which he left sketched in the nude. Seeing these one does feel this would have been the occasion to have shown the originals of some of the other preparatory drawings by Leonardo (if only from the Uffizi’s own collection).

The exhibition also includes Filippino Lippi’s Adoration of the Magi because it was the work that the Augstinians commissioned in 1496 for their church, San Donato a Scopeto, outside the city walls (destroyed a few years later in the 1529 siege of Florence) when it became clear to them that Leonardo would never return from Milan to complete the Adoration they had originally commissioned. Filippino’s Adoration (which is exhibited beside three very mediocre panels of its predella, two now in the North Carolina Art Museum and one from a private collection) comes as a shock after Leonardo’s work as it is in such a completely different world, with an atmosphere totally diverse. The decision to include it here, to illustrate the history of the commission, was correct but this work, although Filippino was one of the great artists of his time, simply cannot be appreciated next to the Leonardo.

We now know that Leonardo’s work was never consigned to the monks of San Donato. According to Vasari it remained in the house of Amerigo Benci so was probably seen there by other artists of the time. By 1670 it had entered the Medici collection.

In the last room there is a reproduction of Leonardo’s work to scale which, using reflectography, revealed that there was a “faint, freehand drawing beneath the brushwork”. The other details of the restoration are well documented in a film. At one stage the carabinieri were called in to prove that certain marks found on the surface were indeed the fingerprints of the master, as well as, in one area, the impression of the palm of his hand.

by Alta Macadam, author of Blue Guide Florence, where this masterpiece is described on p. 134 of the new edition, just out.