House & Garden 
House&Garden 
Vol. I. SEPTEMBER, 1901. No. 4. 
EDITED BY 
Wilson Eyre, Jr., Frank Miles Day, 
and Herbert C. Wise. 
Published Monthly by 
Tine Architectural Publishing Company 
929 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, Penna. 
Price 
United States, Canada or Mexico, $5.00 per annum in 
advance; elsewhere in the Postal Union, $6.00. 
Single numbers, 50 cents. 
Copyrighted, /got, by The Architectural Publishing Company. 
Entered at the Philadelphia Post Office as Second Class A/ail 
flatter, June, iqoi. 
Trade supplied by the Central Nexus Company , Philadelphia. 
T he stories of the destruction of the 
ancient cities of Asiatic Turkey that 
occasionally come to hand would be in¬ 
credible if they were not supported by the 
evidence of reliable witnesses. At the present 
moment the devastation of historic monu¬ 
ments in the East is in full progress, appar¬ 
ently with the consent of the Ottoman Gov¬ 
ernment. The Turks have invented an 
ingenious scheme of importing colonists into 
regions rich with the remains of an ancient 
civilization, and of selling them the sites of 
historic towns, the ruins of which make the 
most easily worked of stone quarries. Thus 
they have turned a penny and performed a 
pious act, for the colonists so introduced are 
their unhappy co-religionists rescued from 
the persecutions of Christians in the Balkans, 
the Caucasus or Algeria. Money is to be 
made out of the importation of these “ Circas¬ 
sians,” as they are called, and the deserted 
districts ot Syria or Asia Minor seem to 
offer to the Turk, with his newly-acquired 
ideas of thrift, a fair field for the working 
out of the scheme. 
On the eastern border of Palestine, across 
the Jordan, two or three very remarkable 
ancient cities survived in a surprising state of 
completeness until afewyears ago. They were 
not mere collections of makeshift houses, but 
cities of monumental importance, provided 
with temples, colonnades, theatres and all that 
the ancients deemed necessary for the proper 
conduct of life. The plans published even 
in Baedeker show how important were the 
buildings that covered two such sites, Gerasa 
and Amman, cities on the east of the Jordan 
in the hill country that separates Palestine 
from the Syrian desert. The photographs 
given in Oliphant’s “ Land of Gilead ” are 
evidences of the extraordinary preservation 
of their streets, their public places and their 
buildings ; which, until recently, remained in 
a state of untouched neglect, compared with 
which the Roman Forum of to-day is a mere 
collection of fragments. Of the destruction 
steadily being wrought in these cities sundry 
travellers give the same sad account. Gerasa is 
in the hands of a band of Mohammedans from 
Bosnia, who are pulling down the Romano- 
Greek ruins for use in building their wretched 
houses and in enclosing their bits of land. A 
“khan” is being put up, and carving, mar¬ 
vellously preserved through fifteen centuries, 
is hacked away from the old blocks to fit them 
for their places in the wall. Even the columns 
from the famous street of columns are being 
carried off to Damascus. At Amman (the 
ancient Philadelphia) the destruction is even 
more complete. The famous theatre is now 
quite gone. The temples are but a memory. 
The destruction of these two cities, though 
perhaps more rapid, is but an example of what 
is going on in other places. Assos on the 
coast of Asia Minor, thoroughly explored by 
an American expedition twenty years ago, has 
suffered awful ravages since then, and one 
might point to a dozen other places where 
license is as unrestrained as it is at Assos. 
Even Palmyra itself is said to be threatened. 
The sums of money now being devoted to 
excavation in Egypt, in Palestine and in 
Mesopotamia, ought to be diverted to the far 
more urgent work of saving remains of price¬ 
less value still standing above the surface of 
the ground, but imminently threatened with 
destruction by Turkish ignorance and greed. 
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