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Show TURK CAPITAL IS RIGHJMHISTORY Angora Stronghold on Frontiers of Roman Empire. WAS OCCUPIED BY CRUSADERS Angora Is picturesque directly you get outside it, for only then can you see the two Gibraltar-like rocks that form the background to the present-day present-day town. They He end to end, separated sep-arated by a steep ravine through which rushes a narrow, muddy stream. The hill on the further side of thla river Is bare, except for a crumbling pile of stones which passes for the ruins of a memorial to the legend that Tamerlane stood there In 1402 to review re-view his army of Mongols after It had overthrown Suftan Bayazld in the plain below. But the rocky height that looms above Angora town Is crowned with an unbroken wall of medieval fortifications. Its bastions are of red sandstone, and shaped to a sharp point, like the bows of a ship. The unconscious vandalism van-dalism of the Middle ages is witnessed In Its structure, for among the huge freestone blocks that form It are built i In all sorts of relics of the dead and gone Angoras of the past. Here Is a delicately fretted cornice from an old j Greek temple. Close by the fragment j of some majestic Roman inscription, clear cut as the day It was first carved, recalls the time when Angora was a I stronghold of the frontiers of the I Roman empire. Gravestones and broken brok-en bits of friezes, millstones and Rom-i Rom-i an titles have all gone to strengthen the still unbroken wall. ! Oddly Foreign Look. 1 Lower down the hill stand the gray ruins of a castle of feudal type. Perhaps Per-haps Godefroy de Bouillon built It when the Crusaders held Angora for twenty years. It has an oddly foreign for-eign look here In the heart of Asia Minor. Its crumbling battlements would harmonize much better with a background of green English meadow-land meadow-land or Norman orchards. But apart from this hill citadel Angora An-gora has no characteristics that It does not share with every other of the drab village towns of Anntolia. Yet, half hidden behind its largest mosque 1 Is a splendid relic of what must have been an Angora out of all comparison, more beautiful and stately. It Is the - ruined fragment of a Itonian temple of Augustus. Just a square decorated archway 30 feet high, leading to a I chiinoel, In which a flight of steps I goes down to a vaulted dungeon le-i le-i nenth where the altar must have Etood, entered by a doorway only two feet hlfc'h. The walls of this monument monu-ment to a race that was not only conquering, con-quering, but constructive, are of freestone free-stone with several courses of sandstone sand-stone of a brilliant crimson. They still bear broken p.'itches of frieze of Greek wave design, and In another place, of a conventional pattern representing rep-resenting apparently an octopus. Much of this old Roman masonry that still stands so firmly Is Inscribed ! with half effaced histories of tfie campaigns cam-paigns of the "Divine Augustus" carved, as the Latin script says, by his own order. But there are also many marks of Its eventful history since those times. Made by CrueaderT Here Is a Maltese cross hammered out with the chisel. Did some Idle crusader, perhaps from far away Kng land, fill In his afternoon by maklnf It? Close by an Industrious Turk hni chipped a long phrase In the difficult callgraphy of his language, and opposite oppo-site a modern Greek, la an Impulse of bravado, has scratched Ma name wlta the date 1014-1022. Tombstones of old Roman prefocta He prone on the ground and close by them stand the turbaned headstones of the graves of Turkish Janissaries wha died here In the Sixteenth and Seve teenth centuries. The Idea of rebuilding some sue! Imposing city as the Romans set upon this open and lofty plateau Is strong In the minds of the new Turkish gar-eminent. gar-eminent. They plan It lo the plain outside the present town and say that Its avenues will he broader than the Champs Klyseea. The scheme. In Its present form, reminds one rather of the layout of the city of Eden, whera Martin Whitehall of Angora Is the railway station, for there the Premier lives In what was meant for the st-tlnnmaster's st-tlnnmaster's house, while the Trench representative has a similar building on the platform and the American emissary to the Angora government with his wife occupies a railway coach fitted up Inside as the most delightfully delight-fully compact bungalow Imaginable. |