All that Glitters
] Sardis
often turning her thoughts here
]
you like a goddess
and in your song most of all she rejoiced.
But now she is conspicuous among Lydian women
as sometimes at sunset
the rosyfingered moon
surpasses all the stars. And her light
stretches over salt sea
equally and flowerdeep fields.
Sappho, fragment 96 in IF NOT, WINTER: Fragments of Sappho, translated by Anne Carson
Confounded by his strange misfortune — rich and wretched — he was anxious to escape from his unhappy wealth. He hated all he had so lately longed for. Plenty could not lessen hunger and no remedy relieved his dry, parched throat. The hated gold tormented him no more than he deserved. Lifting his hands and shining arms to heaven, he moaned. ‘Oh pardon me, father Lenaeus!I have done wrong, but pity me, I pray, and save me from this curse that looked so fair.’ How patient are the gods! Bacchus forthwith, because King Midas had confessed his fault, restored him and annulled the promise given, annulled the favor granted, and he said: ‘That you may not be always cased in gold, which you unhappily desired, depart to the stream that flows by that great town of Sardis and upward trace its waters, as they glide past Lydian heights, until you find their source. Then, where the spring leaps out from mountain rock, plunge head and body in the snowy foam. At once the flood will take away your curse.’ King Midas did as he was told and plunged beneath the water at the river’s source. And the gold virtue granted by the god, as it departed from his body, tinged the stream with gold. And even to this hour adjoining fields, touched by this ancient vein of gold, are hardened where the river flows and colored with the gold that Midas left.
Ovid: Metamorphosis § 11.127
The story of a single atom of carbon is lyrically told in Primo Levi’s ‘The Periodic Table’, from the plant leaf to the bowels of a man, to the air again as CO2 , and to a voyage across the Mediterranean into the trunk of a cedar tree in Lebanon which can live up to 500 years, and from there into the larva of an insect untill it finds its way back into the sea in combination with two atoms of oxygen.(1) Unless congealed in materials (diamond, coal or oil) Levi tells us that the odyssey of the free carbon atom can be told in infinite ways, ie. to end up in a nerve cell in his brain that puts the words on paper. A Jewish man, Primo Levi survived Auschwitz as a chemist/laborer in a nearby German plant, Buna, that produced rubber. (The account of this ordeal is written by him in another book titled ‘If This is Man’) Meanwhile, a number of elements of The Periodic Table are the conduits to the narratives on “a micro-history”, as he writes. The entry for gold involves a fellow prisoner’s story, as prior to Auschwitz Levi was captured by the militiamen of the fascist republic in Piedmont, Italy in 1943, together with partisans: “… Is there gold on the bottom? (of Dora river)” asks the author. “… Yes, in the sand: not everywhere , but in many stretches. It’s the water that drags it down from the mountain and piles it up at random, there is some in one bend of the river and none in another. Our particular bend, which we have passed from father to son, is the richest of all. … you can go back when you wish: the next night or a month later, whenever you feel like it, and the gold has grown back; and it’s that way forever and ever, like grass comes back in the fields…” (2)
For a while now, the hunt for rare earth elements and precious metals is all the rage. From (contested!) Greenland to Africa, South America, to East Asia and soon to the depths of the ocean and to outer space, gold, silver, copper, cobalt, lithium and many others are mined at large; a kind of plunder. Because they are rarely found as pure ore, they have to be extracted from the earth and rock in open pit mines, using heavy machinery (and sometimes brute labor force) to move the earth, and using mostly toxic chemical processes and huge amounts of water either on site or in processing plants. Through concessions given by the governments as accomplices and exploiting the local laborers, the multinational mining companies leave behind uninhabitable land, poisoned mounds of earth, devastated forests, dead biota and toxic fresh water sources: in short, mining extracts lives and livelihoods especially in the global south, from one site to the next. One sometimes wonders whether the transition to renewable energy and the AI revolution, for which these elements are essential, is worth the price, for example in comparison to dirty coal and equally dirty oil, dirty both when mined and after use. Climate emergency and ‘justice’ (climate and else) are in a globally symbiotic relation when viewed from above, over the clean air of the cities of the western world and over the barely visible New Delhi. In this republic of Turkey, the euphemism for coal was ‘The Black Diamond’ (Kara Elmas) for a long time, until a coal mine explosion and fire had killed 301 miners in Soma, in Western Anatolia, in 2014. (owners of the mine, ministers and other responsible parties got away when the (then) prime minister evoked the old testament and declared that such death was ‘in the genesis’ of a miner’s work’ (!)). On January 30, 2026 more than 200 miners were killed in Rubaya, in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo when a coltan mine collapsed. “… local people dig manually for a few dollars a day…” writes The Guardian. “… Coltan is processed into tantalum, a heat-resistant metal that is in high demand by makers of mobile phones, computers, aerospace components and gas turbines.” (3) The disaster barely made the news.
Around where I live, Sappho, Homer, Ovid, Herodotus, Strabo and others are household names (at least for me.) Whenever they mention a city, a river, mountains, lakes, the plains and the sea, they write on my territory, either mythologically, or poetically, or in history and geography. It is the setting where gods descend from the mountain to judge the musical contest between Apollo and Pan. As I walk around and drive by these places, the features of the earth take on a magical meaning where the mountain top spews gold, the plain is where the Persians slayed Lydians, vineyards where Bacchus was revered and where the tumuli compete with the Egyptian pyramids. The fictional and semi-fictional historiae of antiquity are infused with moral tales to be recited over generations to make up the kernel of ‘the western canon’. But more than these, written down long ago, it is the stratified topography of the Anatolian plateau that tickles one’s imagination, going back more than twelve millenia of intense habitation by larger crowds to silently reveal other tales of being human. Meanwhile from İzmir, where I live, all the way to Sardis, about 90 kilometers to the East, the highway is lined with factories, cement and brick plants, small manufacturing outfits, car and truck repair shops, small towns with some shabby apartment buildings and new high rise housing for the workers. On a dark winter day, with smog, the scene is reminiscent of the early times of the industrial revolution: Manchester (before photography) as described, with smokestacks in full emissions, heavy odor of burning coal, and the working class living in slightly better houses than the tenements. After 25 centuries, the mythical lands are around 250 years behind schedule.
I arrive in Sardis (Sart) first to look for the Pactolus stream (Sart deresi) – a tributary of Hermos (Gediz) river – from where all the gold in Lydia emanated, partly pure and partly as electrum, an amalgam of silver and gold (the white gold.) The Sardis Expedition, continuing for more than a century appears to be one of the best researched and documented archaeological undertakings in Turkey.(4) Led by American teams since the beginning, from Princeton, Harvard, Un. of California Berkeley, Cornell, and from Un. of Wisconsin, one of the highlights of the excavation involves the ‘gold refinery’ where gold and electrum had been processed during Lydian times in early 6th century BC., before the Greek, Roman, Jewish and Christian temples had been erected. The gold in this tiny stream, Pactolus, apparently dried up by Strabo’s own time in first ct. BC., and its waters is now the lifeline for vineyards, olive groves and orchards. But for several generations, the Lydian kings were ‘bathed’ in gold, they were the first ones to mint gold coins, lavishly donating literally ‘tons’ of gold for various purposes. So before Elon Musk, there was King Croesus, the ‘richest man in the world’ (“rich as Croesus / Karun kadar zengin” as the platitude goes) sending somewhat close to a ton of gold and silver to the oracle of Delphi in Greece, according to Herodotus (5): a kind of ‘campaign donation’ we may think, for varied favors from Gods. But dismally, his fortunes ran dry when the Persians captured Sardis and Croesus narrowly escaped death on the pyre to become a captive of Cyrus in 547 BC.
At Sardis, I go up the hills south towards Bozdağ, the mountain: “… From Tmolus flows the Pactolus stream which in antiquity carried down a great amount of gold dust..” writes Strabo.(6) Tmolus is but one of the sacred mountains in Anatolia among many other ‘Olympii’ if one may call them in Latin, in plural. Although the original Olympos is in Thessaly in Greece, the myths extend towards other peaks to the East. Among them there is Mount Ida (of Paris) favorite of Homer, close to Troy; Uludağ in Bursa south of Propontis/Sea of Marmara (the Mysian Olympos); Spylus in Magnesia (Manisa); Mount Nif (Nymph) in İzmir/Smyrna; Latmos at Herakleia, bordering Lycia and Karia; and indeed Mount Ararat (Ağrı) of the famous flood, and others. Together they transcend antiquity and beyond, they guard over vast territories, and it seems they inspired the pompous rulers to build themselves the highest tombs, the tumuli: the one for Midas in Gordion, and on to the Lydian rulers around the Gyges lake (Marmara Gölü-Bintepeler). The only other human made mounds of earth higher than these tombs surround the open pit gold mines in Anatolia, together with equally huge cavities, and tailing dams holding water that is laced with cyanide and other toxic chemicals to ‘leach’. Where the tiny stream supplied all the world’s gold once, today it is the 2 grams of gold (together with silver and copper) per one ton of earth and crushed rock that makes an investor salivate . The most infamous of these mines operated for more than twenty years next to Pergamon (of the famous library) starting in 1990s (around which we produced an artwork as xurban_collective in 2006, titled ‘Void: The View from Acropolis'(7)) They are like cancerous tumors, these mines, easily gaining permits to enlarge capacity, or to jump on to nearby sites, and mutating on the way as the corporations change ownership and names, switching nationalities from Canada to Australia, and to ‘consortiums’, usually to end up in Turkish hands when they become less profitable and cleaning up can easily be dodged by Turks through the corrupt Turkish legal system. These companies shamelessly pick up names like ‘Eldorado’ to recall past plunders and genocide. ‘Lydian International’ (majority of shares Turkish owned) is the name of another company that faced fierce resistence to operate in Armenia as ‘Lydian Armenia’, and for now blocked from the so called ‘heap leach operation’ at Amulsar, next to Lake Sevan, the Caucasus region’s biggest body of water.(8) But the same company, together with Alacer (American) are guilty of manslaughter and ecocide in İliç-Erzincan goldmine in Eastern Turkey, possibly one of the biggest in the world, when in 2024 nine miners died, buried when a huge mass of heap leach slid.(9) Prior to that, in 2022 millions of gallons of toxic waste from the same mine leaked to enter the nearby Euphrates river that flows all the way south to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and then onwards to Ur and Uruk, the cities before genesis, prior to reaching the sea at the Gulf of Persia. As of now, like the free carbon atom, the simple molecule of cyanide is free to pass through the Strait of Hormuz as opposed to the complex molecules of carbon that are restricted.
“… one drop of pure water suffices to purify an ocean; one drop of impure water suffices to defile a universe. Everything depends on the moral direction of the action chosen by material imagination.” writes Gaston Bachelard in ‘Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter’. (10) “… I must emphasize that a dream is a natural force. (…) no one can know purity without dreaming it.” (11) As always, Bachelard is in pursuit of the metaphysics of the poetic image, this time specifically sought in the ‘reveries’ finding its substance in water, as opposed to the formal imagery, or rational reasoning, or even myth. From Narcissus and Ophelia to the Maelstrom of Edgar Allan Poe, and from maternal water to water’s morality and purification/ablution/regeneration, a material element provides substance, its particular moods and poetry. He concludes with the ‘most extreme’ of his ‘paradoxes’: “… that the voices of water are hardly metaphoric at all; that the language of the waters is a direct poetic reality; that streams and rivers provide the sound for mute country landscapes, and do it with a strange fidelity; that murmuring waters teach birds and men to sing, speak, recount; and that there is, in short , a continuity between the speech of water and the speech of man.”(12)
Midas’s curse inflicts millions of people around the globe, paradoxically mostly the poor, when their homes and lives are violated with the economies of extraction and looting. For them, there is no shedding of the ‘riches’ that are already embedded in earth. They are only given the chance to vacate the premises. From this tragedy, one hopes for (or better: demands) a new moral tale for a future community.
March 2026
(1) Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, Shocken Books, New York 1984
(2) ibid p.136
(3) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/30/more-than-200-killed-in-coltan-mine-collapse-in-eastern-drc-officials-say
(4) https://sardisexpedition.org/
(5) Jane C. Waldbaum, Metalwork from Sardis, Harvard Un. Press, Cambridge 1983. p.17
https://omphale.arthistory.wisc.edu/pdf/Sardis_M8.pdf
(6) ibid p.13
(7) https://www.xurban.net/scope/deprived/index.htm
(8) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydian_International
(9) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Çöpler_mine
(10) Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, Pegasus Foundation, Dallas 1983. p.142
(11) ibid p.134
(12) ibid p.15