A nose for a good story

GO NICHE: ANYONE WITH any sort of nose for a mystery, or who is simply nosey, will have wondered why so many statues from the ancient world are devoid of their schnozzles.

It’s particularly obvious in the statuary around Ephesus, the ancient city founded by Alexander the Great’s General Lysimachus, in modern-day Turkey.

Those pondering it tend to assume it is because statues are prone to falling face first, causing the protuberance to snap off. Other theories include simple vandalism or just the weathering of extremities.

All or none of the above may be correct but by far the most satisfying answer came from a tour guide at the Museum of Ephesus during a recent visit.

Early Christians still carried with them their pagan belief that the statues of gods were alive, he said. The image of a Greek or Roman god was in fact the god itself and was worshipped as such in temples. The potency of these “false idols” is the reason they topped the Ten Commandments.

To rob these icons of their lingering power during the transition from old religious beliefs to new, they needed to kill the ancient gods once and for all.

The way to do that was to hack off their noses to ensure they could no longer breathe. A stone god with no nose was a dead stone god, apparently.

Whether or not it is true, who knows? It’s a theory Prof Wikipedia seems not to have grasped yet. Equally, no explanation was forthcoming as to why the statue couldn’t just breathe through its mouth.

There is one piece of hard evidence in favour of the theory that the noses were deliberately chopped off – Ephesus’s Priapic exhibits remain fully endowed and, God knows, no statues are more likely to topple forward or be weathered through exposure than these.

tourismturkey.org