Roman Shit

Roman Stuff

There's a lot of it. If you don't like Roman shit, don't go to Trier.

If you arrive in Trier by train then you enter the city the way the Romans did, by the Porta Nigra. In historic times, life beyond the city walls was everything you didn't want inside the city walls. Today, that's none too different. Christophstrasse follows the line of the old wall and there you will find exactly what the city fathers don't want in the city centre. Kebab shops, sex shops, ethnic supermarkets, cheap boozers. If that's your thing then the street running west from the train station is where to find it.

The Porta Nigra

This is by far the best preserved Roman building in Trier. Maybe one of the best preserved Roman buildings anywhere. It's a very stark, grey white lump, solidly dropped right on the northern boundary of the city. When you approached it, you knew what you were getting into. Unless you were mental, there is no way you were mistaking this for anything but a club-house for the hardest bastards in the town. The message was pretty clear.

If there was any part of Trier that would make you think you were not in Germany then this is it. It's Mediterranean architecture, all big windows and flat roofs. It must've been miserable being billeted in it during a wet northern winter. But that's Rome, do what you did everywhere else.

The inside surprised me. Outside, it's a big solid lump. More engineering than architecture. Almost feels like a battleship looming up at you.

Inside is different. There's a great sense of light and air in it. You almost feel like it is another world, kind of floating above the city below. It feels secure. Very secure. If I was in here while the Barbarians were out there, hopped up on mead and magic mushrooms, I wouldn't even be breaking a sweat.

The carvings on the wall show why the Porta Nigra survived when none of the other gates did. It got turned into a church. The Archbishop of Trier managed to get himself a legit goose that laid the golden egg in the form of an actual saint.

Simeon of Trier

If you want to make money in the middle ages, you get pilgrims to come to your town. Trier, like everywhere old in Europe, is dripping with relics. They were as good as treasury bonds a thousand years ago.

Enter Saint Simeon. Famous wandering holy man and social misfit, Simeon got persuaded to come to Trier by the Archbishop whereupon he asked to be walled up in a cell in the remains of the Porta Nigra. There he lived for five years, alone, on a diet of bread and beans. Until he died, probably gratefully.

Next thing you know, Simeon is declared a saint (presumably for surviving a diet of beans for five years) and Trier is flogging itself as a pilgrim resort. Next door to the Porta Nigra is the Simeonstift, the monastery founded in his honour. Or, more likely, as a mediaeval Saintsimeonworld with reasonable ticket prices and well stocked gift shop.

Aula Palatina

This was the building that set me off on visiting Trier. I saw it in Waldemar Januszczak's brilliant Dark Ages, An Age of Light documentary series.

With this basilica, Constantine the Great set off the basilica-frenzy of late-antiquity in the same way that past-it Tory cougar, Kirstie Allsopp, triggered the craze for unaffordable mortgages on shitty suburban houses in pre-recession Britain. The Romans and their successors went nuts for them, blowing the piggy bank on some of the ugliest sights you'll see right up into the 1400's. San Petronio in Bologna, case in point.

The Konstantinbasilika, though, like all originals, is beautiful. The balance is perfect, if you want big then you need to make it simple and that's why it works. Outside, on a cold, rainy autumn day, it looms up at you. Grand. Stately. This is how an emperor with class rolls. This isn't some Donald Trump confection like in Rome.

Inside, it is a church today. But in Roman times, a basilica was practical and mundane. It was a court, meeting room, council office, debate hall, anything but a place of worship. Sitting on a bench at the back, the magisterial apse is so far away that it could be in another age.

And that is how it was supposed to be. 1700 years ago Constantine the Great sat there. You could have seen him if you stood on your tiptoes and you didn't smell too badly. But just don't get too close.

But then, you get into modern times and the ideas of taste and subtelty go down the toilet. At some point in the last couple of hundred years, some genius thought it'd look so much better with this pink piece of shit bolted on the side of it.

After World War II, when they were restoring fire damage to the Konstantinbasilika, they insisted that anything that wasn't part of the original Roman interior get stripped out. Sadly, they didn't apply it to the outside.

Constantine would be turning in his grave. If it hadn't been robbed by the Crusaders and demolished by the Turks. It might be that a sarcophagus at Hagia Eirene is his but it's still a sad end to one of the greatest of all the emperors.

Kaiserthermen

The Imperial baths of Constantine the Great

The Imperial Baths are maybe the biggest Roman ruins in Trier, set in a park in the south of the city centre.

The most interesting part is underground. All the hot air ducts and boiler rooms that made the whole thing work. Surprisingly, you are free to wander in amongst the subterranean parts and the whole thing is a maze of brick lined passageways. Dead ends and right angles, it's fun to get lost in. It really is something you wouldn't normally see in a place like this.

Luckily it is a ruin. If it was well preserved then you can bet you wouldn't be allowed anywhere near. Maybe by a reasonably priced personal tour, certainly not as a free roaming peasant.

The Arena

Out of everything in Trier, the Roman arena is by far the best place. For me, anyway. Nothing else gives you a real sense of what it was to live and die in the Roman Empire. Rome was maybe the pinnacle of civilisation in the ancient world but it also existed alongside an incredible brutality that was part of ordinary life. The gory bits of history get exaggerated down the centuries. But every stereotype and trope of what went on in the arena is legit. You can try and think up the most sadistic, most depraved spectacle you can and it might freak you out that you are capable of imagining it. But the Romans got there first. Having elephants popping heads like grapes by standing on them? Done. Humped to death by a psychotic giraffe? Done. Even the relatively tame duel with a gladiator wasn't exactly a peaceful end.

This wasn't an audience of the Roman elite or court officials witnessing legal executions. OK, some of them were. But the majority were bakers and civil servants and fruit merchants on a nice day out. Nobody was forced to watch this. People came willingly. With their wives and kids and grandmothers. They cheered and they loved it and they came back again and again and again.

At first, it is hard to imagine sitting there and watching people being torn apart and dying horrific deaths for the pleasure of the crowd. But is it? Sitting on a bench looking out over the arena, I got it. Look at the most popular TV series of the last decade. Game of Thrones, Vikings, The Walking Dead. From the safety of your 44 inch TV you can tell yourself that they are just actors and it's all special effects. But your brain doesn't know that. The little bump of seratonin you get when a head explodes is exactly what your ancestors felt. Does it really matter if the violence is fake or real? If you're getting off on it then are you any better than the people who sat here watching the damnatio ad bestias?

I don't know, I don't really watch much TV. Violence porn always made me uncomfortable. I never saw murder as much of an entertainment regardless if it was fake or not. Rape is a regular part of any TV soap opera, but show two consenting adults having sex and the world melts down. Sometimes I am not convinced that our moral compasses are any better than those of Rome.

Either way, I am sitting on a bench on an autumn afternoon, sycamore seeds spinning to the ground as the wind moves the trees. A couple are walking their dog in the arena. A pair of well dressed elderly ladies are sharing gossip. Today, Trier's arena is a peaceful place.

This was the entrance to the arena. Go left or right and you end up in the terraces. Take your place, get settled in and enjoy an afternoon of family entertainment. You don't want that white path in the middle. That one leads right out on to the sand of the arena.

All I could think of was how fucking happy I would have been to be free to be a spectator. Maybe that was the appeal. You came here to remind yourself that, no matter how shit your life was, you get to go home. The worst thing that happens to you is that you get a big tax demand or the Goths cut off the corn supplies for a few weeks. It's pretty certain that you are not getting your guts torn out with a rusty steel hook any time soon.

Self-help gurus like to preach that we should practice gratitude. Well, you can bet your life that one afternoon here and I would be fucking grateful for a long time that it wasn't me down there.

All around the arena are dotted these little door openings. They were the cells where the gladiators were held before being released out on to the sand. That rectangle of light would have been the last thing a hell of a lot of people saw as they were pushed out into the arc of a mace.

It is such a visceral experience to come here and stand in places like this. It is not hard to imagine the smell of shit and piss that the air in this room must have been thick with. And the fear. You came here to die and in a horrible way. Your death entertained the mob and the more you suffered, the more they cheered. Your chance of survival? Nil. Nobody wants you to live.

"If you find yourself alone, in green fields, do not fear..."

I realised my heart was racing. I ran at the door, leaping out into the arena. I wanted to know, even in this super-safe, 21st century way, what it felt like just for a second.

"...for you are in Elysium and already dead".

The couple walking their dog stared at me like an idiot as I burst out on to the sand. I tried to act normal and walk away like I did this every day.

Other Stuff

The southern end of town has another two Roman baths sites. By the time you reach them, you are probably Romaned out. The Barbarathermen is just a few ruins by a dual carriageway and there are some remains of the city walls. This one is in what was the forum. It was shut when I got there but you can see what you need to see through the windows. It's another stop on the Antiken card if you want to get your money's worth but I didn't feel like I missed anything.

The lines in the paving outside aren't just random, they indicate the old Roman layout of the square. Other than that, it's not a particularly great area. There's a conference centre if you happen to be a Bulgarian hooker trying to pick up a German dental instrument salesman. Or there are a few kebab shops.

As you wander around there are little traces of Roman shit everywhere. If you know what you are looking for. A good sign is stonework interspersed with a thin layer of red clay rick or tiles. You see this the world over in former Roman towns, places like York. It is a dead giveaway that this was something Roman. You'll see it worked into apartment blocks and department stores or old churches. Try doing that now and see how far you get.

I'd been looking forward to seeing the Roman bridge and having a walk along the banks of the Moselle. There is nothing like a nice stroll along a river on an autumn afternoon. Sadly, the river in Trier feels isolated and forgotten. A six lane road cuts it off from the main town. There is graffiti everywhere. Tents of homeless people dot the river bank. Maybe I just got the wrong time of year or the wrong day. The rain didn't help but it felt a grim and unloved part of the city. Not somewhere I wanted to linger.

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