In search of beginnings

By Bernard Barnes and Alyosha Barnes

In the late 1970s, a Welsh painter named Bernard Barnes parked his van beside a Byzantine church in the Plaka district of Athens, positioned it so that he could hear the morning liturgy without getting up, and stayed for months. He taught English to children in the evenings. By day he drew - streets, workshops, caf interiors, the women of the Erechtheion painted badly on a taverna wall. He accumulated, by his own count, about two hundred and fifty drawings, all neatly labelled.

Then he packed everything up and drove east.

The Pile Is Ancient follows Bernard Barnes through a year of travel in Greece and Turkey between the late 1970s and January 1981 - through Athens in the aftermath of the military junta, across the monastic peninsula of Mount Athos, and into a Turkey that had been seized by its own army six weeks before he arrived. He walked the Taurus Mountains in blizzards, stood on the buried floors of atal H y k, one of the oldest cities ever excavated, and painted watercolours in conditions cold enough to freeze the pigment on the paper.

The citadel of Ankara, he noted in his journal, was a historian's nightmare - built and rebuilt so many times that Greek carved decorations were cemented into house walls, Corinthian capitals served as tables, and fluted columns stood in as door jambs. Everywhere, the pieces of the past lay heaped into a huge pile.

And even the pile, he noted, was ancient.

This book pairs Bernard's journals and paintings - vivid, funny, precise, and deeply serious about the ancient world - with the political and archaeological histories of the landscapes he moved through. It is an attempt, made with love and a certain amount of detective work, to stop the loss.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H51455VV
• ISBN13: 9798197310217
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 104 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.1" x 9.2"