In the center of Denia there is a large, conical hill from the top of which the entire city and some neighboring towns are visible. Around the fifth century B.C., a reasonably sized temple sat on this hill in honor of the goddess Artemis, built by the Greeks of Hēmeroskopeion (watchtower in Ancient Greek), which was built by colonists from the city of Massalia (now Marseille), which in turn was built by colonists from Phocaea on the western Anatolian coast (now part of Turkey). When the Romans conquered the city, they preserved the temple and its patron, whose Latin name is Diana, and renamed it Dianium in her honor. This is the origin of its modern name, more obvious in the Spanish demonym for its residents, dianense. Curiously, I learned last weekend that a bullseye in Spanish is also named after Diana, I assume due to her role as goddess of the hunt. At the time there would have been little development on that hill, if any, and the sea would have lapped calmly at its feet. It was used as a military base by Quintus Sartorius in the civil wars.
Other than church documents, the western historical record is mostly silent on Denia until it was conquered by the Arabs, and after the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba it became the capital of a wealthy taifa. The first castle was built on the same hill sometime in this era. The Christian reconquest of the area in 1244 and subsequent expulsion of the majority Muslim population was catastrophic and the city had to be repopulated deliberately from Valencia. The new settlers mostly took residence on the same hill or in the small alcabara, a walled, semi-permanently inhabited area surrounding the castle. In 1609 Denia was ethnically cleansed once more by the expulsion of the moriscos, which again led to mass exodus and economic collapse. About 40,000 people were evicted on penalty of death from their homes in and around the city and taken by galley to the Spanish-controlled port of Oran (now in Algeria), on account of their supposed refusal to convert to Christianity and potential collaboration with Barbary pirate raiders. 25,000 left voluntarily, but about twelve thousand revolted and took refuge in the mountains. A detachment of only a few hundred soldiers left from the castle brutally ended the rebellion, killing at least 3,000 men and women before the rest surrendered and were sent away in chains. For the next two centuries the hill and the city were completely reshaped, coincidentally almost precisely every 100 years.
The next cataclysm occurred in 1708, just shy of a century after the moriscan expulsion. It was one of the first cities to declare in favor of Archduke Charles Hapsburg during the War of Spanish Succession, and for that was punished severely by the French Bourbon army when they seized it, destroying almost the entirety of the old city within the walls after occupying it, nominally in order to rebuild the walls. The damage from this battle is still visible today on what is left of the fortress and supposedly spectacular Renaissance palace. It was partially rebuilt before being destroyed again at the beginning of the 19th century by Napoleon’s forces during the Peninsular War, after which it fell into complete ruin. As late as 1900 the population was only 12,000, less than half of the total number of moriscos expelled almost three centuries prior. Early last century, a large statue of the Virgin Mary was built atop the hill, but it only stood for a few years and was taken down in the Spanish Civil War.
What blew me away reading the information plaques scattered around the surprisingly expansive castle was the way the fate of Denia was so intricately and consistently tied to the entire European and Mediterranean regions. One of the largest Roman memorial stones paid tribute to the commander of a legion stationed in Chester, now part of England. I wondered how many of the British tourists that support the city’s present-day economy or English retirees that refuse to learn Spanish are from Chester. Whether the Italian who sold me my bike might be a distant relation of someone in the Neapolitan or Sicilian contingent of soldiers who slaughtered innocent civilians in 1609. Or if by sheer chance, the Moroccan man who sells my friends cocaine might be descended from one of the people deposited callously on the unfamiliar shores of Oran, now returned to the place where his 10-times-grandfather abandoned his home and life’s work. If the personal, individual links of blood and business and belief that bound Denia and its inhabitants to other hills and temples and castles and peoples have been somehow, without realizing, passed down to the present day. It made me wonder what our ruins will look like.
I explored the hill today with a new friend, a Mexican-American woman. We didn’t dance around the parallels between what we were reading on the museum walls and what we read every day in the news. There was a quick moment of understanding, and we didn’t really feel the need to talk too much about it either. Who knew that expelling thousands of regular, hardworking people from your country out of baseless, idiotic hatred would end badly? we said, laughing. We laughed because we saw that one day, in ways that the people responsible would never admit or understand, there would be consequences for doing this and for allowing it to happen. That one hill told a two thousand five hundred year story of prosperity and calamity. It seemed to say to us that what goes around comes around, and it stays for a long time.
Irony Poison 