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Bettany Hughes reveals her favourite historic treasures – and how to see them

Bettany Hughes’s Treasures of the World Saturday 7.00pm C4
Ed Grenby - 17 September 2021

You know those annoying people yammering enthusiastically into their mobiles even as the plane pushes back from its stand towards the runway? Well, Bettany Hughes is one of them – talking to Radio Times right up till takeoff time as she jets towards the Greek island of Kos, where “something rather exciting” has been discovered. (“I’m writing a book on the Seven Wonders of the World,” she explains, “so I just jumped on the first available flight.”) The historian, author and broadcaster won’t say much more about that – confirming our suspicion that all archaeologist types are secretly racing each other to the big discoveries, Indiana Jones-style – but she’s happy to talk about the destinations of Bettany Hughes’s Treasures of the World, which continues this week. “Covid was such a horrific time, with people wondering what we’re doing here, and how to relate to one another. And personally, I find the answers to questions like that in history and the thousands of years of human experience that have gone Bettany Hughes’s Treasures of the World before. So I wanted to try to uncover places that would help us celebrate humanity and human civilisation.” Even better, the places Bettany visited for the series are nearly all open to tourists (Covid restrictions allowing). Here are her favourites…

 


 

SECRET SPY CAVES IN GIBRALTAR

I was blown away by Gibraltar. Firstly there are boat trips you can do into prehistoric caves – the Costa del Neanderthal, archaeologists call it – but there’s this other amazing cavern called the Stay Behind Cave. It was a top-secret World War Two plan, basically a suicide mission where six brave Allied soldiers would be walled up, hidden and sealed inside a mountain if the Nazis took Gibraltar, so that they could radio intelligence back from behind enemy lines. Ian Fleming was one of the masterminds behind it, and you can definitely see the idea trickling through into some of his Bond plots. It was only discovered in the late 90s, but there are tours now. Unmissable.


OLYMPIC ORIGINS

It was really special, in this Olympic year, to be in the birthplace of the Games, in the Peloponnese in Greece. They happened at Olympia for 1,000 years uninterrupted, which I think says something about our drive, as humans, to get together and to be as amazing as we can humanly be. What was strange though, because of Covid, was that instead of 100,000 spectators, it was pretty much just me. And with no tourists around, I could wake and hear the dawn chorus along the river there, where the air is thick with birdsong – exactly the same as Socrates and Herodotus and Plato would have done. Anyone can do that, too: just get there early before the other tourists!


 

MASS GRAVES IN MALTA

In Malta we got to film in a staggering underground prehistoric temple called the Hypogeum. It’s a Unesco site, so anybody can visit, but no one’s been allowed to film there for years, because it’s covered with incredibly delicate 5,000-year-old wall paintings. What’s fascinating is that there are 7,000 people buried together there: at the very dawn of civilisation, they had a sense that “we’re all in this together” and “why would you want to be buried on your own?” I did get the spooks there a bit, but it’s not morbid, it’s inspiring.


 

INSPIRATION IN ISTANBUL

Istanbul is my favourite city on Earth, and I got to “meet” my all-time history heroine there, too. Theodora came from the bottom of the sixth-century pile – she was an erotic dancer and probably a sex worker too, she but ended up marrying the emperor, Justinian. She then became a reforming, social-justice queen and led a massive building programme, which included the great cathedral (now mosque) of Hagia Sophia. I got to stand on the same spot as her and I genuinely felt connected. Once you’ve done the history, you can take a water taxi across to the lovely Princes’ Islands, which is the city’s best-kept secret, where all the locals go to have an ice cream and chill out. Blissful…


DEITIES ON DELOS

Delos, in Greece’s Cyclades [the subject of this week’s programme], is a sacred island: nobody’s allowed to stay overnight, apart from a couple of curators (the whole island is an archaeological ruin). But because of Covid, there was no one else around so they let my crew and me stay, and we had the most magical night: it was a supermoon, we got to walk among the temples, and even did a bit of singing and dancing – which will have pleased Artemis, the Moon goddess who was worshipped there in ancient times. You can have a similar experience without staying over: the first ferry of the day gets there just after dawn, and it’s always pretty empty. Same with the last one back in the evening. Which means it’s just you and the cats and tortoises and birds and bullfrogs – it’s like travelling back in time because there’s no intrusion from the modern world. That’s a very nourishing experience.


BETTANY WAS TALKING TO ED GRENBY

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