It is January, a time of new beginnings. That makes it the province of the Roman God Janus, whose name comes from the Latin word meaning “gateway” or “archway.” Janus had a habit of looking over his shoulder at where he came from, a backward stretch that is not hard to do with the open view an archway provides. The god of gates and doors as well—his title was janitor, a word that has since lost its oomph—Janus was once a very powerful presence in the Roman pantheon, with a temple devoted to him at the place where the Roman and the Julian forums met at the end of a long road populated by brothels, bars, and bookstores, things that I suppose go together, at least if you take a point of view learned from François Rabelais.
The god Janus depicted on a Roman coin
The conjunction apparently offended high-minded Romans, though, so that a few hundred years on, during the early empire, the temple, built by Rome’s second king, was torn down. No one is exactly sure where it once stood. What we do know, to trust Plutarch and some of the other ancient Roman historians, was that the gates of the temple were closed in times of peace and open in times of war. It tells us something about the nature of Rome that the gates were closed only once in hundreds of years.
Gates, doors, porticos, archways, and other entrances were important in the religion of ancient Rome. Borrowing from the Etruscans, the Romans assigned household gods to such charged places, the lares and penates. These minor deities could be impish, or they could be quite scary, as with a medusa head that once guarded the entrance to the ancient Etruscan city of Veii. I keep a laminated postcard of that medusa at the door of my office, figuring that if it was good enough for the ancients, it might prove useful in warding off latter-day evils.
A medusa of Veii
Above my door, too, is a horseshoe nailed with the open end up to harvest whatever good is out there floating about in the world. Some traditions hold that the horseshoe is properly nailed upside down, so that luck pours down on whomever passes through the door, but I’m not buying it. That the horseshoe is vested with such power dates back to the Iron Age, when metal, in just about every culture where it was worked, was thought to have magical properties; to this day, horseshoes have seven holes, seven being a lucky number in cultures around the world as well. In particular, throughout Europe it was long believed that witches could not abide iron, which forced them to take to the air on broomsticks instead of hailing a passing coach or hopping on a horse. Indeed, as late as 1790, historian Daniel Jütte writes in The Strait Gate: Thresholds and Power in Western History, Londoners nailed horseshoes above their doors for the express purpose of warding off witches.
Gates, portals, doors express power, since they tend to be attached to walls of varying degrees of thickness. I once spent much of a day circumnavigating the city wall of Xi’an, China, wide enough for semis to pass in either direction, not that such technologies were known in the glory days of Shihuangdi and his armies, since enshrined in terracotta. The gates were scaled proportionally. A similarly massive gate graced the wall that ringed ancient Seoul, South Korea. Called the Namdeamun, or Great South Gate, it was the city’s glory until 2008, when an elderly arsonist decided that, because the gate was “easy to approach and poorly guarded,” as he later told police, he set it on fire. It has since been rebuilt at a reported cost of $21 million, a sum that, if you’ve been shopping for an ordinary exterior door recently, doesn’t seem too far out of line.
The city wall of Xian, China. Photograph by Gregory McNamee
Thermopylae, the Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, the Arc de Triomphe, the Moscow Triumphal Gate, the Eye of the Needle: such names resound in history. The ancient Rashōmon Gate at the southern end of Kyoto gave the world a short story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa that, liberally adapted by director Akira Kurosawa, gave us a brilliant film and a byword for shifting points of view that make us question what is true or not: “as our brain stares in disbelief at our two opposed certainties, we become alienated from the contents of our own psyche, realizing that somewhere along the line, we’ve believed the unbelievable,” writes Angus Fletcher in his new book Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, timely in an age when people believe all sorts of unbelievable things.
When it stops plaguing out there and we can travel again, a pastime worth recommending is to study gates, doorways, and other entrances and the beliefs and customs that attach to them. How much cultural energy is invested in them? What do local people think about them?
Just remember that not every gate is a gate. The Dzungarian Gate is a metaphorical one, a mountain pass that is the only easy opening in the rocky chain that stretches from northeastern China to Afghanistan, a distance of more than 3,000 miles. Herodotus, the Greek historian, thought that the Dzungarian Gate led to Hyperborea, that remote utopia beyond the home of the North Wind. It leads instead to Tibet, a utopia in some eyes. And the Hell Gate Bridge does not literally provide a passage to Hell, though it does lead to Queens, which some Manhattanites might consider the moral equivalent. It’s a misrendering of the Dutch term Hellgat, which means “shining strait,” commemorating the majesty of the place where the East River flows into Long Island Sound a few miles upriver.
At least it’s not Staten Island.
Of Gates and Their Discontents—and Bagels, Too
It’s customary, around the world, for someone to appear at a door and, announcing his or her arrival, wait to be invited in. The Ottomans, in the manner of invading armies everywhere, did not observe such niceties: they had a tendency to show up at the gates of a city, knock them down, and give the populace inside reason to regret their presence. Granted, they tended to be nicer about the whole thing than Genghis Khan, their erstwhile neighbor before the Turkic peoples migrated eastward via, yes, the Dzungarian Gate: he knocked down the gates of Samarkand, in what is now Uzbekistan, and, being an ill-tempered fellow without an off switch, killed 300,000 people before heading off to the next town.
But back to the Ottomans. The year 1683 found them beginning to despair at not having been able to knock down the gates of Vienna and take over the city. The Ottomans had already conquered a sizable portion of Eastern Europe by that time, and one of their policies was to suppress non-Islamic religions more or less equally across the region, thus giving Protestantism equal footing with Catholicism and Orthodoxy and keeping the place divided on religious grounds—religious differences being, of course, a very good way to keep people squabbling among themselves rather than solving common problems.
The Habsburgs, who ruled Vienna, weren’t terribly concerned when they first heard rumblings that the Ottomans were on the way. Oxford University historian John Stoye writes in The Siege of Vienna that they considered the Ottomans less worrisome overall than the French, who had expansionist ambitions in which Vienna figured. So did the Russians, and the Poles, and the Swedes, and the Germans of several states and principalities. The Habsburgs had a change of heart, though, when 100,000 Ottoman soldiers arrived at the gates of Vienna and laid on a terrific, artillery-intense siege whose effects were amplified by hunger and disease. That long siege was lifted only when the Polish warrior king Jan Sobieski arrived with 30,000 well-trained soldiers, closely followed by 40,000 troops led by French Duke Charles V and contingents of soldiers from other European powers. The allied force turned back the invaders, setting in motion the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire.
The Battle of Vienna, 1683
It seems that a Jewish baker in the city, his name lost to history, wanted to honor Sobieski for being first on the scene, and so he concocted a roll that looked like a stirrup—in German, a Steigbügel or Bügel, shaped by the rules of Yiddish into the form beygel. The roll was made of white flour, then something of a luxury, and it kept well, a good thing for a knight on the march to keep in his saddlebag, maybe with a nice schmear, some lox, and a slice of red onion.
But why not honor Sobieski with a delicacy with a Polish name? And why give the bagel a name that, Max Weinreich observes in his magnum opus History of the Yiddish Language , so easily lends itself to potentially dangerous punning, since beygel sounds very much like the words for “lightheaded,” “joyful,” and “golden calf”? (See volume 2, page A682, for the details.)
Such things will likely remain mysteries for time to come. Cultural historian Maria Balinska does a fine job, however, of providing a pedigree with her lively book The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, linking the bagel to the southern Italian cracker called taralli, southern Italy having been a region of refuge for Jews in the Middle Ages.
But that’s another story altogether.
Gateway Books
Tracy Campbell, The Gateway Arch
Andy Goldsworthy, Projects
Conn Iggulden, The Gates of Athens
Lloyd Kahn, The Half-Acre Homestead
Strother Purdy, Doormaking: Materials, Techniques, and Projects for Building Your First Door
Builder Lloyd Kahn’s front door