Sizergh Castle: Template for Winterfell?

Sizergh Castle is a solidly-built ancient fortress that was enlarged in phases as the family fortunes improved.

The interior tells a different story.  Family fortunes reversed before the Stricklands could keep up with the overly ornate Baroque style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Instead, the decor of Sizergh remains very masculine, with beautifully carved but rugged oak panels rather than gilded and flowery decor.

The strength of the design brought to mind the Starks of the North in Game of Thrones, an analogy that actually overlays nicely with the Strickland military history of its battles against those "Wildling" Scots north of Hadrian's Wall and later the internal war against the Red Rose Lancasters (as opposed to Lannisters in GOT) to see who would claim the united kingdom's throne.

I don't believe it to be too much of a stretch to imagine the real history of Sizergh Castle and the Stricklands factored into the storytelling of author George R. R. Martin, whose fantasy series, A Song of Fire and Ice, was adapted into the epoch TV series watched around the world.

In fact, Martin himself as well as many critics say the basic plot is based on the War of the Roses and that characters and events were frequently lifted from history.

In my opinion, the GOT set-designer missed the boat by not patterning Winterfell Castle more exactly after Sizergh.

Back to Sizergh Castle's actual history, Sir Thomas Strickland lived the head-swelling high life in London (King's Landing?) as a Member of Parliament in the closing years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, dissipating family wealth on gambling and attempts to impress the big city elites of his day.

Nonetheless, upon the death of the wastrel Sir Thomas, the family again took up the mantle for their country, this time on behalf of King Charles I (son of King James I) against the Scots in the Second Bishop's War.

Then again, traditionally wars brought royal privilege plus plundered booty, so perhaps for the Stricklands this was basically just going back to work at the family business.

"Why would King Charles I, as the grandson of Mary Queen of Scots, take up arms against his ancestral home?" you may ask.  To some extent, his hand was forced by Scottish rebellion against his new policy to enforce Episcopal, or Bishop rule, as practiced by the Church of England --- of which he as King was the leader --- upon Scottish "kirks" that were accustomed to Presbyterian independence, but there's more to it than that.

The elitist King James I (King James VI of Scotland before assuming the combined reign) had been raised to look down on Scots as crude primitives, an attitude passed down to his son.

Feudalism was based on elitism, with royals ostensibly chosen by God to rule, and their friends granted fiefdoms in exchange for taxes and raising armies to help in the mutual defense of the kingdom.

The average serf --- and that would have been most people --- was little more than a slave, but just as the Reformation challenged Catholic rule of the soul, Parliamentarians arose intent on supplanting Royalist rule.

A full-fledged Civil War broke out in 1642.

The Stricklands sided with King Charles I and the Royalists, and once again fought valiantly on the losing side of history, culminating with King Charles I being executed in 1649.

Already struggling under the gambling debts accumulated by the wastrel Sir Thomas and fighting on the losing side of the Civil War, the massive fines levied by Parliamentarians brought the family fortunes to a low ebb just as the Baroque Era blossomed with Louis XIV of France, the Sun King, making garish gilding all the rage among European royalty.

Missing that trend makes Sizergh Castle somewhat unique, preserving for the most part a high nobleman's estate at the apex of the Medieval era, whereas most castles sustain the fashionable style of later periods or in other cases fall into ruin.

Hickory Dikili Dock

By the time we reached the port of Dikili, we had reached a psychological state where euphoria had become the norm.

We found everything amusing, including the name of our port, so my dumb joke about a potentially wooden dock sounding like a nursery rhyme made us giggle.

I kept doing variations, and eventually Miss Mature herself came up with one involving Star Trek that had the punchline of Trickery Dikili Spock.

As Julie surmised, those phrases undoubtedly lose a lot in translation, especially when you consider that the port name should be pronounced dee-KEE-lee rather than my nursery rhyme singsong mispronunciation as dick-illy.

Bergama Museum Exhibit of Traditional Muslim Wear

Nonetheless, we enjoyed a very pleasant day exploring sites outside Dikili.

We had planned to be on our own that day, which would have been a bad idea, because Dikili is definitely a tourist town for residents of Turkey and not geared at all to English speakers.

We received a free excursion ticket following the port presentation for Dikili that we'd attended on the morning of the jazz brunch.

This time we didn't win the ticket ourselves, but rather received it in part because we had waited patiently in our seats for the crowd to clear out after the talk.

Flash back to the prior morning when we shared a table with some nice folks from Arizona.  I don't remember their names, but the bronzed husband reminded me of a trim version of actor George Kennedy's cowboy from the 1968 movie Bandolero.


Let's call them George and Raquel for the purposes of this blog.


As the port presentation tour concluded, the speakers pulled a ticket out of a bag for the lucky winner of a Red Basilica Tour ticket.

Above the Trees Are Hilltop Remainders of Pergamon Ruins

Raquel won the free ticket, but she and George had previously booked a tour to the ruins of Pergamon.

Azamara offered to let them cancel the one they'd previously booked for a refund and change tours, but they elected to stay with their original plan.

When they turned around, Raquel's eyes found us still seated in the rapidly-emptying theater, and remembering our pleasant time over coffee, offered us the ticket.

Altar of Pergamon in Berlin, Germany

Only needing to buy one ticket changed our plans from DIY to ship-sponsored excursion.

Our tour actually turned out to be better than the one George and Raquel kept, because they later reported the ancient ruins of Pergamon had mostly been moved to Berlin, as we'd read previously.

Both tours visited the small Bergama Museum near Pergamon (not to be confused with the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, where Germans, in cooperation with the Turkish government, took most of the best pre-Muslim artifacts they excavated from the area, including the gigantic pagan Altar of Pergamon itself, which they reconstructed there).

Still, Bergama Museum had plenty of interesting artifacts to hold our attention in the time allotted, including a model of the Temple and photo of the Berlin reconstruction.

It had historic remnants from the Greek, Roman and Muslim ages.



After an hour or so, our tour headed over to the nearby Red Basilica, which turned out to be pretty awesome.

At almost 600 feet long, this massive red brick structure is the length two football fields placed end-to-end.

The main building is 86 feet wide, and its walls are 62 feet tall, above which there had once been a massive roof, so you can imagine how impressive it would have been standing before it.

Construction workers were busy restoring the building from scaffolding inside the walls.

Built in the early second century (most likely under the rule of Roman Emperor Hadrian), the Red Basilica was initially a pagan temple.

When Constantine converted the Empire to Christian, the temple became a Catholic Basilica.

Like much of the Holy Lands, the Red Basilica and the surrounding area moved into Muslim hands, and it became a mosque.

Right next to the main building, a tall, fat tower with an oculus opening at the apex of the dome captured our attention after most of the group had returned to our bus.

We returned to the seaside town of Dikili in time for a late lunch, but as I mentioned previously, it really is not geared to English speakers.  In fact, it must have been about 99% middle-aged Turkish men filling the tables at the cafes and walking the streets.  We finally gave up on finding an inviting cafe featuring Daghne's-style gyros, opting instead for another delicious lunch on board Azamara Journey.

We would not be sampling any Turkish stir-fried cactus prepared in a Dikili prick-illy wok.


Red Basilica

Bergama Museum

Not From Museum, but an interesting side note is that
the 2008 Democratic Convention used the Temple of
Pergamon as the template for their set design when
nominating Barrack Obama to be their candidate.