I Was Here
Tourist graffiti through the ages
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Amidst all of the news stories about terrible travelers that have hit my feed in this age of overtourism, one stuck in my craw more than others. A year or so ago, there was an item about a guy who thought it would be cool to commemorate his trip with his girlfriend to Rome. So, in the Colosseum, he carved the beautiful sentiment “IVAN + HAYLEY 23” into the ancient brick walls of one of the world’s most famous ancient sites.
Because this happened in the modern age of tourism, and the Colosseum was overcrowded with tourists wielding phone cameras, somebody took a video of him (titled, appropriately, “Asshole tourist carves name in Colosseum in Rome”).
Ivan was later sentenced to pay a fine of about €1,000. In some ways, he was lucky — the maximum punishment is €15,000 and five years in prison. In other ways, he was unlucky — several other tourists also tried to carve graffiti into the walls of the Colosseum in 2023, but only he got caught on camera to live forever in internet infamy.
Whether you saw this item when it first came out or are just hearing about it now, I’ll bet you’re horrified by the actions of Ivan the Asshole Tourist. How dare he deface such an august building by scratching his name out with his keys? How selfish, how egocentric! Or, in the words of the Italian Culture Minister, the act was “undignified and a sign of great incivility.” What a jerk!
So how come I’m so charmed by this?
This is some graffiti, written on the walls of the Tomb of Ramses V, by tourists who were viewing the then-centuries-old site (Ramses died in the 1100s BCE).
The example on the left above, in Greek, is just somebody’s name (Pamonthes, son of Pamonthes). The inscription below it, in Latin, says: “Ianuarius, a Primus Pilus (a military rank), saw this place and was amazed.” Ianuarius’ name shows up in a number of Egyptian tombs and temples — he apparently took the deluxe tour of ancient Egyptian sites.
Some of the graffiti is more complex, complaining about the tourist experience (“I visited and I did not like anything but the sarcophagus!”) or expressing the joy of discovery, but most of it is just some variation of “X was here!” or “Y admired this!” Honestly, it’s no more sophisticated than IVAN + HAYLEY 23.
And there’s a lot of it in this particular tomb:
People didn’t leave graffiti only in Egyptian tombs. Here’s some from the cathedral in Strasbourg:
This cathedral, like Ramses’ tomb, has centuries’ worth of graffiti from tourists:
Some of the vandals spent serious time on their inscriptions:
Many inscriptions look like they were done by real artists (check out those Ws!):
Most of them are just slightly more aesthetically pleasing IVAN + HAYLEYs, to be honest. But I find this graffiti to be far more charming than Ivan the Asshole Tourist’s. Maybe Ivan’s big problem is that he’s our contemporary. Perhaps, in 500 years, future tourists will delight at his graffiti the way I delight at this stuff.
North of Khartoum, there’s a place called Musawwarat es-Sufra. Though most settlements in this part of the world hug the life-giving Nile, it’s oddly far away from the water. Its “Great Enclosure,” constructed 2,200 years ago, housed a number of temples and other structures. The complex bears the cultural imprints of Egyptian and Nubian culture.
Though they’re not quite sure, historians think that the site was a magnet for religious pilgrimages. Many pilgrims left graffiti to mark their travels. Some of them drew patterns:
Later Christian travelers left symbols of their religion:
Not too far away, at El Kurru, there’s another temple, built around the same time. There, too, pilgrims etched graffiti into the walls. They depicted animals, like these chickens and horses:
Or these bulls:
Some of the art shows the boats that pilgrims must have used to travel to the site:
In some ancient sites, the graffiti left by later travelers is a little more controversial. At Persepolis, the capital of the ancient Persian Empire, ruins of the gates and palaces erected by leaders like Darius and Xerxes two and a half millennia ago are scarred with the names of European travelers who felt the need to memorialize their trips.
Even in the nineteenth century, many European visitors condemned this vandalism. Arch-imperialist George Curzon, later the Viceroy of India, defended it:
From this proud memorial it is, I believe, with affected disgust that most travelers turn to the records of many generations of European visitors, who have either cut or painted their names on the lower surfaces of this gateway, in some cases even on the bodies of the bulls. I confess that I do not share this spurious emotion. A structure so hopelessly ruined is not rendered the less impressive – on the contrary, to my thinking, it becomes the more interesting – by reason of the records graven upon it, in many cases with their own hands, by famous voyagers of the past, with whose names and studies the intelligent visitor to Persepolis is likely to be almost as familiar as he is with the titles of Xerxes, and whose forms seem in fancy once more to people the scene which they have revealed and illumined by their writings to thousands of their fellow-countrymen, who may never have had the chance of setting foot on Persian soil themselves.
Some of the Persepolis graffiti is quite verbose:
Other inscriptions stick to a nineteenth-century version of “I was here:”
There are a few famous names in Persepolis, as well — this inscription was made by Henry Morton Stanley the year before he traveled to Africa to find David Livingstone:
The graffiti continued to be left well into the twentieth century:
Persepolis isn’t the only site covered in Victorian-era graffiti. The temple of Bacchus at Baalbek in Lebanon has its fair share:
Felix Bonfils, a photographer, even used the ancient site as a billboard, writing an advertisement for his studio on the gates of the ancient temple (misidentified in the photo caption below). But, as happens at so many of these sites, the earliest graffiti simply created a permission structure for more people to vandalize the temple. His ad was eventually covered over by other people’s graffiti:
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How should we think about all this graffiti? I’m pretty sure I know how I feel about Asshole Tourist Ivan carving his name into the Colosseum. So I suppose I should feel the same way about Pamonthes and Ianuarius. But I don’t, not really. The more ancient graffiti feels like a priceless record of a fleeting human life, an “I was here” echoing across the centuries. But a modern tourist or a nineteenth-century imperialist doing such a thing? It feels like self-aggrandizing vandalism.
Comedians will tell you that comedy equals tragedy plus time — that the passage of years makes bad things seem more palatable. Maybe something similar applies to graffiti at historical sites.
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"Kilroy was here" would have been a better choice for the Coliseum's walls?
Ah, Ivan—modern vandalism’s antihero. I doubt that in 500 years, his Colosseum carving will be viewed as a daring act of love rather than an act of ‘Asshole Tourism.’