Day Nine! Full day
in Selcuk, featuring the Ephesus ruins.
Am writing this on yet another bus.
This time music of choice is Emily Barker +/- the Red Clay Halo. Must
book tickets to the festival where she is playing – so exciting!
We started the day
pretty much in full holiday mode. That is, we took forever to get
going and weren't very organised about it. I think we were both just
relieved to be staying in one spot for the day. The plan was to see
Ephesus, a ruin that by all counts was a must see on any trip to
Turkey. Breakfast on the rooftop terrace of the hotel was pretty good
and the coffee was drinkable which was always a plus.
View from rooftop terrace of the fortress atop Ayasura hill (presently being restored, not yet open to the public)
(And also in view from the rooftop, the Selcuk storks nesting atop the ruins of a Roman aqueduct that run through the town. You know, just casually.)
We were finally on
our way after 10am. The LP had said to get there early to beat the
crowds of tour buses. Well we had totally missed the bus on that.
Missed the bus and caught the buses? Anyhow, after stocking up on
water we headed for the allegedly pleasamt 30 minute walk down a tree
line boulevard to the site, with one planned side trip on the way to
see the site of the old temple of Artemis.
We found the
boulevard easily enough and indeed it was tree lined and wonderfully
shady. Unfortunately the trees had a weird fruit that it had
inconsiderately covered the entire walkway making for sticky,
funny smelling walking. Ignoring the fruit (and the inevitable buzzy
things that like to eat the fruit) it was a pleasant walk.
The temple of
Artemis site was well marked and not far from town. Not much to look
at here – a few tumbledown columns and a sign promising that once
this temple was once one of the wonders of the ancient world. The most
exciting thing to see was the wildlife – storks nesting on top of
the tallest column (storks make their home in Selcuk every year, and
the tall old ruins through the city seem to be their favourite
nesting places). Also there were Geese with baby geese in the pond :)
Geese! Bebie Geeses!
Stork and stork nest! Given the size of the nests, I'm not surprised about the legend of storks bringing babies.
That
done, we trekked on along to Ephesus. To prepare us, I read aloud to
Greg from the LP the history of the place. We were passed by a some
people and one of them remarked to Greg when we saw him again a bit
later “I see you've brought your guide with you.” Guide and
travel agent and chief
correspondent, thank you very much. Unfortunately that means I get to take credit for not only the successes, but also the screw-ups of the trip...
The lead up to the
entrance to Ephesus was like a fair, there were that many stalls and
people trying to sell anything and everything 'Turkish'. I figured
that the cruise ships from Kusadasi probably do day trips to here and
some people this may be their only 'Turkish' experience. The prices
certainly reflected this, and you could tell the cruise ship tourist
groups pretty easily (the most scantily clad and sunburnt, mostly).
We did buy the
cheapest guidebook we could find because we knew the place was
massive and the LP's info was a bit scanty. We got through the gate... and then we got confused. It was busy, busy, busy, hundreds of people
everywhere, so just getting around was tricky. We were first
distracted by a cheesy but well orchestrated piece of theatre set up
on (what we later learned) was the Harbour Street. The Emperor and
Cleopatra strolled in to trumpet music and took their seats on the
podium, and then were entertained by belly dancers, fire blowers, and
a gladiator fight before proceeding out again. It seemed the show ran
every half an hour.
Then we tried to
start touring the ruins from where we were. We had a map in our guide
book and the LP seemed to give directions starting from the gate.
After half an hour of trying to reconcile what we were reading with
what we were seeing however we finally figured out that somewhere
there was ANOTHER entrance to the ruins, and both books started their
guides from there. Feeling a little frustrated with the time we
wasted, we decided to head to the other gate and do things in the
suggested order.
Ahh things made a
long more sense after that! And then... just wow. The place is huge! It's essentially the main street & more of a massive (population 250,000) Roman city with many buildings
still remarkably intact or restored. There are temples, a basilica, a
public latrine, bathhouse, brothel, and houses.
The terraced houses,
albeit another charge to go and see, were AMAZING room after room of
a houses on the main street that belonged to the wealthy and
influential, decorated with beautiful floor mosaics, still intact,
and frescoes still preserved on the walls.
Lady busy uncovering/restoring frescoes.
Balik frescoe! Apparently things like fish would be painted on the walls of kitchens.
This was a large and beautiful mosaic of Poseidon & friends but the only way to get a shot of it was to poke your camera through the gap in the stairs.
...Then you get to the
library, the crowning piece of the ruin. The facade fully restored,
it soars stories high in all it's engraved, statued glory.
That's not
to mention the marble street...
(Some 'graffiti' carved into the stone along Marble Street allegedly to point the Romans in the direction of the brothel, but the guide books assured us that this is actually not what it was about...)
...followed by the grand theatre which could seat 25,000 people....
Then the Harbour street , will a taller pillar
marking where the water used to come to before it filled up with silt
and became land (which was eventually what ended Ephesus as a city,
water got shallow it turned into a 'malarial swamp' and everyone
moved away. Then I'm pretty sure there was also some earthquakes.)
(And naturally some Turkish people looking to get some unique wedding pictures...)
We headed off the
main track to look at some sarcophogi (Greg in particular was
interested) and I GOT BITTEN BY A GIANT ANT. When I looked the little
dude had grabbed on hard to my second toe. This was NOT my favourite
thing, but I'm glad to say that despite my panicked toe-shaking and
foot-stomping both the ant and myself survived the incident. Greg
laughed at me :(
\
The sarcophogi
The ant bite!
Example ant. Difficult to see scale in this photo, so imagine it's about the size of a small cat... then DOUBLE IT. (that's how big it felt, anyway).
That was the end of
the sacrcophagus examining but we persevered further off the track to
see the church of St. Mary, which was interesting but fairly
anti-climactic after Ephesus itself.
We also could have,
but didn't, visited the 'grotto of the seven sleepers'. Legend has it
that 6 Christians (and their dog) from Ephesus were ordered by the
Emperor to give sacrifices to the pagan gods and instead they
refused and so he ordered them arrested/killed. So they ran away into
the hills and met a farmer along the way who they also converted to
Chrsitianity. He let them hide in his cave where they fell asleep and
so Emperor ordered the cave sealed. Years later, after the emperor
had died and the Romans had fuly converted to Christianity the
present-day farmer decided to open the cave up. The sleepers awoke
thinking they had only been asleep the night. They returned to town
and were baffled to see churches with crosses etc. everywhere and the
townspeople were bemused when they tried to spend coin with the face
of a long dead emperor on it. Apparently the men went and spoke to
the bishop about it, then died praising God. Just thought it was an
interesting little story.
After Ephesus we
walked the long, rather hot walk back to the hotel, recouperated for
a bit (which involved DEVOURING a block of partially melted 'milka' chocolate), then went to find lunch.
The empty chocolate wrapper. Utterly demolished in about two minutes.
Greg had looked up a place in the LP that again lived up to it's reputation and even had free wifi. I finally tried some turkish coffee and baklava after the main and enjoyed both immensely! Greg enjoyed the complimentary lemon tea.
Greg had complimentary tea whereas for 1 lira, I decided to try some Turkish ayran, which was interesting but probably not my favourite (yoghurt, water and salt, essentially).
We had kebap wrapped which were pretty good!
Readers, meet baklava. It's fantastic.
Turkish coffee. Expected it to be a bit like Hamish's Scarily Strong Coffee, but was presently surprised and ready to try more!
The restaurant
owners also owned a carpet shop next door and they invited us to take
a look. We consented because already having a rapport with these guys
we weren't too threatened that we would be pushed into buying
anything. Inside the shop we were left alone to browse once we
explained that we simply had no use for a giant turkish carpet. The
cute cushion covers with camels on them on the other hand, I fell
quite in love with and for 10 lira each, why even bother trying to
haggle? (Malcolm we are just like those Americans you described who
go “that's a great deal!' and fork over the money...). I grabbed a
few postcards as well. I've even written two post cards now, and when
I can get to a post office and figure out how it works I will post
them. And in about two years you'll get them!
Then
we went on a shopping mission to get Greg some new togs as he had
forgotten his and he was going to need them hopefully soon! We went
into a shop and found a pair that fit. To Greg's alarm, they were
size XXL.. he is hoping that Turkish sizing is just crazy small and
not that all the good Turkish cuisine has already taken it's toll...
They bumped ten lira off the price when we hesitated, so I guess if
we had continued being coy we could have got them even cheaper. As it
was they were a decent pair of togs for 60 lira, which is about $40
NZD, I thought that was fine, but Greg maintains that they were SO
EXPENSIVE. After we had the togs the man in the shop (always always
always a man, although this guy at least had his wife sitting in the
corner yelling out instructions as to how he should conduct his sale
from time to time) started asking us if we needed *gurbleinturkish*.
We stared blankly at him so he said “I show you, come with me”.
And then he left the shop. Bemused, we followed him down the road to
another shop that sold... towels!. And beautiful towels they were.
Big beautiful plushy towels, for just 30 lira lol. I tried to explain
that there was no way we wanted to be carrying around such big
towels, and he showed me their smallest towel – a beautiful large
white handtowel with golden geese embroiderd on it. Seriously, for
the beach? One thing we knew for sure, we didn't come to Turkey to
buy towels. We didn't even come buy togs, but for Greg's
forgetfulness. We grinned, said no thank you and made our escape with
smiles all round.
Back at the hotel it was well after 5pm and we had no hunger left for
tea and no energy to go out again so we called it a night.
Oh – we seem to be getting off the bus ? Earlier than we thought...
No comments:
Post a Comment