Wow. Roman Turkey

Well, we were tired yesterday, often dehydrated, but it was an amazing, amazing day.

Yesterday was our day of Roman ruins in Turkey, and it was fantastic. In the morning we did Ephesus, often called the best-preserved classical city in the Eastern Mediterranean. It is, in fact, quite impressive. I haven’t been to Pompeii in a dozen years, but my recollection is that it is better for giving you a sense of the layout of a roman city: block after block exist. In Ephesus you have mostly the public buildings and central roads – and a few amazing private buildings. But the level of preservation is in some cases stunning.

Most of the action happens along Curates street.

There was a separate entrance for the terrace houses, which turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip. What you visit are six mansion-houses that share common walls, forming what the romans called an island. Inside they have been able to reconstruct the mosaics and wall-coverings on many of the houses. It gave me a sense of roman life like I’ve never had before, and helped me see the luxury they were living in. (I knew about indoor plumbing and heated floors. That was cool to see again, but it was decoration that was new to me.) The floors had unique mosaics that look very much like rugs. Some houses had beautiful and very different marbles on the walls, like wall-paper. Others had incredible wall paintings. The pictures don’t do it justice (the whole thing is covered in a 25 million dollar tent, which diffused the light).

I had seen pictures of the library of Celsus before: it is the most famous thing there. I was ready to be impressed with its size – and I was. But I wasn’t ready for how beautiful it is, and how amazingly detailed and ornate. I tend to not like more baroque, over-the-top art, but this was really stunning. There were a half-dozen more gates and buildings that elsewhere would be the highlight of a trip.

The Ephesus museum is small and its real claim to fame are two statues to Artemis, who had a huge following in Ephesus. It is striking how un-Greek and un-Roman they seem.

[Alison with parts from a statue of an Emperor.]

After Ephesus, we drove two-and-a-half hours inland to Aphrodisias. We passed through many towns, over a hundred road-side fruit vendors (I didn’t stop because Alison was napping), and lots of fields along the Meander river. I passed many tractors. In pretty much every town, we saw women in headscarves and women without, although clearly the older you are, the more likely you are to wear one: we saw many women in their 20-40s without headscarves with their mothers, who were wearing one.

Ephesus is the biggest tourist attraction in Turkey: tour boats will let off 4000 people there at a time. When we were there it was very busy, but didn’t feel too bad (one book helpfully pointed out it gives you a sense of what it was like when Ephesus was a city of more than a quarter million). Aphrodisias was almost deserted – and in some ways more impressive. There were maybe 25 people there after a tour-bus left soon after we arrived.

It has a beautiful double-gate that lead to the temple of Aphrodite.

[Temple of Aphrodite.]

But the most impressive thing outside was the stadium. It is over 270 meters long! When I walked through the entrance I just started laughing.

There are all sorts of other great sites, like the theater. We were exhausted, though, and somewhat ready to be done. But I knew we had to go the museum, because Aphrodisias is famous for its school of sculpture, which scholars didn’t know about until serious excavations started in the 60’s. We were the only ones in a world-class museum for most of the time we were there. It is quite large and has an incredible collection. The highlight was a room of sculptures that came from a building for worshiping the roman emperors as gods.

The food so far has been great. Our meal last night was incredible. Clearly the cooking is very good here, but so is the produce. We have just had really great tomatoes, eggplants, mushrooms, etc. The eggplant and tomato dish last night was maybe the best eggplant I’ve had.