Dan's Letter to the Ephesians

St. John's Basilica
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By Dan

Leaving the hot water experience at Pamukkale, our next stop was Selcuk. (Turkish pronunciation and spelling results in the town being pronounced Sel-choock.) Selcuk became one of our favorite towns in Turkey: it’s small, manageable, clean, full of friendly people, and next to some of the most awesome archaeological stuff in the world.

Those of you who have been to a wedding or two will be familiar with the popular reading from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. (Sorry, my Bible seems to be out of reach, so I can’t give you the psalm citation.) After Jesus was crucified, John the Baptist moved to Ephesus along with Virgin Mary, where Mary apparently lived out her life and John was based until he died. Paul hung out there a lot, too. Despite his comments on love being widely quoted today, Paul’s preachings on Christianity were not well received in Ephesus. A big reason, we learned, was because the manufacture of religious idols was big in town, and idol manufacturers saw the loss of a lot of business if suddenly there was only one God instead of the whole Roman pantheon, and one God whose idol wasn’t supposed to be worshipped at that. But, in addition to its Biblical significance, Ephesus was also a specially-built city that served as the capital of the Roman Empire’s territories in Asia. For some reason, people just sort of left the city, rather than tearing it down to build other stuff, so it has remained in remarkable shape.

walking the street in Ephesus
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We spent a great morning wandering around the ruins with a guide. Around 100 AD, Ephesus was a city of 250,000, and we were absolutely amazed by how organized and efficient the city was. It’s really remarkable that so much was lost or forgotten after the Romans faded away – in many cases, things weren’t back at the same level of sophistication for 1500 years. Ephesus had running water, a sewage system, buildings with central heating, a spectacular library, a theater that sat 25,000, and beautiful public art. The kids of course especially enjoyed checking out the public lavatories, which had carved marble seats, pipes for hot water to warm the marble in cold winter months, a system for de-odorizing, and running water to remove the waste. (Apparently, they didn’t have toilet seat covers, which contributed to greater marital harmony in Roman times.) The most impressive sight is the old public library, which once had the largest collection of books in the world. (It reached number one status when the library in Alexandria burned down, and Cleopatra talked Marc Antony to giving her the contents of the library at Pergamon, then burned those contents to heat her bath water.) Its façade is still two stories high, and features very ornate decoration. Apparently, people spent ten years putting the thousands of pieces back together. It was well worth the effort.

Roman toilets
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Selcuk is also the place where John the Baptist is buried, so it gets lots of religious pilgrims. The basilica that was built over his grave has seen better days, but it was cool to see the ruins. There are also a few other spots of religious significance around town, so we were kept busy. Finally, Selcuk is where one of the Seven Wonders of the World was located. A Temple of Artemis, originally built by the Persian king Croesus (of “rich as Croesus” fame) around 550 BC and rebuilt a few times, apparently had 127 columns and was truly immense. Unfortunately, there’s only 1 column left, so it takes a lot of imagination to appreciate.

Ephesus Library
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There’s a whole lot of commerce going on in Selcuk, and we were constantly being approached by folks who had things for us to admire. Offering people a cup of tea is huge in Turkey, and the specialty in this part of the country is apple tea. It tastes more like hot cider than tea, and it’s really good. We probably did some serious damage to our teeth, with all the apple tea we drank. What was nicest about it all was that there was no hard sell. People were perfectly willing to take no for an answer, and still seemed to want to visit, even if we made it clear that we weren’t buying.

Theater
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The two guys who owned the hotel in which we stayed, as well as the rug shop next door, were very personable and we spent a lot of time with them. We got the run-down on things around town as they shuttled us a couple of times. Bus stations are very important in Turkey, since buses are the primary means of transportation. There is a very fancy looking bus station in Selcuk, but it’s only half-built and clearly construction has stopped. According to our hotel owner, a new mayor was elected, and he didn’t like the project, so he stopped work. It took me back to the 2006 elections in Orinda – what if the next city counsel had stopped construction on the new city offices, and let the shell just sit there festering? That would have been quite a thing to see!

I’d be remiss in describing Selcuk without commenting on two sports for which it is famous: camel wrestling and oil wrestling. OK, maybe famous is an exaggeration, since I’m willing to bet that very few of our readers (both of you??) think of Selcuk and immediately think of camels or oil. In fact, apart from a few of you who have been places you shouldn’t have been on bachelor parties or something, oil and wrestling are rarely mentioned in the same sentence, and I won’t even comment on the linkage between camels and wrestling. Sadly, we were in town at the wrong time of year, and missed both spectacles. Apparently, camel wrestling is not man vs. camel, but camel vs. camel. They are muzzled to prevent those nasty camel bites, but they do a lot of neck butting and whatever else angry camels might do. Oil wrestling is man vs. man, and considered a whole lot more macho than that wimpy stuff that American high schoolers do. (Larry, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry – just reporting the facts.) Hopefully, on our next trip to Selcuk we’ll time things right and get to take in a session or two of one or both of these interesting sports. If Istanbul is named as host city for the Olympic Games anytime soon, though, they’ll be coming to you live on your TV via Bob Costas and NBC Sports. Make a note of it.

After two fun days in Selcuk, we hit the road and headed north. Inter-city signs in Turkey get a huge thumbs up. It has been much easier to get from place to place in Turkey than it was in France or Italy. And, we enjoyed the cleanest gas station bathrooms I have ever seen in any country. What’s painful, though, is gas prices. You’d think that a Muslim country in the Middle East would have low prices. Sadly, not the case. We were paying nearly US$10 per gallon. Dropping 80 bucks to fill up our tiny little Kia was pretty painful.

Next stop was a little seaside village called Assos. We got there after about 20 kilometers on a road that grew progressively worse, and finally dropped down a very steep cliff to the coast. There were about 3 streets clustered around a little harbor full of fishing boats. There were more stray cats than there were people. The feline population just slept, and the human population just sat around smoking cigarettes and playing backgammon. It was the perfect place for us to chill out for 24 hours. The kids spent a lot of time catching hermit crabs, which has become one of their favorite seaside pastimes. Christina and I just sipped tea and gazed out at the Aegean Sea and the Greek island of Lesbos, which is just about 5 miles across the strait. Perhaps the single most exciting thing about Assos, though, was the fact that there wasn’t a single tourist-oriented shop in town. In fact, we sort of had the feeling that there wasn’t another gringo in 100 miles. Probably not the case, but it felt good to think so.

On second thought, no. From the kids’ perspective, anyway, the most exciting thing about Assos was that it gave them the chance to say another forbidden word. It goes on the list with Dam Square in Amsterdam, and the Hotel Anafartalot in Canakkale. (Christina and I have seen a few others, but since there was a PG-rated portion of the last blog entry, I don’t want to raise the bar with an R-rated portion of this one.) Are our brains turning to mush??