Turkey has some serious Christian history. Constantine, who converted the Roman Empire to Christianity in 312, established Constantinople as the Roman capital in 330. That attracted a lot of Christians to Turkey, but there was plenty of action before that.

A Christian-Greek-Pagan-Roman mashup? A perfect road trip, since we already reside at the intersection of Adventure and Absurdity. Four days and three nights ought to do the trick.

Izmir

We flew to Izmir from Istanbul. It’s just a little over an hour, and flying within Turkey is super cheap. We flew out of Sabiha Gökçen, which had been the primary international airport for Istanbul before IST opened in 2018. So it’s still a pretty big damned airport. Our favorite part, if you can have a favorite part of an airport, was this Soviet-style mural. Onward vanguard of Turkey, to your glorious future airport!

Izmir is Turkey’s third largest city, sitting right on the Aegean coast, but we only spent the afternoon and evening there, heading to Selçuk and Ephesus the next morning. Izmir used to be Smyrna, and we were staying in the Old City right next to the ruins of the Agora. It was hot enough that we spent the afternoon in the Kemeralti Market, which was covered. By the time we got out to the Agora it was closed. We walked around the perimeter and peered inside. It looked like… old stones.

I’m afraid we’ve been to so many Roman era ruins at this point that we’re a little jaded. Which is concerning, since we’re going to two more sites on this trip. Fingers crossed.

On the other hand, you have to love a town that’s chosen this as their mascot. She stands guard just outside the Kemeralti Market. As a warning to the other fish.

The Kemeralti Market is a big, sprawling covered market dominating the Old City. But what really stood out was the complete and total absence of arts and crafts. There was food and clothes and spices and textiles and cafes, but we literally found only a single shop selling tourist goods. We must have just missed the sector, although we spent the entire afternoon wandering the market. I was embarrassed to ask at the hotel. “Hey, where do the tourists shop?” The shreds of my dignity and self respect tortured themselves into a semi-human shape and forbade me. It’s not like we needed more handicrafts. It was just weird.

This, however, demands its own explanation. There were a lot of shops selling little Grand Vizier costumes. At first we thought they might be for wee wedding attendants, but there were way too many, and no commensurate quantity of adult wedding wear. Nope, these were their own animal.

A short trip to the interwebs revealed the unpleasant truth. These are the fancy outfits 5-7 year olds get to wear for their own personal Sünnet festival. For when they’re circumcised. In public. At 5-7 years old. I’d demand way more than some Arabian Nights cosplay, but that appears to be the payoff. That, and, of course, being circumcised. Which is awesome and totally worth it. On Day Eight. Not sure I’d have signed off on Year Seven.

Selçuk

We’d been planning to take the train from Izmir to Selçuk, the town closest to Ephesus. The guy who arranged our tour said the train was complicated, which made no sense, as the train schedule showed a direct train from Izmir. When we got there and tried to figure it out, surprise, it seemed complicated. So we took a cab for the thirty minute drive south.

And here’s where the stupid kicked in. It was hot the day before in Izmir, but we were able to stay pretty covered in the market. Ephesus would be a direct sun tour, with very little shade, and a temperature of 108. We should have just bailed and stayed in our air conditioned hotel room. That would have been, what’s the word I’m looking for…? Smart.

Especially since we came back to news articles about pilgrims dying on the way to Mecca in the 110 degree heat. That got our attention.

But we didn’t know that at the time, so off we went, marching under our banner: What Could Possibly Go Wrong? First stop on our tour wasn’t Ephesus. It was…

Mary’s House

We found our tour guide through a personal connection, so we just signed up for the Ephesus tour without drilling down into the itinerary. This was our first group tour, so we figured we’d just go with whatever happened. Counting us there were eight people on the tour, sharing our thankfully air conditioned van. Five Argentines who got their own Spanish speaking guide, and three Americans with our own guide: ourselves and a lovely Japanese woman who lives in… Chicago! We’ll be connecting with Hisae when we get back to the US. Look at us, making friends.

I have to confess, I wasn’t all that thrilled about visiting Mary’s house. First, I don’t actually care. Second, I felt pretty strongly that we should have started in Ephesus before the sun was directly overhead. But Mary was first up and we’d strapped in for the ride.

The redeeming feature wasn’t Mary’s actual house, it was the wackadoodle backstory. A German nun took to her bed in 1812, riddled with all of Jesus’s various maladies: wounds from the Crown of Thorns, the stigmata, the lance, the whole nine yards. She was attended by a monk who cared for her from 1818 through her death in 1824. During this period she was prone to visions, which the monk, he claims, dutifully recorded. After her death he published them as The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which became an international best seller. Because it would take over a century to produce a Robert Ludlum.

One of her visions was a description of the location of the house that John had purportedly built for Mary’s retirement years. Or as she preferred they be known, Mary’s Scrapbooking Years. It’s not like she quit working. One of the many readers of the book declared that he recognized the location the nun had described as being uniquely a hilltop above Ephesus. An expedition was raised based on his claim, which found… the foundation of an old house. Exactly where the nun described it.

And, that’s it. There is absolutely zero evidence that this is Mary’s house except the crazy nun’s visions. The Catholic Church has never officially recognized the site as Mary’s house, but three popes have visited, so… you know.

Meanwhile, the site racks up the pilgrims. You can visit the house, which is actually a brand new Olde Style stone house built on top of the existing floor. I guess Mary’s Foundation didn’t come out of focus group. You get to stand in line so you can enter the fake house, look at pictures of popes, and buy an offering candle.

There’s still a spring there, and there are faucets so you can douse your hands and face with water from the same spring used by the mother of god. There’s a wishing wall. But most importantly, there’s a gift shop, with ridiculously overpriced Mary merch. The silversmiths of Ephesus should have seen this coming and welcomed Paul with open wallets.

While the site itself was underwhelming, the meta made it somehow worthwhile.

Ephesus

Finally, 108 degree heat be damned: Ephesus. How hot was it? Dorothy drank 3+ bottles of water and never once peed all day. Our iPhones overheated and their screens dimmed, which had never happened before. I mistook it for glare making the screen unreadable at first, until it kept happening in the shade. But we were not to be deterred. Even if being deterred would have been really smart.

Ephesus, despite its august history, has had it kind of rough. Rebuilt after rampaging Goths (is there another kind?) razed it in 262 AD, it finally went down for good in 614, laid low by an earthquake and the silting up of the port.

Other than its scale, one of the most interesting things about Ephesus is how much it’s a mashup of Greek and Roman design and construction, all side by side. The Romans were known for destroying whatever came before them and reusing the building materials, so a true Greco-Roman city is unusual.

There were several arena-style structures with raked seating, but they served entirely different purposes. One was for governing and one was for entertainment.

Our guide referred to the first one as the Politarium, although I couldn’t find that term anywhere else. It’s where local officials gathered to debate and vote on the business of the day. Unlike the theater, it had a covered roof.

The Great Theatre of Ephesus was actually built by the Greeks and refurbished by the Romans. Most Roman cities had two arenas, one for entertainment and one for spectacle, but the refurbished Greek theater served both purposes in Roman times. You can tell it was used for spectacles because of the high walls, which kept dangerous animals away from the patrons. While it wasn’t as enormous as the Colosseum in Rome, which could seat 50,000, The Great Theatre of Ephesus held a more than respectable 25,000 attendees.

As we walked down Curetes Street toward the Library, we passed a couple of key sites. The first was the Trajan Fountain. Erected in the 2nd century AD in honor of Emperor Trajan, it was one of the city’s more spectacular fountains.

Next down the hill was the Temple of Hadrian, built by the Greeks in about 130 AD. It’s one of the most intact structures in Ephesus, although everything here has been rebuilt. Pretty much nothing was left standing by the time serious excavation and restoration efforts began in 1863.

I’ve saved the best for last. The absolute highlight of Ephesus awaited us at the foot of Curetes Street, the restored Library of Celsus, the most magnificent structure in the city and, honestly, in much of the ancient world.

The library, completed in 135 AD, held more than 12,000 scrolls. While it couldn’t hold a candle to the Library of Alexandria (and probably shouldn’t have) and its 500,000 scrolls, it was still one of the largest libraries of the ancient world. On the other hand, you can still visit the Library of Celsus. Try booking a tour to the Library of Alexandria.

This was pretty much the end of the Ephesus tour, and at this point Dorothy found a spot of shade from which she could see the library clearly. Because she’s the smart one.

Shopping

I know how the packaged tours work, and it’s one of the reasons we’ve never done them. You’re on someone else’s agenda, and there’s always an obligatory stop at some overpriced gift shop. I get it. Everyone makes money from it, and it’s a necessary part of the commercial food chain. I may not like it, but I certainly understand the benefits.

So having been taken to an overpriced gift shop, we purchased overpriced Turkish Delight and olive oil. Which were both very good. Just hideously, unnecessarily expensive. But hey, happy to do our part for the local economy.

Temple Of Artemis

This site no longer has much to say for itself, but the history here is thick. There have been three discrete temples on this site, all of them dedicated to Artemis. The first one is from the Bronze Age, and while there’s no build date for it, we know it was destroyed by a flood in the 7th century BC. So, old.

The second temple was built by Croesus of Lydia (that Croesus, the one who invented money) and completed about 540 BC. That temple was destroyed by an arsonist in 356 BC, because he wanted to be famous. Well, we still know his name, so, well played.

Alexander had offered to rebuild the temple again, but only if his name was above the title and bigger than Artemis’s name. That put the Ephesians in a bind, as they had no interest in angering either Artemis or Alexander. After consulting, they returned to Alexander and declined, saying “it would be improper for one god to build a temple to another.” That actually worked, and Alexander toddled off without killing anyone for their effrontery, leaving the Ephesians to fund the rebuilding of the temple themselves. All in all, the best possible outcome.

Alexander’s interest, the story goes, is that he was born the day the temple burnt, and Artemis was so busy attending the birth and making sure the Great popped out healthy that she didn’t have time to goddess back to Ephesus and save her temple. A classic time management problem.

The final version, whose remains are the current ruins, was the most glorious of all. It was started in 323 BC and stood until those nasty Goths destroyed it as part of their Ephesus campaign. It was a massive building, the largest of the three versions, with more than 127 columns and an overall structure that soared to 60 feet. It was recognized at the time as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. In fact, it’s our first checkmark on our Seven Wonders Bingo Card. Here’s a recreation from Wikipedia.

What’s left today is remarkably less impressive. There’s a field of foundation rubble and a lone column standing melancholy guard. And that’s not even a real column, just random pieces that were found on site and stacked up to the proper height, a faint echo of the temple’s previous grandeur.

Like many such sites, one of the reasons there isn’t much left is because the ruins served as a source of reusable building materials. The Christians stripped the marble from the temple to build a basilica to St. John. Parts of that basilica are still standing.

Why only parts? Because when the muslims showed up and needed to build a mosque, they found a basilica with plenty of material ready to be reused. What goes around comes around.

That was a lovely way to close out the tour. There was some shade from the heat, and we were the only people there. It was a quiet spot in which to contemplate how everything, even a monument to the gods, is eventually little more than rubble. It made me feel small in a very satisfying way.

Shopping!

Tour over, we headed back to our hotel to shower and hug the AC. We set out to find some dinner in Selçuk, and damned if we didn’t walk right into a crafts store. How did that happen?

The pieces were beautiful, but very expensive, and we were sure we were just window shopping on the way to dinner. We are so, so silly. The proprietor was a lovely man, and every piece had a story. It was impossible not to be charmed and seduced. Especially if you’re the easiest marks on the planet.

Pamukkale

Day Three kicked off with a train that ran directly from Selçuk to Denizli, the town closest to Pamukkale. Or it would have run directly if we’d gotten on the train going in the right direction. I asked the station agent if we were on the correct platform for the train to Denizli and he said yes. I’m sure that makes him laugh every single time.

We took the train to the next major station and got the next train headed back. Thankfully, no one was weird about our having a ticket for the earlier train, and it only added about an hour to our arrival time. Worse mistakes have been made. Like touring Ephesus in 108 degree heat.

When we were in Oaxaca we visited Herve el Agua, a stone waterfall that was built up from minute calcium carbonate deposits accreted over thousands of years. When I wrote about it, I’d written something about how it felt to stand somewhere completely unique on the planet. Which prompted fact checking that brought up a similar site halfway across the world. In Turkey’s hinterlands, clearly a place we’d never get.

Well, we have now visited all two of the stone waterfalls on the planet. Honestly, didn’t see that coming.

Here’s the tourist map.

Our hotel was right at the entrance at the bottom right. We took a shuttle from there to the South Gate, went to the thermal pools and then walked down the path through the travertine pools to get back to our hotel. We left at 4:30 and got down the hill for dinner just at sunset, at 8:30. It was still 92 degrees at 8:30. As much as I regret missing them, skipping the ruins at Hierapolis was 100% the right call.

I cannot stress enough how crowded Turkey is. We expect it, to some extent, in Istanbul, in places like the Hagia Sophia and Topkapi Palace. But Pamukkale felt off the beaten path in ways that made the crowds feel like an unpleasant surprise.

The Theater

Pretty much the only part of Hierapolis we saw was the theater, which is just above the thermal pool in the tourist map above. And even that we only saw from a distance, while we walked to the pool.

Cleopatra’s Pool

The thermal pool, or Cleopatra’s Pool, was the main draw in Pamukkale, along with the travertine pools. Although fed from the same hot spring source as the stone pools, the water here is somehow ridiculously transparent. The pool, in which Cleopatra was reported to have actually bathed, is full of fallen Roman columns, capitals, and slabs of marble to sit on and swim around.

So here’s the thing. For literally decades Dorothy has had a picture from a fashion magazine on one of her mood boards. It was of a crystal clear pool with a model sitting on what looked like a submerged Roman column. She couldn’t possibly have told you where it was taken, but it’s been part of her visual wallpaper for forever, and unquestionably an aspirational life goal.

It wasn’t until we’d planned the trip to Ephesus and Pamukkale and we were digging into the details that Dorothy realized that her picture was from Cleopatra’s Pool, and that we were going there. The picture below is the same angle as the picture from her mood board. The only difference is that our model is much prettier than the one in her clipping.

While nominally a hot spring, in 107 degree heat it felt more like a warm spring, cooler than the air. We stayed in it for almost two hours, right to closing time, before making our way to the travertine pools.

Dorothy, as happy as I’ve ever seen her.

The Travertine Pools

Like Hierve el Agua, the travertine fields and pools of Pamukkale have an otherworldly feel, as well as a timelessness born of the millennia it’s taken to create them.

This is the view from our hotel room’s balcony. The pictures above are of these travertine fields. To the right, just outside the picture, is the path that leads down to the town via a descending series of pools. Walls have been built to catch the water and create pools that you can swim in. None of them are very deep, maybe knee depth or a little deeper, although they’re fine for sitting.

Having just spent almost two hours in Cleopatra’s Pool, we didn’t really need to swim anymore. But the path down isn’t a path so much as a slope through the pools themselves. Shoes are forbidden on the travertine, so the walk back is a refreshing splash through warm water. As the evening cooled, all the way down to 92, it was the perfect way to close out our visit.

While the vast travertine fields might seem like a still life, they’re anything but. The landscape is alive with the movement of water, from trickles to torrents.

In our ongoing series, Dorothy Sees Textures, Dorothy sees textures. In this case, Geology × Time ÷ Gravity = Art.

Sunset over the travertine falls.

Back to the hotel for a 10:00 dip in the cool swimming pool, and that put a bow on our trip. We’d get up in the morning, take a bus from Denizli to Izmir, about four hours, and then fly back to Istanbul. We wound up getting back at about midnight, exhausted but happy.

Pamukkale had one last treat for us before we left. That next morning I was up early enough to see the balloons take off at about 6 AM. It’s not like the balloon army in Cappadocia, where we’ll be in a couple of weeks, but it was a lovely sendoff nonetheless.