Ephesus

We took a bus to Selcuk, our home base for exploring Ephesus, an ancient city is fairly well preserved. Selcuk is nice. All the old guys in the city gather at a few spots and play rummikub every evening. Women seem to be absent, which was also the case in Bodrum, come to think of it. Except for the tourists.

Here are the ruins of the temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. It's my second in two days!










It was destroyed and rebuilt a few times. The final time was by a christian saint who said it was evil and pagan. The stones were used to build, among other things, the basilica of St. John here. You can see, in the foundation, sideways greek letters. I imagine these stones were part of the temple originally, but I'm not sure. You can see an upside-down omega and a backwards epsilon here.














This mosque is pretty cool. Here's the courtyard, and Elaina in a headscarf. Women should wear them inside out of respect.















One of the cupboards in the hotel shad some random silly posters. We swapped them around with the ones already hanging, and the horses ended up in the hallway in a prominent position.



















The hotel was pretty sweet. All-you-can-eat barbecue dinner! All-you-can-eat is unheard of over here.

K, on to Ephesus. In Turkey, there are mini-busses called dolmus. They are like shared taxis, and are the cheap easy way to get around. You flag one down, like you're hailing a taxi, and jump in and pay the driver a few lira. They operate on fixed routes. This one was supposed to go to Ephesus, but it let us off about 3 km away. I guess his other passengers, going to the beach, were his priority. Walking there was fine, but the walk back didn't start out very good. Right when we were done looking around the ruins, it unexpectedly started to rain. Then, it started hailing huge chunks of ice. Very strange weather here. We hid under a tree, to see if it would let up. It didn't, so we started running, trying to protect our heads from the ice cubes falling out of the sky. We ended up hitch-hiking back to town with some people from Istanbul, so it ended up being a cool experience.

At ephesus, my favorite thing is the inscriptions on the rocks. There is a combination of greek and latin. The first one here is a milestone. You can see latin on the top and greek on bottom. The roman numeral "V" says where we are along the road.

















































Ephesus was a port town, but is now five miles inland because the river silted up.

Looking down the main road.














Library facade


































Gate of Augustus