Turkey - Ephesus

Journal entry: 18 Sep, 2001 Tuesday –Kusadasi  After breakfast,  leave around 9 for drive to Ephesus.  Founding myth is that the Delphi oracle told Andropolus to found a city where there were jumping fish and running pigs.   After many travels, his boat had caught some fish and his party was cooking it ashore one night when one of the fish, not dead yet, leapt off the spit and into some bushes where it frightened a local pig who ran away.  What better omen than that on which to found the major port of Asia Minor?  In any case, we visited a 3rd Wonder of the World in 4 days, the Temple of Artemis.  Like all the others, not much remains, and it takes a lot of imagination to reconstruct the temple from the handful of restored columns.  (Other 2 were sites of Colossus of Rhodes and Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, of which even less remains today).  Behind the temple are a Byzantine Basilica of St. John, and a 7^th c Seljuk castle, along with a later mosque.  Quite a range of history captured in one shot.

Supposedly a shorter day, we estimated we’d be back at the hotel by 2:30, but the walk to Sirince from Ephesus took longer than expected, and we arrived there for lunch after 2:30, with a pottery shop and the folk museum still to come.   Got back to hotel at about 7, and never did get down to the beach this time.  Happened to be reading Freya Stark’s description of her explorations in Lycia in the 1950s “We could follow the route by the lake and just do it; and Araxa, a mere nothing on the map, could be glanced at in the morning as one passed. This was my mistake, for no temptation should ever persuade one, anywhere in the Levant, to try to do more than one thing in one day”

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