Ancient Ruins of Ephesus, Turkey

For our trip to Ephesus,* the Professor hired a private guide for. Melissa ( Melis Basaloglu - her Turkish name means Sweet)was a charming young woman and full of information. We did not choose to go see the home/church where Mary and John supposedly lived their last years after leaving Nazareth following the death of Jesus. Melissa did take us to see one statue though. Probably she could not understand our disinterest in seeing the ruins of the Church built in honor of Mary. Because we chose to miss that part of the usual tour, we had the city of Ephesus* pretty much to ourselves for awhile. It was lovely. Of course, my mind is like a sieve and I remember so little that she told us. The names just came and went. The library was built in honor of a man named Celsus. Apparently there was a discrete tunnel under the road to the brothel across the street if you did not want to read. Please also note the community toilets for the upper class men. And I do mean community. Ugh. I like MY privacy.







I think we enjoyed this morning more than most of our other days. We paid extra to go see the enclosed ruins of the houses climbing up the hillside. They were "completed" and enclosed in 1999. Melissa told us that she was so frightened when she first went there as a child. The metal stairs connect plexiglas platforms so that you can see through the flooring to the ruins below. I didn't think to take a picture of the see-through floors.

It meant a lot to us to see the amphitheatre where Paul spoke to the Ephesians.
By 300 AD Ephesus was a city of about 125,000 people. At that time it was actually a port city on the Aegean. Since then the river has dried up and silt at first turned the port into a swamp and now it is a valley filled with grass and trees.

We docked at a port called Kusadasi and drove for about 20 minute to Ephesus. Kusadasi, Turkey is in the area of Anatolya with the largest city being Izrim.

Later in the afternoon we went shopping in the bazaar. Looking was much more fun than buying. But since my flip flops had died on our last day in San Diego, I replaced those with some leather ones. We'll see how they are. :) The theory is that they were handmade in the area.

The bazaar was large with shops lining several small streets close to the port. While we were shopping we heard a loud pop sound. A moment later a man ran past us with a policeman in pursuit. Following him was another man yelling angrily. It took no time for two more policemen to materialize and in no time the suspect had been captured. All of the people involved were dark haired and could have been Greek. We have no idea what was happening and no idea if the loud pop we heard was a gun being discharged. I am not at all disappointed that we were not in a position to know the answers to any of our questions.









We visited this area on Thursday, October 27th.

* Both of these links have great pictures and information about Ephesus. One has a virtual tour.