Ephesus - grand Roman site
Trip Start
Sep 01, 2011
1
18
Trip End
Oct 27, 2011
Selcuk, Izmir, Turkey
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
The last leg of our journey had been on a minibus. After we got on, a local family loaded it down with at least five huge rice bags of luggage. It's nice to see people with more luggage than we have. There was some consternation as the toothless old lady wouldn't sit next to us. She was eventually persuaded to (although why someone else couldn't have taken that place is a mystery). We suspect that she did not want to sit in the same row as a male, but that the rule was waived as I was alien and so didn't count, but it might have been about something else entirely. In any event we were clearly the subject of much discussion, which it was a shame not to understand. It was touching to see how devotedly she was looked after by her grandson. We thought that we might have misunderstand things when the van turned off the road and down a dirt track but it was just a short detour to drop some people off and we were soon back on real roads.
The next morning we had hoped to be taken to Ephesus by our pension, as we had been promised was possible. We had heard of the hilarious local law prohibiting pensions from doing this but were told that it could happen. Of course the next morning things were different. The owner said that it could not happen. One can't blame him of course but we were annoyed anyway. So we decided to walk to the site later in the day and start with the local museum. We were determined not to reward the local transport folk for getting their absurd law passed.
One of the interesting things about Ephesus was that it was the centre of a cult of Artemis, goddess of fertility who is generally depicted with an enormous cluster of ovoid objects on her body. These are frequently described as breasts but in no way resemble them and ancient sculptors were not at all shy on this front so it seems perfectly clear to me that they are actually eggs, which fits the fertility function quite as well as would breasts. As is often the case we were as taken by some of the more routine items as with the grander ones. They had on display a glass plate now almost 2000 years old, a chair uncannily resembling a folding camp chair, a marble backgammon board and a gigantic tablet stating the elaborate customs laws. It was interesting to see a little figure of Artemis adjusting her sandal, recalling the famous figure of Athena doing the same thing from the Parthenon. I am very curious about this: did ancient goddesses have trouble with their shoes? Was it a deliberate mimicry of a celebrated work? Is it a recurrent theme through ancient sculpture?
The larger than life figures of Artemis are extremely impressive, right down to her slender toes. The gigantic fragments of Domitian's sculpture are also impressive but seem somehow sinister. The statue is thought to have been 7 metres high.
The walk to Ephesus took longer than we expected and we were quite worried as after almost an hour we stopped seeing sign posts to it and we could not figure out how we had gone wrong. A horse and cart taxi told as to keep going and we were relieved when a tour bus offered us a lift, although it turned out to save us only 200 metres. We had thought that the walk was about a kilometre and a half. But we still had plenty of time so we thought that we would walk slowly up to the top of the site and then read everything as we came back, but we soon noticed that we were actually going down hill. Some careful map reading later led us to conclude that we had somehow ended up at the top of the site - the bit furthest from town, which partly explains our slow trip - so we decided to go back and read everything carefully after all.
It is a pretty neat site and quite well preserved for a ruin on account of having been abandoned when the harbour silted up. The most spectacular building remaining is the grand library, but there are plenty of other remnants. The public toilets were a revelation: free and with musicians playing to cover the noise. This in a country that cannot provide free public toilets anywhere (and using one can cost more than the price of a loaf of bread or the same price as two ice-creams). I think it is truly a more complete city than any we saw in Greece or Italy although particular sites there have isolated buildings in better state of preservation. Interestingly the iconic Artemisian "egg" shape is incorporated in most buildings for example as decoration on the lintels. Of course the Library of Celsus is the obvious highlight as the best preserved single structure.
M.
