Priene, Miletus and Lake Bafa
Trip Start
Aug 11, 2007
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33
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Trip End
Nov 08, 2007
Didyma, Turkey
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Paul and Carol are heading south to meet with friends in Bodrum in 2 days, so the 4 of us decide to travel to these sites together. But before we get out of town, Paul and Carol want to go to the Isa Bey Mosque and a couple of other sites (since they won't be coming back here again)
Isa Bey is just up the road from the hotel. It's a huge 14 century mosque with a lovely walled courtyard. We hadn't realised, but its being restored and is still being used. The Imam was really friendly and welcoming, even though Tina hadn't come appropriately dressed (was in shorts and sleeveless top).
A short walk took us to the ruined hamam (Turkish baths), then back to the hotel.
Carol and Paul wanted to go to the reputed (the Vatican has verified it so guess its real....) last home of the Virgin Mary - supposedly she accompanied the Apostle John here (when Ephesus was at its peak - remember the letters to the Ephesians....) and died in a small house located outside the city. Turned out it was way outside - about 7 kms up into the hills. The cost to get in was extortionate and the tour groups had already started accumulating, so the 2 of us decided to leave Paul and Carol there and head to Priene. We all agreed to meet there and have lunch together. The views from the road down were well worth the drive anyway.
Priene has a magnificent site, high up on a steep hillside overlooking a huge alluvial plain. It used to over look a major harbour, but this has long since silted over - which is why many of these once important cities were mostly abandoned and died. Priene supposedly dates back to 11th century BC, but became a major Hellanistic city in 4th century BC. It was never an important Roman city, so most of its ruins are Hellanistic rather than the mix of both that you see in most ruins around this coast. It is a hugely impressive site. Again a small amount of restoration so you get an impression of the massive temple and other structures, but what strikes you the most with this site is the phenomenal number of column pieces lying all over the ground - this place must have had colonnade after colonnade running through it. The only problem was the heat - it was hot, hot, hot!! And that meant we probably cut our visit shorter than we would otherwise have done.
We arrived back down at the entrance gate to find Paul and Carol's car parked beside ours, so we sat in the shade and waited for them. Sown in the little village we had lunch together, then they left to head south to Bafa Lake, where they were going to stay the night in a small pension.
On our way back to the car, we were waylaid by a nice young man who owned and operated a onyx carving business. He showed us his (very basic) operation and demonstrated a small carving, which he gave to Tina. After the previous day in Sirince, we had made a decision that we needed to spend more with the local economies where we go - not just in the hotels and restaurants, but with the small businesses here - even if all we do is leave the stuff behind in the car. So we were happy to buy a small onyx vase from this man - besides it was very interesting!
Then we headed down the road to Miletus, which in Hellanistic times (remember - 2,500 years ago) was an even more important city than Priene. Again,, it was a city sited on a great harbour, which hs since silted up, so now it stands in the middle of a flat plain a bout 1 km from the present day ocean. It has a magnificent theatre in very good repair - you can still walk though the huge vaulted corridors that lead up to the tiered seating. These theatres are truly amazing - they rival anything we have today in terms of seating capacity (Miletus could seat up to 15,000 - Ephesus 25,000) and ability to manage these numbers of people into and out of their seats efficiently, and they are still standing and largely intact after 2,500 years!!!! Again it was really hot at Miletus - thank God it was dry, we could not have stood it if there had been any humidity! As it was Tina looked as if she had become badly sunburned - although it was just the heat. One thing that we stil can't get over - this country is so full of priceless antiquities that everyone becomes blasé - goats and sheep graze amongst everything, we clamber over what would be treasures in most world museums, we turn our noses up at certain ruins because they are only Byzantine (post 500 AD), not truly historic like the Hellanistic and Roman ruins!!!
On our way through the ruined Faustasian baths, which are huge and must have been magnificent in their day, a man in a dirty suit jacket and pant approached us and offered Tina a sprig of lavender from a bunch he had picked. We thanked him and started to offer some lira, but he stopped us (in much better English than I had expected from someone dressed as poorly as him) and asked for us to take his photo and gave us his address. It was a nice moment!
We were so hot from our wandering around ruins, that we decided to miss Didyma and head instead for Lake Bafa, to see if we could find the Aussies and have a last beer with them. The lake was easy to find - it's huge. The Aussies proved more elusive. However it was really interesting driving around the little local roads and through the tiny villages - it is a dairying area and it was late afternoon and people were bringing the cows home from the fields back to the stalls in the town, plus there was all the local activity going on in the streets, because this is a little backwater that probably only sees Turkish tourists and then only for weekends and over the summer school holidays.
By then it was time to head back to Selcuk - about 90 minutes away and dinner back at the hotel again (it was so good there hasn't been any point in going anywhere else). And who sould turn up to have dinner at the same place but a nice young couple we'd met in Capodoccia. So we had a great dinner together, with far too much Turkish red wine - but definitely a good night!
