Ephesus

March 6, 2007

Selcuk, Turkey

Today was another early morning, but a very short bus ride down to the site of Ephesus, a Hellenistic-turned-Roman settlement next to a now silted up harbor. We entered the site and immediately entered the bouleterion, a smaller version of the larger theater located on the other side of the hill on the city. Most of the bouleterion has been reconstructed, but it shows evidence of clear Roman construction, including the hallmark elements of a sunken half circle orchestra and the liberal use of arched vaulting. The day was a little bit cool but the sky was a perfect clear blue and the site was huge and inviting.

The whole day has turned into kind of a blur, but I will try to recap some of the highlights.

One of the first stops on our tour was the huge theater, located on the other side of the hill from the bouleterion, and had the largest capacity that we have seen so far, of about 25,000 and contains not one, but two diazoma and opens onto a wonderful view of the broad ocean boulevard that now leads not to the water, but to a low lying silted plain. From this perch we could see the whole of the ancient city in its bare-boned columns spread out below us, a multitude of bath complexes and monuments and statue bases. At the end of one of the wide roads in the theater was the huge ornamental façade of a library, in three tiers with alternating levels and a multitude of niches for the placement of statues.

We stopped by the public latrine, which still contained rows of stone seats with holes incised in them for the disposal of public waste. Each of us found a seat upon these cold stone thrones and listened to the lecture. We wandered throughout the entire site, stepping inside of a massive covered building that contained the remains of a bunch of houses for the well to do. We walked over a raised glass floor, set so that we could be directly over the mosaics without actually destroying them, and surveyed the houses from our artificially elevated position. The walls still existed in some areas, with frescoes lining the parts of the walls in what was once a brilliant shade of red, now reduced to a subtle hue of ruddy brown and faded beige. The images of the gods still could be seen in some areas, portraits framed in red lines of blush cheeked deities.

We really enjoyed wandering around the site, and saw so much that it is difficult even tonight to recall all of it. The day was warming up and we spent the better part of the morning walking throughout the whole town, even making our way down the wide ocean boulevard and back past the stadium and out a shady wooded lane and back to the bus for lunch.

Lunch was spectacular. We had an all you can eat buffet in the remote region of Ephesus that contained some of the best cooked vegetables I have ever had, and I cannot name a single vegetable that I recognized besides potatoes. There were stuffed grape leaves and a spicy type of meatball and all kinds of greens and a spicy yogurt that reminded me very much of tzatziki. We all stuffed ourselves and were even further delighted to be served a delicious dessert of fried bread and honey, which topped off the meal splendidly.

After lunch it was a short bus ride to the Ephesis museum, which contained a good deal of Greek and Roman statues, including a statue of Artemis in an eastern style, standing rigidly upright with relief statues of lions and various heraldic beasts parading around her clothing. There was also a very interesting exhibit on gladiators, showing a number of reliefs of gladiators in battle gear. There were also some skeletons on display that had a reconstruction of sustained battle wounds and manner of death. These gladiators were beaten up pretty badly, evidence shows signs of multiple ill-healed injuries, and the ways in which they died varied from spear wounds in the shoulder to trident wounds to the head. Ouch. I am interested to learn more about the Roman attitudes toward gladiators. I know enough from my paper to know that attitudes were pretty ambivalent because of the gladiators slave-yet-professional status, admired for their skill in the show ring and abhorred for their fights for money. I wonder if the same attitude might be held toward professional athletes today? The separation of collegiate and professional atheletics is often attributed to the key difference of finances, and the complaints filed against large well funded schools and their “benefits” offered the players that play for them amount to charges of professionalism. According to Donald J Kyle, who I read for my research paper, the Greeks were the perfect embodiment of sport, defined as “good, civilized, amateur, and manly” while the Roman spectacles, such as gladiator events, were considered spectacle: “vulgar, professional, decadent, and humanizing.” The same terminology often applies to the discourse surrounding collegiate and professional athletics, leading me to wonder—are professional athletes the gladiators of today? Or has all sport coopted this sense of spectacle from the Roman world? Or perhaps, and judging by my earlier statements regarding the events at Olympus, the divisions between sport and spectacle are not as clear as we would like them to be.

I drew some of the statuary I found in the museum until it was time to board the bus, for our stop at the Artemesion. For one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the Artemision was a bit disappointing. One pillar, bolstered at the bottom by concrete drums, stands to the sky, while the rest of the facility is covered in water. Very anticlimactic. We didn’t stay long at the site because there was not much to see.

Our last stop was at the church of St John, a temple of the cruciform type made up of grey stones and columns and capped with brick arches. The whole structure is now unroofed, and we wandered among the ruins, stopping at the baptistery, which contained a set of stairs down to a pool and another set of stair ascending out of it. This was apparently how the early Christians baptized themselves. We did not spend much time here except to wander and take pictures, where we could stand at the corner of the church and view a mosque with two huge domes below us, and farther than that, the lone pathetic statue of the Artemesion in the distance.

Then it was back to the bus and the hotel. We had returned early that day, and sick of being cooped up in the hotel Ambrice Jess and I ventured out into the town, which only consisted of a few streets and a shopping area. The first promising store we stopped in contained a lively shopkeeper named Julia who told us that she was the only woman in the town to own a shop, and that she was proud to make it on her own and asked us questions about where we were from and where we were going. Then she fixed us some delicious lemon tea that she served in some small clear handle-less cups, and allowed us to wander around the shop. Many of the objects were fascinating, and incredibly intricate. There were silver earrings with complicated filigree and dangling parts that hung low beneath our ears. Bright blue evil eyes hung all over the place, ornate porcelain bowls lined the floors, and colorful rugs and pillows were stacked everywhere. Ambrice and I and Jess decided that this would be a great place to buy some souveneirs, and before we knew it, the woman’s charisma and helpfulness had won us over. We all left the shop with some purchases, and worries about how we were ever going to fit everything in the suitcase. It was one of the most positive shopping experiences I think I have had so far on the trip.

Turning the corner we ran into a carpet shop, where the helpful (but not pushy—I will consider no one to be pushy after Egypt) merchant pulled out all the stops and showed us these inricate mirrored and tasseled and gilded table cloths, pillowcases and cashmere scarves. The fabric was rich and sensuous and shiny and we flipped through the folds and folds of the cloth before I decided on a pillowcase and Ambrice bargained the seller down to a very cheap price on a gold beaded tunic.

We quickly walked back to the hotel for another three course meal of fish-with-the-head-still-on, lentil soup, and a dessert of a baked and sweetened apple, before finally settling in for the night. I had a lot of reading to do, and resumed some Procopius before deciding that reading was NOT going to happen for the night and caught up on my blog. Which I really enjoy more anyway. There is always time on the bus tomorrow.