December Trip Part 4: Ephesus

After Pergamum, Tracey, Olga, and I got on a bus and traveled to Izmir, where we stayed with another Fulbrighter named Deirdre. From Izmir, Olga and I visited the ancient site of Ephesus. This was our last and most impressive stop on our whirlwind tour of ancient Turkey. Ephesus was a huge capital and port city, and was home to the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Ephesus also boasts a cemetery for Roman gladiators, and a huge library and theater. The town was a very important Biblical site, as it was a stop for St. Paul on his conversion tour, possibly where St. John wrote his gospel, and supposedly the last resting place of the Virgin Mary. Olga and I had some of our own divine luck; it had been pouring all day, and it immediately cleared up as we entered the site, and then the rain came right back down literally as we exited the parking lot. 

This is a marker along one of the ancient streets. It is obviously Hermes, what with his winged feet and his snake wand (in the business we call it a caduceus). This is the "Holy Road" where all of the temples stood, so Hermes is probably leading the ram to a sacrifice.

Ephesus has a lot of really amazing monuments, but one of the most remarkable things about this city is how much of the day-to-day ancient city is still preserved: the paved streets, market stalls, public baths and latrines, private homes, temples, government buildings, etc. There are not too many places that make you feel like you are actually walking around in an ancient Roman or Greek city, instead of trying to recreate it all in your mind using a floor-plan. It is kind of creepy, like walking around in a ghost town. The only other place I have felt like that is in Pompeii.

Once again, the combination of old stuff and cats, especially kittens, really cannot be beat.

Olga and I snuck past some "Do Not Enter" signs and crawled into an old hypocaust. Hypocausts are a Roman system of central heating for baths, whereby the floors would be raised by columns and the hot air from a furnace was allowed to pass underneath the floors and behind the walls and up through small chimneys, thus heating the rooms without emitting any smoke into them. This picture is behind the scenes where the workers would have been feeding the furnace in the hypocaust. It was probably a dark, smoke-filled place when it was in use.

The beautiful facade of the Library at Ephesus was reconstructed in the last century, and it is probably the most famous monument from the site.

This is the huge stadium at Ephesus, which could hold something like 25,000 people. It is believed to be one of the largest open-air stadium in the ancient world. There were gladiator matches and theatrical performances. Olga and I were really excited to hear that in this very theater St. Paul incited a riot amongst the Ephesians (to whom he eventually wrote a letter, now a book of the Bible). Apparently all of the ruckus started when the city's silversmiths felt that Paul was talking too much smack about their statues of Artemis, questioning their divine nature. People got into a tizzy and rushed into the theater (Acts 19:23). The described scene sounds hilarious; most people didn't even know why they were there. For about 2 hours the crowd booed Paul and shouted slogans like "Artemis is Great!" Paul wanted to address the crowd, but his homeboys would not let him. The mob showed no signs of letting up until a municipality official had to break it up, saying that if everyone did not knock it off, everyone was going to jail for sedition. Paul was presumably kindly asked to leave as soon as possible. Now THAT is some Biblical history for ya. It sounds weird, but learning that was really special for me, because while I am a practicing Christian, I also have a healthy respect for archaeology. I have been to Israel and Palestine and I have visited holy sites like the Holy Sepulcher and the Church of the Nativity, but on some level those places didn't affect me as much because the skeptical archaeologist inside of me kept on thinking that we can never really know for sure that these were the exact spots where these events happened. But, the theater was as black as white as you could get; this was the theater were hundreds of angry people were practically calling for Paul's blood. Although it was an unpleasant scene, it is the most tangible Biblical site I have ever been to, and that really fed my imagination.

If you want to see any physical trace of the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, you have to go to the Isa Bey mosque, built in the 14th century. Apparently, the crews utilized the nice carved blocks of marble from the nearby ruin in the construction of the mosque. 

Ephesus also has a nice archaeological museum. That is where I saw the very famous statue of the plentifully-breasted Artemis of Ephesus.