Ephesus, Selcuk, and Sirence

The Four of Us at Ephesus

Our second day in Selcuk was much more pleasant than the first.  In the morning, at our new hotel, we ran into Jill and Nikita, the South Africans from our cruise.  We decided to abandon our planned tour--due to our crummy experience the day before--and explore Ephesus on our own, with the South Africans.

Our first stop was at the Ephesus museum, in Selcuk.  It was pretty neat.  By far the two highlights were a giant statue of Artemis, from the fertility cult in Ephesus and a small effigy of Priapus, the son of Aphrodite and Dionysus, a minor god of fertility who, cursed with impotence in the womb by Hera, eventually became depicted with an absurdly large erection.  Priapus is the namesake of priapism, the medical condition of having a prolonged erection, often warned about on the label of Viagra.

After the museum, the four of us headed up to Ephesus.  It was so crowded!  We found out the evening before that there were a few cruise ships that had just landed and would be in Ephesus the same day we would be, but there was nothing we could do about it.  The ancient city is one of the coolest set of ruins I've been to.  With my trusty guidebook and the absurd amount of material I read before the trip, I played tour guide for the day.  There were more than a few interesting places in Ephesus.  We saw the men's latrine, which was even used by those with private bathrooms so that they could engage in social discussions and gossip (Giving rise to the eventual English vernacular expression of "shooting the s**t").  There were also a number of temples to former emperors.  It was a great honor for an emperor to raise to the level of cult worship and have a temple built in his honor.  One notable temple was the ornate Hadrian's Temple--Hadrian being the namesake of Hadrian's Wall in England, the most northern point the Roman Empire ever reached.

The Library of Celsus

One of the coolest things we saw in Ephesus were the terrace houses.  These are a collection of around 6 houses that have been excavated, are in very good shape, and are gradually being put back together to show what they would have looked like in their full glory.  This restoration consists of Turks working day and night to take shards of earth and paintings to assemble the original artwork, in its original condition, and restore it to its original location.  The houses were unbelievably well preserved and some of the mosaic work on the floor was incredible.  One of the houses even had its own personal basilica, where the owner received his guests!  While the Terrace houses were cool, the clear highlight was the Library of Celsus, the most famous sight in the ancient city.  The facade of the ruined library, once the third-largest in the world, is breathtaking.

The Four of Us at Lunch

From Ephesus, we went back to Selcuk for lunch.  On the recommendation of my guidebook, we stopped by a place near the bus station that supposedly has the best kofta, Turkish meatballs, in the region.  It definitely lived up to its reputation.  It was really cool because you walked up to a giant case of meats, picked what you wanted, then they cooked them and brought them out to you.  The meatballs were fantastic, as were the fried zucchini patties we had.  The last sight we took in on our Selcuk tour was the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.  While there is but one column left of the temple's original 127, in its glory it was the largest temple in the world, eclipsing even the Parthenon in Athens.

After a quick rest back at the hotel, we rallied and caught a bus to the nearby town of Sirence, often referred to as a Turkish Tuscany.  It's a small town with many shops, one jewelry shop even produced most of the jewelry used in the movie Troy.  But what drew us to the town is that it's known for its fruit wines.  The town produces a variety of fruit wines: sour cherry, blackberry, strawberry, raspberry, melon, pomegranate, etc.  Some of the wines were great while others tasted more like cough syrup than wine.  We walked up and down the streets for about two hours, stopping in the various shops to have free shot-sized samples of their wines.  It was a lot of fun.