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Published: October 4th 2008
It was a big day today as we had a lot to fit in. We headed out for our private tour of Ephesus nice and early. It was only about 1 hour out of Izmir and in no time at all we were at the Temple of Artemis one of the 7 Ancient Wonders of the World. As you can see from the picture thanks to earth quakes and some good old fashioned looting there is not a lot left of the original 136 columns. It was interesting to see that in one shot you could get pagan temple, Muslim Mosque and Christian Church.
We then headed up into the hills to see the house of Mary. It was here that Mary apparently spent her last days and there is a holy spring that is supposed to cure ills if you drink it. We were going to get a bottle but decided that they were probably just bottling the tap water to sell to Americans.
We then headed back down to fight with the hordes of cruise ship tourists for our tour of Ephesus. Ephesus is the largest "intact" Roman ruin in the world and much of the original
city can still be seen. It was quite iincredible to witness the level of technology that they were employing and infuriating to think of all the time and knowledge that we lost during the dark ages. Graham was muttering several times that if he only had a time machine there were a few people that he would like to punch in the face 😊
There was so much to see that it is hard to sum it up in a few words. Some of the highlights are show in the photos but it is hard to get a feeling of the size of the ruin from them. It was our hottest day in Turkey so far and that coupled the obnoxious of the Cruise tourists meant that we were definitely ready for our lunch at the end.
We headed up into the mountains again to Sirince which is a lovely little Greek village which was originally called "Ugly Village" but was later renamed to "Cute Village" by the mayor of Izmir. We had a lovely lunch of Gozleme and a walk around the village before we headed back home.
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