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Published: April 10th 2008
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Yesterday we arrived in Selchuk, the nearest modern town to the ancient site of Ephesus. But I'll start with yesterday morning... We went to the sites of ancient Pergamon. They were pretty cool, but very similar to all of the other ancient sites we have seen. Lots of pillars and a huge theater that held 14,000 people. We also went to the Aesclepion, which was the ancient hospital area. That was really neat. You could see all of the places where the patients would stay when they were there, the rooms were pretty well in tact, well for being 2,000 years old they were. After this, we stopped in Izmir en route to Ephesus to eat lunch. Izmir is a city of 2 millions people and it is very modern. It is largest port in Turkey besides Istanbul. We went to a mall for lunch and it was the only shopping area that we have been to that has resembled ones in the US. There was a food court and everything. There was also a store that was kinda like Wal-Mart, which is incredibly weird to see that. The stores to buy normal, everyday things and food are normally very small
here. Equivalent to a small local shop in the US. So this was almost overwhelming because it was so big. It's something you don't realize living in the US... We have all these huge stores that have hundreds of everything to accommodate all of your needs. This was the first store like that that I have seen here. And things were fairly cheap too, well like prices that we would see in the US, so a nice change for us because everything has been so expensive because the Euro is so strong and the dollar is so weak. But the Turkish Lyra is similar to the dollar, so that's nice for these 10 days that we are here. But anyways, then when we got to Ephesus, we went to the ancient church of St. John's basilica. That was really cool because John was there and he is also supposedly buried there as well. It pretty much just looked like the ruins of an old church (which it was) but the Biblical importance makes it so cool and it is just amazing to be in the same place that all of these Biblical people were once in 2,000 years ago. We
also went to the Temple of Artemis, which is one of the seven wonders of the world. So that was really neat that we got to see that. There isn't much left to the temple, but you could tell how huge it was from the ruins. Supposedly it used to be 500 feet by 400 feet with many pillars. Again, now it's just ruins, but it was still really cool to see it. After we left there, we kept driving to Sechuk and arrived here about dinner time. The hotel that we are in is amazing! There is a pool and a work out place and the meals are awesome! So I'm kinda glad that we are here for three nights even though we are out and about during the day seeing the sites. So this morning we left pretty early to fit in another long day of sight seeing. We started out with the ancient site of Ephesus. That was amazing! And the most incredible thing is that they have only been excavating for 100 years and they think they have only uncovered one-fifth of the ancient city. And right now it is huge! I can't believe what it
will be like when it is all uncovered. I would love to come back and see it and see how much more has been excavated. There are so many things there that are so intact. I think the most impressive is the library. The front pillars are still standing and there is so much detail in them. Another thing that was really cool was the theater. It can hold 25,000 people which is incredible. The site, and specifically the theater, is mentioned in Acts 19 of the Bible (somewhere around verse 25) and we read that passage in the theater, so that was really cool reading about it when we were actually there. Another impressive thing there were the slope houses. They were the houses of the upper-class and they were amazing. They are so well preserved and some of the paintings are still fully in color which is so cool because they are almost 2,000 years old. The houses were multiple rooms and you could completely see that from the ruins which was so cool. After seeing all these ruins we went to the place where the Virgin Mary supposedly lived and died. It is now and church, but
it used to be a house. The way it was discovered is similar to the church on the island of Tinos. A nun, in Germany, had multiple visions of this area (she had never been to Turkey and let alone Ephesus) which were incredibly accurate and had visions of the Virgin Mary's house where she died. So some archaeologists decided to act upon these visions and sure enough, they found a house. This was pretty recently too, like late 1800s or early 1900s. Another cool thing about that church/house is that there was a wildfire a while ago here, but it stopped about 10m away from the house/church and it was not damaged at all, whereas all around it trees and everything was destroyed. Anyways, after that we went to a leather store that sold leather jackets that were made in the area. They actually put on a little fashion show for us which was kinda cool, not quite what we expected when we heard we were going to a leather store. They had a lot of nice stuff, but I didn't buy anything. Some people bought jackets though, but I didn't really want one and I didn't want to
drop a few hundred dollars on one. But it was still fun looking and trying them on and the fashion show was kinda cool. They had Turkish music for it and everything and then just a few people modeling jackets. After that we came back to the hotel and tomorrow we are leaving early again for another long, but (hopefully) great day of sight-seeing!
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