Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Ephesus, Turkey

I snapped this shot in the ancient city of Ephesus, Turkey.

Six weeks later, the photo below was taken of Arian's family.

Yep. He's following in my footsteps, that kid of mine!

I can't imagine doing Ephesus with one, two, three little munchkins,
but these dear parents have been blessed with the Spirit of Adventure, in healthy doses.

Actually, they didn't follow me ONLY to Ephesus.

Add . . . Istanbul, Venice, Santorini (Greece) and stops in Croatia.


It's fair to assume that they pushed that stroller over some of the very same cobblestones where I ambled, just weeks ahead of them.

But there's one thing they did which I did NOT do:

Hand-washed, fresh-air dried laundry.
My daughter-in-law Jill is an 1st class laundress
. . . even when she's in 2nd world countries like Croatia, as documented above.

ALL THAT BEING SAID,

I'm going to tell about Ephesus from MY humble viewpoint, no kids in tow.


The facade of the Library of Celsus (captured in the first two photos) is absolutely massive.


Here's just one of several statues located behind the huge columns.
It's considered to be the personification of Virtue - something I plan to work on during my next life.

The library contained 12,000 scrolls which were destroyed in a fire, year 262 A.D.

Not one back-up file.

Can you imagine HOW MUCH KNOWLEDGE WAS LOST . . . and HOW MANY TEARS WERE SHED?

This is gorgeous relief is over the entrance of the Temple of Hadrian.

It's memorialized on the 20 MILLION Turkish Lira banknote.

That's a 20,000,000 Liras on 1piece of paper money. Worth $10, U.S.

And we complain about inflation?

These final shots may not seem like much, but they exhilarate me.

It's a tile floor in a terraced home built by the Romans in the 1st Century B.C.

- at least 20 feet long and 7 or 8 feet tall.


Archeologists uncovered six of these terraced houses over the last five years.
All of them have intricately tiled murals on the floors.

I can't help but speculate about the ancient treasures still awaiting discovery.

As a child, I'd dig deep down in the dirt, hoping to find buried treasures. Didn't you?

Another tiled floor with a mural of a lion - uncovered in 2008.

Really, they are down there. Waiting for us.

3 comments:

Rachel said...

Those are floors???? I am, 'floored'. Amazing.

Jill Lewis said...

Fun post!

K said...

I love the tiled floors. They happened in Egypt, too. I'd love to do something like that on my front hall - but I'm afraid I'm not that artistic or ambitious. I wonder if that stroller also traced the footsteps of the folks who were the receivers of those epistles to the Ephesians? If two thousand years ago, one man paced down that very by-way, puzzling over the letter he held in his hands. Shakespeare wrote a play set in Ephesus. I look at that facade and wonder - how could such a thing survive so long, so tall and thin - and what used to stand behind it and who lived there, doing what? The laundry is so cool.

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