Painting: The collonades at the Ephesus, Turkey ruins

click to enlarge

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Two of the seven wonders of the [ancient] world: The Colossus of Rhodes and The Temple of Artemic

On our trip to Turkey, and Greece, we visited the sites of two of the "wonders of the ancient world [1]." The first, was the Colossus of Rhodes, and the second, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus.

The Colossus of Rhodes was a colossal statue of the Greek god Helios, built on the Greek island of Rhodes between 292 and 280 BC. Before its destruction, the Colossus of Rhodes stood over 107 feet high, which made it one of, if not the tallest, statues in the world. The statue stood for only 54 years until Rhodes was hit by an earthquake in 226 BC. Ptolemy III offered to pay to rebuild it, but the Delphic oracle made the Rhodians believe they had offended Helios, and they never restored the statue. The bronze scrap from the statue was sold off eventually, possibly in the 7th century by invading Arabs. By the time we stood on its site, there was nothing left but the legends.

The temple of Artemis has a little more to show for itself, but not much. The column you see in this photo I took is it. The site of the temple was rediscovered in 1869 by an expedition sponsored by the British Museum. A few further fragments of sculpture were found during the 1904-06 excavations and were assembled and displayed in the "Ephesus Room" of the British Museum. The single remaining column is constructed of dissociated fragments discovered on the site.

Colossus of Rhodes, from a 16th-century engraving by Martin Heemskerck, part of his series of the Seven Wonders of the World. This is a fanciful depiction, based on only the loosest of historical descriptions.

[1] The wonders of the ancient world are:

Great Pyramid of Giza
Hanging Gardens of Babylon
Statue of Zeus at Olympia
Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
Mausoleum of Maussollos at Halicarnassus
Colossus of Rhodes
Lighthouse of Alexandria

Wonders of the medieval world (I've seen two - The colosseum in Rome, and the Tower of Pisa):

Stonehenge
Colosseum
Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa
Great Wall of China
Porcelain Tower of Nanjing
Hagia Sophia
Leaning Tower of Pisa

USA Today's "new" seven wonders (plus a viewer voted for eighth). Of these wonders, well, I've used the internet, and flown over the North Pole three times in the last three months:

1
Potala Palace
Lhasa, Tibet, China
2
Old City of Jerusalem
Jerusalem
3
Polar ice caps
Polar regions
4
Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument
Hawaii, United States
5
Internet
N/A
6
Mayan ruins
Yucatán Peninsula, México
7
Great Migration of Serengeti and Masai Mara
Tanzania and Kenya
8
Grand Canyon (viewer-chosen eighth wonder)
Arizona, United States
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Turkey in Ruins

By Keelin Curran
All This Is That History and Archeology Editor






Turkey is in ruins, and fully alive at the same time. I love ruins, and did not fully realize when we selected this destination for our trip exactly how much in heaven I would be here tramping around the churches, columns and caves.


A salvaged frieze from the Temple of Afrodesias


Aphrodite (aka Venus) herself, from the Afrodesia Musem of statuary, friezes, etc. Click to enlarge.

In college, one of my sidelines was Greek archeology. I even took a few semesters of Ancient Greek. On one of our earlier trips to Greece, I tracked down a just-discovered (1979) Minoan temple site destroyed by an earthquake in 18th century BC—Anemospilia—see http://www.uk.digiserve.com/mentor/minoan/anemospilia.htm based on the xeroxed information my professor at Hunter College (whose name I don’t recall, but who was an acolyte of renowned Greek archeologist Emily Vermeule) had handed out to the class.


The gate to the Temple of Aphrodite. Click to enlarge.


A close-up of the gates. Click to enlarge.

I travelled by bus, and tramped around the hills near Iraklion to find it. It was not much—just three rooms you could imagine based on the stone foundations, but they had done sacrifices there that brought the place to life—and death--as this passage describes:


Del Brummet ponders a statue of a philosopher in the excellent Afrodesias Museum. Click to enlarge.

“The west room is, in many ways, the most interesting. . . . [t]his room was used for blood sacrifices. Uniquely in Crete, three skeletons were found in the room. Two of these people, a man and a woman, had been killed by the earthquake and resulting fire. Another male skeleton was also found in the room. This body was found lying on an altar. A knife was resting on the skeleton. The feet had been tied and it has been argued that the young man had been sacrificed and the blood drained from his body. If so, it might well have been his blood in the vessel found in the antechamber next to the skeleton. It is most likely that the normal victims of sacrifice would have been bulls, but in the face of seismic activity which threatened the whole community, it may have been considered necessary to make a human sacrifice.”


Colum Brummet emerges from the gladiator's tunnel at the vast 30,000 seat stadium at Afrodessia. Click to enlarge.

This is about as dramatic as it gets in the ruins world, but well illustrates the open-ended speculation (along with tolerance for sifting and digging) required to do this work.


The 30,000 seat stadium & gladaiatorial venue at Afrodesia.

Anyway, since that 1982 trip to Anemospilia, I haven’t been able to indulge my ruins interest until the last few weeks. The family has been most accommodating in patiently going along on trips to see Agia Sofia in Istanbul, (not a ruin, an amazing, living space from 6th C BC but still a lasagna of one culture on top of another, as ruins often are), the cave dwellings and churches of Goreme, and more recently, the ruins riot that is Ephesus, and most dreamily, the ruins of Afrodisias.

I barely know where to start in talking about these experiences. Goreme and Cappadocia were the most mysterious and humbling. These cave refuges of troglodytes and early Christians were often built at great heights above the current ground level—or far below ground. How did they get up there? How did they tolerate long seasons underground? You have a sense about how scared these people must have been, much of the time, threatened by Hittites and Romans et al. The spaces are so small. They would have known everything about each other—a contrast from our life of screens and large dwellings. And the simple, repetitive and sometimes beautiful scenes of the life of Christ in these churches give one the sense of how much reinforcement is necessary to start a religion from the ground up.


Jack in the Bouletarian theatre that served as the ruling council's meeting place as well as a theatre and performance space.

Then, Ephesus and Afrodisias. These two cities give a living sense of Roman life, in its beauty and brutality. The museum near Ephesus had a riveting exhibit on gladiator culture in ancient Rome, complete with an analysis of the wounds suffered by gladiators based on the skeletal evidence. This culture existed among the beautiful marble buildings and statues; blood and circuses and Ridley Scott/Russell Crowe. Yet you can not help but compare the artistry born of imperial ego, politics, wealth and will in these urban spaces with those we inhabit and find our world poverty-stricken in comparison.

At Afrodisias, up until the last few decades, the town of Gehre was built right on top of Afrodisias. Townspeople built there modest houses braced by the bottoms of roman columns, and crushed their grapes in roman baths. The Temple of Aphrodite, unreconstructed, was a field for their livestock. Seeing the pictures of Gehre (since moved a few kilometers, sadly, to allow the excavation) gives one the sense of how we are just the latest layer in this earth lasagna.

Okay, I will stop. Thanks to you All This Is That readers for indulging me in this Turkey travelogue. We have more ruins to go, so life is very, very good for that reason and all the others that make travel so great.
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Poem: Moslems vs. Nazarenes vs. Pagans

1.
Moslem shepherds steal ınto the strange caves wıth paintıngs
And scratch the eyes out and throw stones at the heads
of figures on the frescoes.

2.
The Crusades.

3.
The Christians charge in
And carve crosses into the foreheads
Of fallen statues in the Roman ruins

Like somehow that will make up for
Whatever they did or didn't belıeve

4.
A lot of us don't belıeve this
But they were all people just like you and me.
And ın some strange way
They were just all tryıng to save each other.
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Ephesus: my favorite ruins of all time

The Theatre at Ephesus - clıck to enlarge

İ'll write about this more, when I get 'net access and some free time again,m but Ephesus ıs by far the most impressive ruins I have ever seen ın Europe or Asıa. Here ıs one quick photograph of the theatre. It held 25,000 people. It stıll does. We were hoping to be able to catch a performance there (can you ımagine how cool ıt would be to see a play a play by Sophocles Aeschylus there?).

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The Selime Monastery and the İlhara Gorge

OK....the internet here in our hotel is sketchy to say the least, complıcated by the Turkish keyboard, whıch ıs dıfferent enough that it took me half an hour to figure out whıch keys to hit to log in...

The İlhara Gorge

The Ilhara Gorge - The family hiked with our young friend Abdullah through the Ilhara gorge. My knee was killing me (since in remission...I thınk I torqued it ın that run of eıght mıle walkıng days up and down the steep steps and hılls of Istanbul...ıt seems good for more abuse now), so I waited for them at the end, where I wrote a poem (see: http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2008/06/poem-in-greme.html), drew two pictures, and drank three glasses of chai.

Claıre and Jack drinkıng chai on the creek at the end of the gorge

Inside the sanctuary

We also vısıted another church in the hills,(The Selime monastery). Yes, another cave church, but this was the most elaborate and complex of any we visited in Gorem (and we visited at least six or seven). The church itself was far more archıtectural and elaborate that the cruder ones we'd see hacked out of tufa ın the Underground City. The sanctuary was a very tall barrel vaulted structure with two domed apses on a T ın the front. The frescoes were again paınted by schooled artists, and the overall finish seemed to indicate that the people who buılt this ıntended ıt to be more permanent.

The outside of the Monastery

Claire and Abdullah ın a room ın a cave ın the monastery

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