We were up way too early in order to catch the hotel shuttle to Ephesus. Fortunately, breakfast was served from seven in the morning... blech! Not breakfast -- breakfast was excellent -- but seven am sucked a little.
We were showered, dressed breakfasted, and ready to go by just after 8. Erdal, not so much. He was still flitting around in his usual convivial but harried fashion and we began to think we wouldn't make it to Ephesus before the 8:30 opening. At about 25 after, we were piled into the van with another guest and Erdal drove us (quickly) to the upper gate at Ephesus. It wasn't very far away. We landed in front of the ticket booth at about 8:31, paid our 10L each and walked in.
The top part of the Ionian ruin of Ephesus is a big flat area with the occasional pile of rubble and it was already, at one minute after opening, populated by a half-dozen scattered tour groups, each with a rapidly speaking guide. Steve and I took one look at each other, and actually jogged past the groups down the Curetes Way. Once we were out of earshot, we slowed to a brisk walk and admired a few of the wondrous things we saw on the way down, starting with the monumental marble slabs we were walking on. Amazing! The Temple of Hadrian and the gate of Hercules were covered in beautiful carved friezes with distinct and lovely figures. Over to the left were some exquisite mosaic floors, with an agreeable kedi sprawled artistically all over them. Beyond the mosaics was the covered area which we knew housed the Roman houses which you had to pay extra to enter.
We were joined by yet another dog, which seemed to be par for the course for our touristic wanderings à la köpek.
As fascinating as the sights were, we were intent on one thing and one thing only -- the Library of Celsus. We had read that this library, with its astonishing carved facade, had once rivaled the Library of Alexandria in Egypt. We had further read, though I can't recall where, that out of jealousy (and the economic necessity of maintaining it's position of largest library and therefore the attractor of the largest number of scholarly tourists), the Egyptians stopped providing papyrus to Ephesus. Not to be stymied by a lack of paper, the Ephesians looked around, thinking 'well, we've got to have something to write on that we don't have to import' and saw nothing but sheep and lambs and kids. In a fit of enterprise, they made vellum out of the hides of that walking paper, and invented a new kind of writing surface. Yay Ephesians!
The library was astonishing. It was magnificent. It was superlative-failing.
It stood at the end of a little courtyard at the corner of the Curetes Way and the Marble Street, flanked by the Gates of Augustus (spectacular in any other company, but not so amazing here). The steps to the library seemed so much smaller from the street, but when you walked down the little ramp and approached from below, the grandeur loomed, literally, overhead. After admiring from the bug's perspective, we walked up the stairs to the area behind the columns, and marveled at the statues of the Sophia (wisdom), Arete (virtue), Episteme (knowledge) and Ennoia (insight). These aren't the real statues, of course -- those are long lost to the museum -- but they were still lovely... though only Sophia retained her face... ok, most of her face.
We had the Library to ourselves for over ten minutes. Marvel if you like -- apparently this is unheard of. Everyone we spoke to who had visited Ephesus had the common complaint of it having been crawling with people and detracting their enjoyment (not to mention their photos). We shared it only with one little köpek and a family of photogenic and shy kedi. It was amazing, and we felt ourselves hushed and reverent with our good fortune.
When the silence began to rumble with the distant tourists, we decided to make tracks. Walking briskly down the Marble Street towards the theatre, we entered silence again. Our dog had left for greener... marble slabs, I guess, and we entered the theatre truly alone. The theatre was as astonishing as the library in its scope: Wikipedia tells me it is thought to be the largest ancient. open-air theatre in the world, holding some 44,000 people, but what does Wikipedia know? It made the theatre at Miletus look like the one at Priene. The upper reaches weren't even restored and it was still humongous. The giant blue crane to the side of the theatre was even dwarfed. It was nice to see the Turks haven't rested on their laurels at Ephesus (which one would think is magnificent enough) and are continuing to restore and preserve.
We walked as far as we could up into the nosebleeds and sat and admired and amazed and astonished. Well, that's not quite right grammar, but we were too overcome by the enormity of where we were and what we were so casually sitting on to be terribly fussed by language. From where we sat, we could see right down the Harbour Street which unsurprisingly used to lead to a harbour on the Mediterranean. As at Miletus, the sea was nowhere in sight, having been silted up by that Büyük Menderes river. The very fact that so much time had passed since the building of this theatre that the sea had been pushed back so far you couldn't even see it in the distance... amazing.
After another ten minutes or so, some tourists dribbled in -- first a pair of nice, older Australians who took our picture and didn't complain too much about our garbled Macbeth which we whispered from the stage ("ah, life is but a walking candle... no, life is a tale, full of sound and fury, told by an idiot... no, that's not right either."). They even took our picture, and we took theirs.
By this time, the crowds had spilled into the theatre and we no longer had Ephesus to ourselves. It was time to start over. We walked slowly back up to the top to the ticket booth, and then meandered, in a river-like unhurry, drifting through shoals of tour groups and eddying against the banks of marble.
Occasionally we would listen in to the tour guides, speaking a hundred different languages, herding their charges along the marble steps to the next big thing. "This, this is the statue of Hermes, you can tell by the wings on his sandals. This, this is the..." and they and their crowd would be gone in a cloud of sunscreen and multilingual Ephesus guidebooks. Some guides held up professional-looking sticks with numbers on them, some held up fancy canes, and one was holding up a bright pink umbrella as a beacon for his group of tourists.
Sometimes we gleaned interesting tidbits from the tour guides, though we stayed away from the ones that glared at us moochers (though we had the advantage of being able to follow the French guides tolerably well, and Steve could get by in Spanish too).
We saw the room of public toilets: a large room with marble seats with convenient cutouts so that the... contents... could fall down into the sewer below. According to one tour guide, the Roman nobles would send their slaves to the toilets early in the morning for the express purpose of warming up the cold marble before the delicate Roman bottoms had to sit on them for their morning ablutions. Italians!
We found the footprint carved into a flagstone on the Marble Street which pointed the way to the brothel; we saw kedi all over the flagstones, we wandered up the streets up the hill and, in the end, declined to join the throngs in the Roman Houses you had to pay extra for. We decided to head to the exit, and the bathroom, which was a short walk on a path that met the Harbour Street.
Since Steve wanted to go explore Harbour Street a little more, we agreed to meet outside the 'bookstore' -- one of the shops in the souvenir gauntlet outside the exit -- where we had been assured they would call the Hotel Bella to come pick us up. As this would give me a little Steve-less quality time in a shopping area, I was ok with this arrangement.
The bookstore was easy to find, and they called the hotel with no problem, though it would take them some 30 minutes to come get us. I looked at the trinkets on offer, and was quite taken with some leather-bound books, every one different from the other. I had chatted a little with one of the store-minders who was quite impressed that I had learned my Turkish from a book. Actually, he had done what everyone seemed to do: speak to me in Turkish, to which I would respond with one of my few dozen words, and they would grin hugely and unleash a torrent of words, none of which I knew. Fortunately, I could say "hayır, küçük Turkish" (no, little Turkish) while making the international 'little' symbol with my thumb and forefinger. They would smile and laugh and usually play charades with me at that point.
The store minder chatted with me in English a bit as I wandered around, but when I asked kaça? about the books, he told me "too much". Pardon me? He told me he knew a wholesaler who supplied the shop and I should go there and buy the books. Part of me was thinking "yeah, right. A wholesaler." We had figured out by then that every Turk has a brother who is one or more of a) a carpet salesman, b) a hotel owner or c) a wholesaler. The other, more avaricious, part of me was thinking "really -- a wholesaler?" When I asked how much cheaper the wholesaler would sell for, the storekeeper said "maybe half. Maybe less." and gave me the Ubiquitous Turkish Shrug. Since nothing is more curiosity-making than the UTS, especially in combination with 'half price', I accepted the business card the shopkeeper handed me that did, in fact, say "wholesaler" right on it.
The store minder chatted with me in English a bit as I wandered around, but when I asked kaça? about the books, he told me "too much". Pardon me? He told me he knew a wholesaler who supplied the shop and I should go there and buy the books. Part of me was thinking "yeah, right. A wholesaler." We had figured out by then that every Turk has a brother who is one or more of a) a carpet salesman, b) a hotel owner or c) a wholesaler. The other, more avaricious, part of me was thinking "really -- a wholesaler?" When I asked how much cheaper the wholesaler would sell for, the storekeeper said "maybe half. Maybe less." and gave me the Ubiquitous Turkish Shrug. Since nothing is more curiosity-making than the UTS, especially in combination with 'half price', I accepted the business card the shopkeeper handed me that did, in fact, say "wholesaler" right on it.
I looked through a jewellery store where several American tourists were trying to explain to the shopkeeper that they wanted something thinner, but what they really wanted was something cheaper... I waded into the fray with my Rough Guide phrasebook in hand, which was almost useful. I say almost because the Americans didn't really want to be helped and, for all their bringing out racks of bracelets, the Turks didn't really want to help them. After not too long of being caught in the middle, I slunk out of the shop and back to the bookstore.
About that time, Steve showed up from his marbly wanderings and we braved the rest of the tourist-trapping tout tunnel and escaped into the parking lot. If Erdal hadn't been coming to pick us up in some ten minutes, I would have been deeply tempted to take a ride on a horse-drawn phaeton to the Seven Sleepers (or around the garbage dump, if it had been in a horse-drawn phaeton!). But Erdal was coming, and there was no garbage dump in sight, and in any case it was a pile of money. I took lots of pictures instead.
After not too long, Erdal showed up, looking slightly harried, and told us in no uncertain terms that he was going to take us to the Seven Sleepers where we didn't have to climb the hill to look at the grotto, but we did have to have lunch at the most famous gözleme place in Selçuk. The L.P. agreed that the gözleme place was indeed famous, but we would have taken Erdal's recommendation anyway. Plus, we weren't inclined to do any stupid tourist moves that would add to his harried-ness, and we got the impression that turning down these most famous gözleme would had been a stupid tourist move.
Boy, were we glad we weren't stupid tourists. Well, we might have been more or less stupid tourists, we couldn't quite tell. We were led into a dim, warm room where there were three women sitting, making gözleme. One rolled out the dough on a round table, one filled the flattened dough with bits & pieces from buckets sitting on the divan beside her, and then rolled ou the dough again with a little dowel... which she then used to pass the dough to the woman sitting in front of the open fire, which contained a convex metal griddle on which the gözleme were spread to cook, liberally rubbed in butter. YUM!
We picked from a grimy menu as Erdal gave the young boy on the 'till' (box of lira) strict instructions. I would like to think the instructions were to make us particularly delicious gözleme, but really he was probably arranging his commission for bringing us there. We picked a spiced meat (etli), a cheese and spinich (peynir and something I don't know) and, best of all, a banana and chocolate gözleme that we were very excited about.
Instead of joining the other tourists under the arbour-shaded terrace, we (stupidly? it was pretty warm in there) decided to remain and sit on little divans in the dining room, and watch the gözleme-making. It was fascinating and we took some not-very-surreptitious photos of the process.
The etli was prepared first, and it was very, very good. Çok nefis! The cheese and spinach, even better. The banana and chocolate (Nutella, really) was absolutely out of this world. Unbelievable. Justly famous, my ass -- this stuff was manna from heaven. It was sublime.
It was also less than 20L for three gözleme and two vişne suyu. Sublimer!
Eventually we were able to tear ourselves away from the table. Crammed with gözleme and suyu, we staggered out of the dining room and down to the end of the road, where Erdal had promised to collect us. Going up to the Seven Sleepers was not a high priority, I'm afraid. Not only had we seen plenty of necropi (?) but we would have had to hire guides to roll us up the hill.
After an uneventful trip back to the Hotel Bella, we decided to explore the lower town some more and maybe find this "wholesaler". With a slightly cynical air, we went through the 'pedestrian only' area to the train tracks and turned right at the bridge, which took us through a poorer-looking residential area. We wondered how many tourists made it into this area, which was really only a few blocks of the touristic area -- given the way the little kids stopped in the street to watch us walk past, I'm guessing not many!
We found the building indicated on the business card, but it looked just like a house, with a little orange tree on the cement patio in front. Giving each other a Ubiquitous Canadian Shrug, we walked up the stairs and knocked on the door. There was a greeting in Turkish (we guessed "come in") so we went in with a cheerful "merhaba". Inside, it was definitely NOT a house: metal shelves ran in rows, high as the ceiling, leaving narrow aisles. As our eyes adjusted to the relative dimness, we saw the shelves were covered in piles of the books, beads, and various crap... um, souvenirs, that we had seen in every tourist-gauntlet at every exit of every historical sight we had seen. Let me be clear though -- the general quality of Turkish trinkets is quite high; you don't see the same kind of kitsch-y plastic throwaway stuff that you do in North American tourist places. This is a good thing, as we went to Turkey with the intention of doing all our Christmas shopping there.
We turned to look at the man behind the wooden desk in the corner who had been chatting with a standing man. They both looked surprised to see us. The desk-man asked quite calmly if he could help us; we told him we had been told he was a wholesaler and did he sell to the public? With a wide smile, he replied simply "what do you want to buy?" Everything!
After some tea, some candy, some polite chit-chat and a great big cookie, we were ready to get shopping and Zubir -- the wholesaler -- was happy to satisfy our every shopping whim. After loading up on a bag of 50 evil eye charms, plus some bigger ones, plus some of those cunning leather books, plus some bracelets, plus a bunch of other cra... souvenirs, Steve and Zubir were chatting about the other things we wanted to buy on our trip, one of which was to be an oud (or ud) or Turkish lute. Zubir, the consummate salesman, told us he had one, but it was at his other warehouse, which he would take us to in the van, if we would only come this way?
Steve and I climbed into the van, fortified with oranges which Zubir had picked from his front-garden tree, thinking that we were craaaaazy to be getting into a van with a strange man in a strange town, in a strange country... you get the picture. The thing is that in Turkey, this felt normal. Even being driven at ridiculous speeds through the industrial part of Selçuk (who knew there was an industrial area of Selçuk?) seemed entirely normal, as did arriving at a rather more warehouse-y looking warehouse and being led inside to box chaos and climbing up and over some box chaos to get to the railing-less stairs and climbing up... where Steve tried an oud that was, regrettably, only good for the wall. We did find, however, three tiny metal doumbeks that would be perfect presents for the boys (though perhaps Mike and Laura would kill us in our sleep on Christmas night).
Zubir was genuinely sorry that the oud wasn't for Steve, not because he missed the sale, but because I think it would have given him great pleasure to be of assistance. In any case, we were able to do the bulk of our trinket-shopping in Selçuk for about half the price as it would have been had we attempted to buy those things at a proper tourist store. We were well pleased, though also completely laden down by our purchases and we knew that the next purchase would have to be a stupidly large suitcase to haul our loot in. We felt a tiny bit like we were cheating by purchasing all our eyes in one fell swoop rather than haggling over each and every one, but really it was better to get all of our shopping for 'basic' presents over at the once, rather than waste Steve's limited shopping attention on the less interesting items.
We walked back towards the hotel with our huge bags of stuff, stuffed ourselves with candy of every description and about ten glasses of tea. All that walking and eating and shopping had worn us out so we decided to have a little nap before dinner.
Emerging from the hotel an hour later, we decided we needed to replenish our funds that had been seriously and unexpectedly depleted at Zubir's place. The first bank machine we tried (the red one) didn't work. Even though we had selected English as the prompt language, when the error came up, it was in Turkish. We had no idea what the problem was, though we knew that Selçuk in particular and Turkey in general were having internet problems due to a strike. Maybe that was it? Or maybe it didn't like our Vancity Credit Union card?
We tried a few more times and were about to give up and try another machine when a young Turkish woman got up from her cafe table a few yards away and approached us, offering to help read from the screen. She was very respectful and stood back with her back to us while we entered our code, then came and read the screen. Fortunately, it indicated it was a connection problem, rather than a card problem. We were thinking we'd either try Steve's Royal Bank card, or the Vancity card on another machine (or both) when the woman did a very unexpected thing: she offered, if we were short, to loan us money until morning when maybe we could get our card to work. I swear it's a wonder all four of our eyes didn't fall out of our heads to land on the cobbles underfoot! To say we were surprised would be a profound understatement.
After taking a moment to get our wits about us (we were that surprised), we told her not to worry as we would be fine: we still had some lira, and we had another card, and we could use another machine -- but teşekkür ederim very much anyway! She made us promise that we would come find her if we couldn't get any money out, and we did so.
A word here: I'm sure all readers are wondering what her agenda was and what she hoped to get out of offering us some money. Well, she didn't work at a carpet store, she didn't run a restaurant, and she didn't set off our spidey-senses in any way whatsoever. Steve has travelled a lot, and I'm naturally suspicious, and neither of us felt at all as if she was looking to dupe, scam or otherwise take advantage of our situation. Just like jumping into a battered van with Zubir earlier that day, the strange seemed perfectly natural everywhere in Turkey and neverso more than in the wonderful little town of Selçuk.
At the next machine, we were fine, and both cards worked perfectly. We took out our combined maximum (some 1,000L) as we needed to pay up for the hotel, car and carpets the next day. In fact, since the limit on my account (where most of our money was deposited) was some 400L per day, we needed to contact the bank to get the limit raised for a day. We walked back up to the hill to the Bella (only a few hundred feet), used the laptop and someone's purloined wireless signal to look up the phone number for Vancity, and then use Skype to call them. They sounded a little surprised that we would be calling from Turkey... on a computer... but made the arrangements that we could take out another 1,000L during a four-hour window. We scampered back to the working bank machine and took out our cash, put it in our pockets with its friends, and went for dinner.
Yes, in our pockets. After the first two days of being slowly strangled by my passport money-belt-on-a-string, and feeling perfectly safe and ridiculous to even think of being robbed, I gave up on the money-belt altogether. I put our passports, extra id and plane tickets in the under-flap pocket of my MEC purse, which had nice secure wide webbing straps, and simply carried my money in my pockets. Steve would sometimes wear his money belt and, if we were on the bus or in a strange place, we'd put the plane tickets and bulk of the cash in there. Most of the time, we just didn't worry.
Unlike other places Steve had travelled, where poverty and therefore personal crime are rampant, Turkey is a safe, safe country. We saw poor people for sure, but no-one was starving. With the abundance of fresh produce, no one seemed to go hungry in Turkey. Maybe that's why the incidence of personal crime is among the lowest in the European-ish countries. In any case, we were lighthearted and worry-free as we walked down the street to the Tat Cafe, which had a mention in the LP and a prominent outdoor area on the main drag of the pedestrian area to recommend it.
It was rather amusing to be greeted at the Tat by a man who obviously thought he knew me -- I was puzzled, until he revealed that he also owned a store across the street from the cafe where I had poked around the previous day after the market. We had chatted briefly in the now-typical "where did you learn your Turkish / where are you from / how do you like Turkey?" kind of way. Now he greeted us warmly and told Steve how lucky a man he was to have a polite and well-spoken wife and other harmless flattery. I was mostly flattered that he had recalled my face among the thousands of tourists he must see in a season.
We sat down for dinner at an table on the edge of the street and finally ordered the dish called Imam Baldiri or 'the imam fainted', an Ottoman dish made of stuffed, roasted eggplant that was apparently so good that the first taster (an imam, obviously) fainted dead away from the pleasure of it. We may not have felt all swoony, but we were suddenly disappointed that we had only one more week in Turkey in which to eat this amazing dish. Why oh why didn't we order it sooner? We had missed so many opportunities to eat Imam Baldiri... so sad! Along with some nice haydari and an excellent Iskender Kebap (sliced, roasted beef served in a tomato sauce on top of bread cubes), we made a nice light meal of it. I couldn't believe how much we had eaten that day. Whew!
After dinner and chatting with our host, we peeled ourselves off the chairs and staggered, replete, up to brightly-lit stone street. There were still cafes open, and shops of every kind, and even at ten in the evening on a Sunday, Selçuk felt warm and welcoming.
Bed was a comfortable and welcome relief after our busy day, and all we could think was that we didn't want to leave Selçuk the next day.
