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{joomplu:1184}A Slice of Turkey with Aphrodite too

Looking back at blank stares from death masks, or marble torsos that might have had their own personal trainers, or pantheons of gods embellished on sarcophagi are familiar experiences to visitors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These artifacts, transplanted from distant places, introduce us to earlier worlds that predate blogging and tweeting, yet the people captured in marble are so lifelike.

Come to think of it, how did they survive without some kind of handheld device?
Their handheld devices were often swords. Their communications took place in the agora, or market square. Wealthy bodies were scrubbed with sea salt and massaged with oil and there were games galore in the coliseum or amphitheater. Libraries were constructed and enemies held at bay – at least in Ephesus, where our guide relayed that at one time the harbor lapped the city’s shore.
Who these people were and where and how they lived are facts that may be considered just ‘interesting’ on a day at the museum. The details are filed away until that day you step foot in a country where the facts come to life, perhaps in a land in Asia Minor where visitors can stroll for hours on acres of the detritus of once-thriving, long-extant civilizations.
Once known as Anatolia, today’s Turkey takes pride in showcasing its best-preserved ancient magnificence that is Ephesus, a city that, during the time of the Roman Empire, was the largest city outside of Rome. For hundreds of years before the Romans, Ephesus was a city that accommodated more tribes than there’s room to list, so the Greeks will have to suffice. The early Christians founded a church here, too. Ripe pomegranates still dribble onto a tumult of stone near the corner of the agora where important people made their detailed preparations to be well turned out in diaphanous garments that always fell – at least for sculpting purposes – into seamless folds when their statues were created.  
{joomplu:1183}Whoever was ‘last in’ when playing the capture game often then got to play the slave game – sort of like allowing illegal immigrants to stick around because there’s a lot of work to be done that nobody else wants to do. The slave game also helped to assure that these populations always had fresh gene pools as they tended to sacrifice their own fertile pop-star virgins who were then expected to move on to appease whatever god was the issue of the day while those still breathing were cultivated on earth for consumption by their leaders.
Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, had a town named after her. A drive of several hours from Ephesus reveals her ruins called Aphrodisias.  A small-but-elegant museum, sarcophagi strewn about the grass and a near-intact stadium and temple pilasters still basking in the Mediterranean light stab the heart as surely as Cupid’s arrows. (This god of love would be at home here, too, as the Romans carried on after the Greeks.)  
A third site is Pamukkale / Hierapolis, which on descent to the Antalya Airport at first glance resembles a large frozen waterfall but turns out to be a virtual cliff not of ice but of the stone travertine, formed over millennia from thermal springs that guests can plunge into after walking miles atop the cliff on a plain in the ancient city called Hierapolis.  A former Roman bath was turned into the Hierapolis Archaeology Museum with artifacts from the immediate site and archeological finds from surrounding areas. This region also constitutes a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
{joomplu:1196}The intensity of thrusting oneself into 500 BC and trying to imagine the lives of neighbors lounging about didn’t bode well for shopping because somehow the modern material world did not equate with the goats and sheep, olive groves, austere mountains and the Mediterranean, all still singing their own songs in this ancient land. However, on a brisk scramble through Antalya’s old city, a virtual hillside fortification above the sea, there was evidence of a potential to indulge in a sybaritic style befitting the ancients. Which means there are always many reasons to return to experiences that begin to whet the curiosity.
For more information on how to travel in well-informed style to this small part of a cordial country, visit www.asiatranspacific.com.

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