Pt2 - 4: THE MONA LISA of BERGAMA,

EPHESUS

and

OPERATION TIME MANAGEMENT

The bus to Bergama was another luxury cruiser complete with valet service, so the four hour journey through snow covered villages on the high road to Kücükkuyu and rolling farmlands along the Aegean coast to Dikili then Bergama seemed much shorter.

I kept this to myself at the time, you’re the first person I’ve mentioned it to. The young woman in the Bergama Tourist Office was the living Mona Lisa, a beauty so knuckle-bitingly ethereal as to make hardened philistines weep. I hid the teeth marks with my gloves.

Wasted in such a menial role, La Giaconda with consummate grace found us accommodation at the Pension Böblingen. Run by a Turkish family who’d spent six years in Stuttgart as gastarbeiters, or guest workers, the pension was friendly, warm and comfortable. We passed a long night huddled around the heater in the lounge sharing drinks and conversation with a young English couple, both archaeologists. We agreed to go halves in a cab up to the Acropolis next morning and work our own ways down the steep site.

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The Greco-Roman city of Pergamon was an important cultural centre of the ancient world. The Acropolis sits atop a 1,000ft high mesa, the surrounding settlement spilling down the steep sides to the plain below. By far the most extensive site we’ve visited, it is crowded with imposing architecture and, yes, some serious 2,000 year old plumbing.

I could burn off a page on the various powers who’ve called the city their capital over the centuries, but suffice to say its elevation and proximity to the sea created an enticing strategic target for everyone from Alexander the Great to the Byzantines. It was also a cauldron of cutting edge thought; its ancient library was second only to Alexandria and it was home to philosophers, artists and scientists, including the famous physician Galen. Much of the early archealogical work was undertaken by a succession of German amateurs, followed by more experienced and academic archeaologists who saw to it that the most outstanding pieces from Pergamon ended up back in Berlin. We would hunt these down in the Pergamon Museum in the former East Berlin in a few months time.

The cab dropped us off at the Acropolis right on 10. There was no way we could do the ruins any sort of justice given the limited time we had to explore them, so we relied heavily on the map Mona Lisa gave us yesterday to select the highlights. The Trajaneum is the centrepeice of the Acropolis, a temple dedicated to the Roman Emperor Trajan (AD98-117). Although some of it has been rebuilt the remains of the ancient structure, below a red line marked on the masonry, is still in pretty good nick.

The theatre is simply a gobsmacker. Positively vertiginous, it is terraced into an almost sheer face of the mesa. You enter via a stepped, dog leg tunnel which brings you out behind the very top row of seats; I defy anyone not to gasp at the panorama that greets you as you emerge. The seating, enough for more than 10,000 spectators, recedes steeply away below. The numbers are boggling: 36 metres high (which makes it the steepest theatre in antiquity), 78 rows of seats divided into seven sections in the lower part and six sections in each of the middle and upper parts, at the base of the theatre a 250 metre long by 18 metre wide terrace supported by an immense retaining wall. Imagine fronting up with your little picnic of cheese, bikkies, cold meats and a bladder of wine, the torches taking over as the sun set; the pageantry of a performance must have been something to behold, especially against that breathtaking backdrop.

We came across our archaeologist friends as we poked around the various streets and alleyways on our descent to the modern town below. It was hard to get excited about anything after the majesty of the theatre, but their guidance was helpful in pointing out some of the more important structures and the symbolic significance of the markings which occasionally appeared in the masonry. It was nearly one and raining lightly as we arrived at street level and made our way back to Böblingen.

The Asclepium was an easy stroll from the pension. It’s a self-contained precinct of Pergamon dedicated entirely to healing, so pretty much an ancient health retreat. Here’s where Galen, the Roman world’s most famous physician and personal doctor to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius who allegedly got him hooked on laudanum, practised for many years. With a capacity of more than three and a half thousand patients, the Asclepium had everything you’d expect of a health retreat; spas, mud baths, massage rooms, saunas, a modest Roman theatre, a hospital and a pharmacy dispensing lotions and potions. Much of the infrastructure survives, including the plumbing. Needless to say, the complex required lots of water which came via a system of aquaducts and ceramic pipes from a source in the mountains forty kilometres away. Arriving at the rate of about 30,000 litres a day, it was stored in an elaborate arrangement of cisterns with dual sedimentation tanks and, in the case of the Acropolis, a pressurised lead pipe. Encased in masonry, the networks of ceramic pipes are as functional now as the day they were laid twenty centuries ago. And we can’t find a bloody hotel with reliable hot water and a shower that works properly!

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Ahmet, mine host at Böblingen, put us on the bus in Bergama about 10. No sooner had we stepped off in Izmir than we were shirt fronted by a world class hustler called Osman Nazar. He persuaded us to re-board and go on to Selçuk (Sell-chook) where we were most welcome to stay at his hotel. He would instruct the bus driver to drop us off around the corner from said establishment; his brother would meet us and check us in. While Osman laid it on with a trowel I surveyed the crappy, crowded bus station and decided it wasn’t a bad proposition. From the bus window Izmir had looked like an industrial wasteland and I wasn’t in the mood to go through the ritual of finding the tourist office and hassling for a room for what looked like no good reason. We obediently boarded the bus for Selçuk and by 1:30 were installed in room 205, Otel Nazar. At 2 we were lunching heartily at the Özdamar Café in the centrum and considering our next move.

Travel is a process, often a process of getting into trouble and working your way out of it. Problem-solving is an essential skill and flexibility an absolute necessity. Our plan was always to not have a plan, but the downside of not having a plan lay in the fact we frittered away a lot of downtime waiting around for transport connections, or having to go right out of our way to make connections. Too often we found ourselves with not enough time to do anything but too much time to do nothing. Long term, if we were to make our hire car appointment in Nice on the 2^nd of June we would have to start seriously trimming time wastage right now. There was another important rendezvous coming up in Athens on the 29^th April which had begun to influence our thinking, but more on that soon.

So, Operation Time Management - Step 1: Hire a car in Selçuk. Fortunately, as the tourist hub for nearby Ephesus Selçuk is well served by car hire places, so after lunch we shopped around till we found a deal we could do. Mehmet at Hermes Car Hire offered us a Turkish Fiat Şahin 1600 for $35 a day; while we were umming and ahhing he came in with the clincher – on our return he’d give us a free lift to Kuşadaşi (Koo-sha-darshi) for the ferry to Samos. We negotiated to pick the car up the day after tomorrow with an option to extend from seven days to ten at no extra cost and signed on the dotted line.

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Dolmuş (doll-moosh) sounds like it should be a tasty Turkish snack, but it’s actually a shared cab. Mostly minivans fitted out with extra seating, they run set routes and come and go as they fill up. Selçuk was bathed in clear, brittle sunlight as we hopped a dolmuş for Ephesus and entered through the bottom gate near the Great Theatre around 10. I was agreeably surprised to find it nearly deserted; a distinct advantage of travelling on the cusp of the season, along with more available, cheaper accommodation and generally cheaper expenses all round.

We struck out for the top gate with the object of working our way gradually back down, but got no further than the imposing façade of the Library of Celcus. This is the Ephesus you see on all the postcards, travelogues and promotional stuff. It’s not big by ancient standards, but the design incorporates a few architectural tricks which make it seem more grand than it really is. The outer columns are narrow while the two inner columns are thicker, creating the illusion of width. The columns are also classically tapered to draw the eye upward, complementing the optical width with the illusion of height. I also learned, courtesy of eavesdropping on an English speaking guide, that Celcus introduced the innovation of alabaster windows to protect the fragile papyrus scrolls from direct sunlight. I love that shit.

We disciplined ourselves onward and upward along the ancient, cobbled main street until we reached the top gate, a pretty tame incline over about a kilometre. Here we rested briefly on a couple of marble blocks. To our left were the three red brick arches of the public baths – the frigidarium, the tepidarium and the calidarium. Beside them were the columns which had enclosed the Basilica built by the Emperor Augustus as a stock exchange.

The site suddenly filled with German tourists, the air thick mit der jas und neins of herrs und fraus and guides yelling to be heard. We scurried off through the Odeon, a small theatre seating about 1400 which would’ve been used for both performance and council meetings. I flashed back to the Italian pilgrims in Jerusalem as we tried to outrun the advancing Germans. After the Odeon we found ourselves on the Sacred Ramp which was jammed with traffic, so we detoured along a series of low walls and came down at the Temple of Domitian, the first temple at Ephesus to be dedicated to an emperor.

You can find ancient libraries, basilicas, theatres and temples almost anywhere in this part of the world, but something we found nowhere else and which was, for mine, the most interesting building in the whole Ephesus complex was the public loo. There were no Ladies or Gents or private stalls, just one large open plan unisex facility. The four walls are lined with raised marble benches with keyhole apertures spaced around 600mm apart. About two metres below, a masonry channel continuously flushes with fresh running water. In the middle of the room stands a lavish fountain for ablutions. Once hidden within the walls but now exposed, clay pipes carried hot water from the calidarium in the nearby baths for added comfort. Elegantly simple and efficient.

I read Robert Graves’ I, Claudius and Claudius the God many years ago, so anything to do with the Emperor Claudius (AD41-54) immediately piques my interest. Construction of the Great Theatre at Ephesus began during his reign and continued for seventy-odd years. With a capacity exceeding 30,000 spectators it lives up to its name. The stage, which sadly hasn’t survived, rose to a height of 18 metres in three tiers. A red-capped German tourist guide demonstrated the theatre’s pin-perfect acoustics by treating his group, and all of us lucky enough to be there at the time, to a lilting harmonica rendition of Cat Steven’s Morning Has Broken.

We’d budgeted a full day for Ephesus but it was only a little after one when we let ourselves back out the bottom gate and grabbed the first dolmuş into town. What I like a lot about Ephesus is that you don’t have to go to Berlin to see the most significant artefacts from the site, there’s a museum right here in Selçuk and after coffee we paid it a visit. The displays are artful and informative, especially the priapic God Bes, a little guy with a whopping dick and an even bigger reputation. The many-breasted Ephesian Artemis would’ve had a hell of a time doing a mammogram, no wonder they couldn’t find a bra for her.

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After the museum we dropped in on Mehmet. We weren’t scheduled to pick the car up until tomorrow but we figured if we could drive it out this afternoon we could make an early start on the next leg and knock a few ks off before lunch. We gave the car the once over and took it for a spin up to Mary’s house above Ephesus. A solid if unspectacular car, it was roomy and comfortable to drive. A 4-door with heaps of back seat to throw our junk on, it had a lock-up boot capacious enough for both our packs and then some. It was white like twenty million other cars on the road here, although it was unique in that I was driving it (Tess liked the idea of driving on foreign roads, but when it came down to it she liked the idea of being a passenger even more). The 1600 engine and 5-speed gearbox were made for Turkish roads. Now we’re free to keep our own schedule for the first time on the whole trip.

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From the Quirky Turkey file: Turkish belongs to the same language group as Finnish and Hungarian. All these tribes originated in western Russia and became ethnically isolated after their dispersal.

Next time: On the (Turkish) Road Again…