We stayed at a pensione in the touristic coastal town of
Kusadasi, which is laden with accommodation, restaurants, bars and tourist
shops. We can only imagine that in summer the place would be heaving, tourists filling
the streets day and night, lights and noise everywhere, but during our stay it
was little more than a ghost town. Exploring the streets in the evening was
eerie, with an entire maze of streets reserved only for bars, but all boarded
up and lifeless.
From Kusadasi we visited the UNESCO World Heritage Listed
and world renowned ancient city of Efes. Not only is it a large and very well
preserved example of an ancient city of the region, but it is also the home of
the now destroyed Temple of Artemis, one of the original Seven Wonders of the
World. It was certainly the most impressive of all of the similar sites we’ve
visited (Afrodisias, Hierapolis and Troy) and as such the most ridden with
tourists – even far away from peak season it was horrendous. We were
disappointed though that there is no marking of where the Temple of Artemis
used to stand.
Troy was the last of our intended stops before Canakkale and
Gallipoli. This was the least impressive of all the ruined cities we visited,
but the main attraction there is the replica of the Trojan Horse. Although we
were excited to see the horse, and even enter it and explore a little, it was a
pretty tacky replica, not really resembling what we suppose the actual horse
would have looked like. Tom, Tom and I climbed up the stairwell into the horse
and Ben asked a bystander to take a photo of us all together peering out the
windows and then ran up to meet us. Only after we’d left did we check the
photos and realised we’d chosen possibly the worst photographer of all time.
The first photo had us all and the horse in it, but the next three that he took
“for good measure” cut out Tom Unkles in one, Tom Unkles and I in another, and
all three of us bar Ben in another. Perhaps our bystander misunderstood and
thought Ben only wanted a photograph of himself.
Troy was the end of our tour of the Turkish Antiquities,
leaving us at the doorstep of the town of Canakkale and the haunting war site
of Gallipoli. It wasn’t long now until we’d be in geographical Europe.
No comments:
Post a Comment