Efes (Ephesus)

The shish kebab I had the night before was called çöp şiş. Çöp means rubbish in Turkish. Why would Turks call it rubbish kebab? Was it because the meat was poor quality, offal or what? Well many years later I found the explanation in an article by a Lonely Planet author. Çöp originally meant chaff, the wheat stalks left over after threshing. Later when Turkey became a consumer society the word was recycled to mean rubbish. So çöp şiş actually meant chaff kebab, meat pieces skewered with what looked like a wheat stalk, then barbecued. Interesting how the language retained a trace of an agrarian past.

The street outside was quite noisy at dawn with scooters and tractors driving past. It actually quietened down around 0700. After breakfast, while the day was still cool, I walked the 2 km along the pleasant Dr. Yayla roadside path to the archeological site of Efes, formerly the ancient Greek city of Ephesus. Most people know it from the apostle Paul's epistle to the Ephesians.

If you were expecting a guided photographic tour of the site, unfortunately this blog page is not it. There are far better web pages than mine for that. After all those years, the name of only one building sticks in my mind. I will simply record my impressions on that day.

Even that early in the day, there were scores of buses at the entrance. I could detect from the hubbub of conversations that most of the tour groups were USAn, with the occasional German or Dutch group, and a few Turks.

The last sites I had visited with stones this ancient were in Greece. It's just a site full of ancient ruins. An untrained visitor would have no insight into the city's history. It made me realise how much we know today of ancient history comes from writings by historians and other preserved documents.

Did this arch remain standing all those centuries?

This is the only building whose name I remember, The Library of Celsus.

Ancient columns.

Nature has reclaimed a lot.

Wikipedia tells me that this is the Temple of Hadrian.


I was glad I visited Efes, but I decided that it would be the last visit to ancient ruins this trip.

A view from high ground near the end of the main street of the site and the groups of visitors.


By this time the day was hot and I was glad I had started early, so I wandered out of the site and sought a dolmuş back to Selçuk. Finding none I started walking back. One turned up on the way. A Chinese tourist couple near me were reluctant to join the dolmuş, but I told them the price was fair. Maybe they were scared by the mention of thousands of TL.


I left my things at the hotel and visited the museum. There were artifacts from the site. Unfortunately they were not well labelled so the displays were not as informative as they could be.


In the hot afternoon I hid in my room with the Turkish Daily News. Movie review of Angela's Ashes: A family growing up in New York during the depression. What!? (It was Ireland.) The Australian comedy Me Myself I seemed to be doing well at the Turkish box office. Perhaps it appealed to young female professionals. TDN also warned readers to phone cinemas before setting out as films are often cancelled due to "technical reasons".


After dinner I went up to the terrace with my purchase of 8 postcards and wrote them up in view of the fortress. Another 24 or so to go. Those were the days when I made lists of recipients. Nowadays I blog, what else? A water truck came through spraying the road, probably to keep the dust down. I had recognised various people in the small town. The Chinese couple in the dolmuş I saw again while dining. A USAn couple at the Library of Celsus I had seen before in Bursa. Time to move on and head for the coast: sun, sand and all that.