Gym's Ramblings: Kusadasi and Ephesus

We left Haifa, Israel on the evening of May 7^th, 2011 and steamed north for the next 36 hours. We were headed to a scheduled one-day engagement in Kusadasi, Turkey. When we woke on May 9^th, 2011, we were docked at what turned out to be one of the nicest cruise ship terminals since Hong Kong. Kusadasi is a beautiful place as you can see from our photographs and the Turks are for the most part pretty nice people. The place is modern and clean and I did not see anything that looked remotely like the Turkey that I saw in Midnight Express. There was this one truck driver though who almost ran me over when I‘d lapsed into a daze on my way across the street. He kind of looked like one of the prison guards in that movie. Other than him though, everyone was really nice.

We signed up for a half-day tour of Ephesus and it was a really beautiful day to hike through those ancient ruins. Now, Mrs. Gym and I had no idea what to expect on this tour, but I think we both agree that it ranks right up there with Petra and Masada in terms of the wow factor. I’m sure that when you look at the pictures you will see what I mean.

Now just because Ephesus is not a well known today, doesn’t mean it has always been that way. Mrs. Gym and I walked the same streets as Alexander the Great who liberated the city from the Persians in 334 B.C. Later during the Roman period under Emperor Augustus, Ephesus became the second largest city in the Roman Empire and the entire world, behind only Rome. It is said that during the Roman Era, the population at the peak may have been as high as 500,000 inhabitants. And that’s not all. St. Paul went there after the death of Christ to spread the word of the Lord. He wrote 1 Corinthians there and later wrote the epistle to the Ephesians while he was in prison in Rome. Finally and most importantly, Ephesus is said to have been the last home of Mary, mother of Jesus. So some big names hung out in Ephesus.

The amazing thing about Ephesus is that so much has survived intact. The one obvious main reason for this is that unlike most other ancient cities like Rome, Athens, Jerusalem and others, no modern city was built on top of the ruins. Ephesus was saved because this former port on the Mediterranean Sea is now 2 kilometers from the sea. What? Is Gym mad? How can this be? Well I was there and I drove in from the coast past a number of sugar cane and banana fields that are between the beach and the old port city. What has happened is the Cayster River silted up the old port and has continued to dump silt into the sea creating new land through the centuries at the rate of about 100 meters per century. This meant that Ephesus could no longer function as a port city. The river is still dumping prodigious amounts of silt and continues to build some nice flat fertile land for future generations of farmers.

After our tour of Ephesus we returned to Kusadasi. In the afternoon we went to a little tea party in town. The Turkish custom is to offer tea to visitors and we were told that you should not refuse these offers. We were with a few shipmates just minding our own business when we got caught up in a sales pitch on the street and were swept into the basement of a cavernous Turkish Carpet warehouse store. Fearing a Midnight Express-like incident, we accepted the offer of tea and listened to the pitch. I have never heard a slicker salesman in my life. He was immaculately dressed in a custom-made suit and spoke English with a ‘moneyed’ east coast accent. I don’t know how we got out of there without at least a 500 knot-per square inch runner for the front hall. Thank God that Mrs. Gym was able to out-charm the Turkish slickster and give us time to slip out of through the back door. We ran all the way to the ship.

That evening we left the Aegean coast and started west towards Athens. That would be our last night of a very long cruise.