Ancient Ephesus

That early bus brought us to the small Turkish town of Selcuk (pronounced Sel-chook), just a few kilometers away from the next area of interest on our voyage. A few of the nice travellers whom we met the nights before in Bodrum had headed out a bit earlier than us, so when we arrived they brought us to their gathering point. It turned out to be a carpet store run by a very friendly Turkish man who had a cat that just had a new litter of little kitties:

They fit in the palm of your hand and they squak instead of meow. The cats are Turkish Van cats or Turkish Kedisi cats or something like that. They are famous because they always have two different colored eyes:

You can kind of see it in the picture above. The mommy cat (above) has one blue and one greenish-yellow eye. She was a sweetheart, and I really don't even like cats.

Anyhow, the man who ran the shop was kind enough to drive us up and over to Ephesus, pretty much the reason why we came to Selcuk to begin with.

Ephesus was an ancient Greek city on the west coast of the region of Anatolia, but I'll spare you all of the history lesson that I learned on Wikipedia. I'll just tell you that each of the pictures are of something famous, as I heard tour guides saying so. You're just going to have to believe me.

This first one is the Temple of Hadrian. It dates to the second century. (!):

Okay, maybe this second picture is of something famous, but it's cool-looking:

This is the Library of Celsus, completed in AD 135. It was ordered to be built by Gaius Julius Aquila to honor his father, Tiberius Julius Celsus. It was built to hold 12,000 scrolls and act as a monumental tomb. Purtill, you can expect no such thing from me:

And this is the theater. It was capable of holding 25,000 spectators who came to watch either drama or gladiator fights:

You pretty much can't help but feel like you're walking through some serious ancient ruins as you wander throughout Ephesus. Who would have thunk?!

I was very happy we made a stop in Ephesus for the day. I think it was the third spot on our journey where we've seen some ancient wonder of the world (the Temple of Artemis, and by "seen" I mean we've been to where they were once erected), which is always cool to say. It was also just a very fascinating excavation in general and interesting to consider it all relative to the ancient ruins that we saw in Rome and Athens.

After spending the day in Ephesus, we hopped on a twenty-one o'clock overnight bus to our last stop in Turkey.