Ionic Cities

April 22, 2015

The road from Kusadasi to Bodrum winds for 120 miles around Turkish mountains and coastline. Three important Ionic cities dot the route and would break our trip into four segments. Our guide for this trip, as well as in Bodrum, would be Teoman Erdogan, who is from the same Black Sea area as the Turkey’s President Erdogan, but is not related to him in any way. Teo is 59 years old, almost six feet tall, lean and muscular, with short balding grey hair. I asked Teo why the cities are called Ionic, since the Ionian Sea is on the other side of Greece, and the cities are near the Aegean Sea. He explained that people from the Ionian part of Greece had settled these cities, and so they are called Ionic.

Our first stop was Priene, which is a long walk uphill on concrete paving stones, and then up some steep and uneven stone steps. The city overlooks the valley below, which in ancient times would have been a bay of the Aegean City. A large cliff of rock dominates the north side of the city, the sea and cliff combining to make the city eminently defensible. The city was founded in about 350 B.C. and was still under construction sixteen years later when Alexander the Great relieved the city of its Persian rulers. Priene was a thriving port city, but the founders were not very far-sighted, because the Meander River (whence we get the English word meander), was slowly silting in the bay. Priene was abandoned before the Romans could rebuild it in their style, so it retains the simpler, Greek plan. One of the first things we encountered was a bouleterion, or council chamber, in which ten rows of sets face a small altar decorated with bull’s heads and laurel leaves. Abby commented that felt a bit like the British House of Commons, with rows of seats facing each other, the better to debate.

Near the council chamber is the Temple of Athena, designed by Pytheos, architect of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Five of the temple’s columns have been restored. Just to the northeast is the theater that could seat 6500 people. Mark and I enjoyed sitting in one of the five honorary seats around the theater and pretending to be Hellenistic nobility. The front feet of these seats were carved to look like lion’s feet. As we looked down upon the bath, which was placed lower down at what was then the water level, we noticed cattle grazing among the ruins. We felt like figures in a poem written by Lord Byron.

We drove across the former bay, now farmland devoted primarily to cotton, and parked before the great theater of Miletus, which could seat 25,000 people. The first settlers were Minoans from Crete who arrived between 1400 and 1200 B.C. The Ionians arrived 200 years later, massacred the men and then married their widows. The philosopher Thales was born here in the 6^th century B.C. and, according to Fodors, “. . . calculated the height of the pyramids of Giza . . . and coined the phrase, ‘Know thyself.’” Paul the apostle preached here at least twice and is believed to have delivered his letter to a delegation from Ephesus here. He was no longer welcome in that city because the silversmiths didn’t want him ruining their lucrative trade in making Artemis statues.

The Miletus theater is Roman in style, meaning that it had stalls for animals and raised seating to protect the spectators from the animals. Abby stayed at the lower level, while the rest of us climbed the stairs into the vomitoria, the vaulted passages that lead to the seats and remind some people of a modern sports arena. Like most theaters of this period, it is built into the side of a hill, so we walked out the back of the theater onto a hillside covered with variegated thistle that overlooks the ruined, and today partially flooded, city of Miletus. We saw the Delphinion, a sanctuary dedicated to Apollo and, as we left the city, a modern copy of an armless statue of Hera, with a Turkish symbol around its neck that wards off the evil eye.

We moved on to Didyma (Didim in Turkish) which has a spectacular Temple of Apollo. Fodors says that this temple is as grand in scale as the Parthenon, with 124 well-preserved columns. The temple was started in 300 BC, was under construction for almost 500 years, and was never completed. You don’t have to look too hard to see signs of unfinished construction, columns whose flutes were not completed for example. There was a spring at this site, which became associated with an oracle, second in importance only to the one at Delphi. Abby pointed out the meander key and floral pattern around the base of one of the columns. A giant head of Medusa, which Fodor calls the twin of the one in Istanbul’s Basilica Cistern, is posted at the edge of the site, perhaps to ward off those with evil intent.

There was a surprising amount of wildlife in the temple – a tortoise crawled among the ruins, similar to one we had seen at the Basilica of John in Selcuk, and the well had hundreds of tadpoles in it, fighting over the sunlight.

We ate lunch at a restaurant across the street from the temple. I had “meatballs,” which has become one of my favorites. Evren had described them as containing just ground beef, onions, parsley and some cumin. Delicious! Sarah ordered a chicken curry, which was even better. Abby and Mark each had tomato soup and bread. Abby ordered a banana-and-honey dessert, which we all shared. There were a couple of large, green frog statues outside the restaurant, which seemed incongruous with the classical surroundings. We then piled into the van for the remaining 100-kilometer drive to Bodrum.

El Vino Boutique Hotel in Bodrum is a charming little oasis with a small kidney-shaped swimming pool that has a stone bottom. When we checked into our rooms, we found our beds strewn with yellow daisies. We enjoyed a delicious dinner in the hotel restaurant, from which we had a great view of Bodrum castle, the harbor, and the Greek island of Kos in the distance. I had sea trout, which reminded me of Minnesota lake trout. Two filets were bound together with a grape leaf, with red and yellow peppers in between, all resting on a bed of mashed potatoes. Abby had lamb chops on a bed of lentils, and Sarah and Mark each has sea bass served with a marine vegetable. Supper was accompanied by wine made on site. For me, this was our best meal of the trip. We fell asleep early after the long drive.