Mary Slept Here

Guess it’s time to write some more about our Turkey trip.

I thought it would be strange to go to Turkey and stay in one city the whole time, so I looked for other destinations. I didn’t come up with a whole lot. My understanding is that in Turkey, the main options are Istanbul, the Mediterranean coast, and Cappadocia. After that, I think you find yourself confronted with sites featuring ancient ruins you probably won’t want to travel to see.

Cappadocia is a weird place full of peaks left behind by erosion. The peaks are very small, like 4 stories high. In ancient times, people decided to dig caves in them, so now there is a sort of cave city there. Tourists go and walk around in the caves, and they also, for reasons unknown to me, hire hot air balloons and look at the rock formations from above.

The rock formations are very ugly. No one but me seems to have noticed that.

I didn’t think Cappadocia was worth a long trip from Istanbul, but I mentioned it to Rhodah anyway, and, like me, she did not see the appeal.

I decided to look into Ephesus, which is near the seaside town of Kusadasi. Ephesus used to be a very rich port, but silt kept piling up until it was miles from the sea, and then a malarial swamp developed, killing the inhabitants. In the 290’s BC, a ruler, Lysimachus, built a new city farther toward the coast, and he pressured the Ephesians until they moved there. The temple of Diana stayed behind, at the original location. Built by Alexander in the 320’s, the temple we know today is older than the ruined city Rhodah and I visited.

Obviously, Ephesus is where Paul’s Ephesians lived, so it’s of interest to Christians. John is also believed to have lived there, except for a spell in Patmos, after which he returned. There are Catholic stories claiming Mary lived there, but they have no basis in fact.

The ruins of ancient Ephesus are pretty darn ruined due to Turkey’s earthquake problem and the ancients’ unfamiliarity with rebar. A lot of the old buildings there have been re-erected. Archaeologists found things lying on the ground, and they stacked them back on top of each other. Some buildings are in better shape. There is a group of homes called the terrace houses, and while the houses have no roofs, a lot of the walls and floors are still in place, though cracked and distorted.

Ephesus had a library of 12,000 scrolls, and the walls and facade are standing, but the facade was actually found in pieces on the ground. The facade of the building, which is known as the Library of Celsus, is what you will usually see first if you Google photos of Ephesus.

The library was not there when John and Paul were there, so if you go to Ephesus, don’t get all soppy about looking at the same building they saw.

Ephesus was the site of the famous temple of Diana, the remains of which are pretty far from the excavated town. Basically, the temple consists of a column which has clearly been re-erected from random segments found on the ground. You can see the outline of the foundation, and there are a lot of stones, but for centuries, people looted the site in order to avoid quarrying, so there isn’t a lot there.

The temple sits maybe 15 feet below the surrounding area. It appears that silt accumulated and buried it, and archaeologists only dug out the temple’s immediate surroundings. Because it’s so low, it fills in with water in the rainy season.

What I’m getting at is this: it’s not much of a sight. If you go to Turkey, don’t feel bad about skipping it.

We were shown something puzzling in the main town, and I seem to be the only one who understands why it’s puzzling. Here and there, the stone was marked with pizza-shaped graffiti. I mean foot-wide circles divided into eight parts by straight lines. We were told a mark like that was called an ichthus, and that Christians made them.

To me, an ichthus is what we Americans call a Jesus fish. The word “ichthus” means “fish.” In Turkey, it’s different.

The vertical line represents an iota, which, I guess, is the first letter of “ichthus.” The two diagonal lines make a chi, which must be the second letter. The horizontal line turns the circle into a theta. The circle is an omicron, I think. Somehow or other, you can also get a sigma out of the symbol. Iota, chi, theta, omicron, sigma. Ichthus. I am not looking this up, so feel free to correct me.

I just checked, and there is no omicron. There is an upsilon, which looks like a Y.

We were told that Christians used graffiti to let each other know they were around, without risking imprisonment and execution. The guide said the ichthus signs were secret messages.

Okay, here is the puzzling part: how do you make a big, complex symbol on stone in the middle of a city without attracting attention?

If I knelt to make an ichthus on a marble paving stone in the middle of a street, I would make a lot of noise for quite a while, and people would notice me kneeling there. You can’t do it without getting caught. Doing it at night wouldn’t help, because people would hear it and yell at you for keeping them awake. Ancient times were very quiet, so carving stone in the middle of a street would be noticed.

I hate to say it this way, but something is fishy here.

That was not deliberate. My puns are better than that.

I mistakenly thought Rhodah and I paid for a “private” tour of Ephesus and related sites, but it turned out we were part of a four-person group. The others were a Romanian woman who married a Turk, and her half-Turkish son. She spoke no English, even though we specified English when we paid, and neither did her son. Because of this, we had to hear everything twice.

They were very nice, but it was disturbing to see this woman and her adolescent son smoking cigarettes together whenever they got the chance.

It reminded me of Eastern Kentucky.

We couldn’t get an Ephesus tour without a tour of Mary’s House. This is ridiculous shrine up on a mountain. The claim is that John looked after Mary there. There is no tomb because Hellenistic churches (Orthodox and Catholic) have a baseless teaching that Mary was assumed into heaven, and also because, hello, Mary never lived there. She lived in Jerusalem.

The “house” is about the size of a large garden shed. We had to wait to be allowed to pass through, because they only let groups of 4 or fewer in. We walked into a closet-sized room with an altar, and then there was another room about the same size, and then we were out. I looked around to make sure we hadn’t gone the wrong way.

If Mary’s House had an air conditioner, a 5,000-BTU unit would be more than ample. It’s that small.

Outside, they had a row of taps where people could collect water from a holy spring. I was glad to see this, because my hands were a little grimy.

Christians and even Muslims go to the house and hope to receive miracles. They drink the water and rub it on themselves. I just wanted to get road filth off my hands.

I don’t like fake religious sites, and I don’t like seeing people kiss and rub stones or drink plain old spring water, hoping God will finally notice them and help them out. If your church is so weak your best hope of help is a 0.00001% chance that idolizing a rock or a fake bone from a saint’s arm will bring you relief, your church is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Muslims have a very odd view of Jesus, by the way. They venerate him as a prophet, and they also believe he was wrong about nearly everything. They treat him the way nearly all Catholics treat the pope.

We also saw the Basilica of St. John, which is a big, ruined church. They say John’s remains are under it, and it is conceivable that they are. They have to be somewhere, after all.

Our hotel was in Kusadasi, at the base of a hill, next to the sea. It was beautiful, but not the greatest hotel.

I’m not sure, but I think Germans have a strong connection to Turkey, and I suspect the hotel we stayed at–the Korumar Deluxe–belongs to a German company. It was full of Germans.

Americans like hotels built for individualists. We like square footage, nice bedclothes, and good food prepared to order. Germans, on the other hand, are more like geese which move in tightly packed flocks. Maybe this is why they invented goose-stepping. They are more in tune with the ordered, Spartan life.

Our hotel had rows upon rows of small, identical rooms. The rooms had no tubs. Each bed had only one sheet and one thin cotton blanket too small for the mattress. There was no complimentary bar soap; they had a men’s-room-type dispenser by the sink and in the shower, and the shower soap was also supposed to cover shampooing and conditioning.

Rhodah was not happy. She wanted another sheet, plus something resembling a real comforter. She complained, and they brought a second blanket just like the first one. She complained again, saying it was too small. They nodded and brought a third one…just like the other two.

I paid for the all-inclusive plan, because it didn’t add much to the bill and might save us trouble getting food. I learned the restaurants served meals during certain time windows, and we needed to be sure we got to our seats while the buffets were running.

The food was sort of okay, but I would call it institutional. The croissants were not croissants, and they seemed to contain no butter. The steam pans were full of casserole-y items which appeared to be made from inexpensive cuts of meat. At breakfast, the scrambled eggs contained no milk, and they were scrambled until they had the consistency of apple sauce. They sat in water that had drained from them. The orange juice was neither orange nor juice. It was like something a summer camp would serve if the proprietor couldn’t make himself spring for real Tang.

The salads and desserts were not bad, however.

On the second night, we decided to eat in town. I asked the desk clerk to recommend a seafood place, and I instructed him to pick a good one, not one that belonged to the brother of the hotel’s owner. He sent us to the Kazim Usta, a waterfront place in the marina.

The restaurant was magnificent. It was cheap. It had a wide variety of dishes. Everything was cooked beautifully; better than I would have expected in America, where proper fried calamari doesn’t exist. The service was friendly and skillful. The location could not have been better.

I think we paid about $30, including drinks. Wonderful.

We got up and walked through Kusadasi’s bazaar. The shops I liked best had signs saying, “Genuine Fake Watches.” They weren’t quite as naggy as the Istanbul shops.

We picked up some costume bracelets for Rhodah. Stone beads are a big thing in Turkey. The shop owner had a long conversation with us. Like us, he knows our governments’ coronavirus tactics are about control, not disease prevention. Believe it or not, a lot of Turks refuse to take the vaccines. They don’t trust them. They also know the world is going crazy. It’s not just right-wing American Christians who see the writing on the wall.

I’ll provide some advice now.

If you want to go to Istanbul and branch out to other parts of Turkey, do not rent a car before you leave America. It will cost 4 times as much as doing it in Turkey via Rentalcars.com, which generally throws in insurance in case you break something. Stay away from companies like Hertz and Enterprise. They will charge you like a tourist.

Don’t rent a car in Istanbul unless you plan to take a long trip outside the city. You will probably have to pick it up at the airport, which means an expensive 60-90-minute trip just to get the car. If you manage to pick it up near your hotel, which will probably be in Sultanahmet, you will have a fine time navigating the narrow, twisted, busy streets, and you won’t be able to park.

The time you think you will save by driving instead of going through security and flying to another city will evaporate fast, and it will turn out that flying doesn’t take much longer.

If you’re planning to spend a fair number of days touring around, renting and driving may make sense.

Turkish drivers are relatively sane. They drive better than people in Miami, which isn’t saying much. There has never been a Cuban F1 driver, and there never will be. On the driving-skill chart, they are just above Chinese people.

Anyway, you can drive in Turkey without problems, but maybe you shouldn’t.

If you want to see the sights near Kusadasi, look into individual trips instead of packing everything into one tour. We wasted over an hour on Mary’s phony house. I’ll bet you can hire a guide who will only take you where you want.

Don’t take a long day tour unless you have to, because they will give you bad food. We were told we would get a wonderful lunch in a Turkish restaurant, but we got dubious buffet food in steam tables. Obviously, the guide had a deal with a bad restaurant, and the owner knew he didn’t have to make good food because his guests had no choice.

Never, ever eat at a buffet in Turkey. There is no excuse for it. You are literally better off skipping a meal entirely and finding a real restaurant later than eating the glop they provide at buffets.

Don’t get an all-inclusive plan in Kusadasi. You’re better off spending three dollars on a cab every time you want food. It’s depressing, watching frugal Germans eating price-driven cafeteria rations.

Finally, if you want a fake watch, make sure it’s a genuine fake watch. There is nothing worse than a counterfeit fake.

That’s all for today. The wife is paging me.