For sanity’s sake, this has been an off-week. I’ve been holed up, staying with friends in Selçuk, and doing … well, not doing much of anything, really. I’ve spent days on the computer, evenings chatting with friends, made it out to a few of the markets and a few of the tourist sites and a few of the restaurants, but otherwise stuck close to home.

It’s a little odd to try and figure out what my life would have been like if I’d just stayed in New York. I suppose I would have probably flown out for the two larps I attended, and probably would have done similar traveling between them. But then I’d have flown back, and spent the past week doing the same thing I am here: not much of anything, kind of preparing mentally for the holidays.

The biggest difference is that when I was staying in one place, I put a lot of effort into figuring out what to do; by default nothing much happened without effort, so I put effort into finding things to do or to see. Now, it’s trivial for me to decide to spend a week in Ukraine or two weeks in Turkey, and I find I’m having to actively put effort into not doing things, scheduling breaks where I can catch my breath.

To borrow a metaphor from my reading up on Chernobyl, there’s two kinds of nuclear reactions. Some reactions require active effort to keep going; left to themselves, over time, they die out. As they speed up, you eventually reach a point where you need to take active steps to slow them down or they go critical, going faster and faster until they blow a hole in the containment vessel and blast radioactive smoke over most of Europe.

I am trying to remain ever mindful of the distinction.

Selçuk is pretty small¹ and far busier during the tourist season. It’s mostly known for being the doorstep to Ephesus, and based on the reactions of my friends it largely seems I’m among the last people to have visited the ruins of Ephesus. Better late than never, I suppose.²

My friends and I wandered through the ruins of Ephesus on Saturday. Apparently the crowds and the heat can be horrific during the summer, but midwinter they’re not an issue; we found an appropriately sunny day and headed to the ruins. They’re not all that large,³ and it’s mostly a bunch of collapsed stone that’s been reassembled⁴ but it’s astonishing none-the-less.

The most well-preserved parts are probably the Stadium — being carved out of a hillside means there’s less to collapse — and a series of terrace houses. The terrace houses in particular are really amazing. They were in use from about 100 BCE up through 700 CE, so there’s a lot of history packed in there, and all these modifications as they were adapted to different uses, from Roman to Byzantine rule. The tilework is fantastic, as are the surviving wall paintings, and there’s still a massive ongoing effort reconstructing the shattered stonework that covered the walls.⁵

Just outside Ephesus is the Artemision, the Temple of Artemis fabled as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. At least, it’s the site where the Artemision used to be. It collapsed after an earthquake,⁶ and the ground is littered with what remains of the foundation stones and columns, although not all that many of them — facing north from the site, you can see scattered through Selçuk a mosque, a castle, and a basilica, and it seems likely that’s where the bulk of the building materials ended up. There’s a desultory column reconstructed which gives you a vague sense of the scale the thing must have been. Otherwise, it’s basically gone.

A natural reaction, here, is one of almost incalculable loss.⁷ Here you had something renowned for centuries as the epitome of human achievement, and it’s just gone. It’s easy to feel that way, traveling through Pripyat or seeing the Aleppo Room in the Pergamon Museum while videos of the current state of that city play just outside. It’s not a mood easily reassured by contemporary politics.

But there’s other ways to look at it. We know what Ephesus looked like, we can wander through its arches and see its frescoes and trace our finger along the graffiti someone, in that same spot, carved millennia ago. There are still concerts in the stadium. Some enterprising Austrian is going to eventually figure out how all those shattered tiles fit together.

One of my favorite plays is Arcadia, and there’s a part that’s always stuck with me. In it, two of the characters are discussing all that’s been lost to antiquity:

THOMASINA: …the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without
so much as a fine for all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus! — can you bear it?
All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus,
Sophocles, Euripides — thousands of poems — Aristotle’s own library! … How can
we sleep for grief?

SEPTIMUS: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from
Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for
the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book
which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travelers who
must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by
those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on
the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to
it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written
again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves
once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their
time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been
hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a
corkscrew?

So that’s how I’ve tried to spend the week. On Sunday, my friends and I wandered down to one of the restaurants and ordered a bunch of mezes for dinner, a mix of things you might expect to find in a Mediterranean deli stateside (stuffed grape leaves, served hot; plates of mushrooms fried with cheese; the ubiquitous french fries) and some things I’d genuinely never encountered before (cabbage, carrots, and walnuts mixed with labne; something called “atom meze”).⁸ It was a long, lovely dinner, and afterwards we headed to a bar to share a couple drinks with a friend recently returned to the city.

You can stand in Ephesus and see all these ruins around you, imagine all the people who used to be there. But of course, they didn’t disappear. They moved. Lots of them moved just down the road, to what would eventually become Selçuk. It’s less than an hour’s stroll from the middle of one to the middle of the other. And you can sit there, amidst dozens of cats⁹ and watch the tourists all strike the same pose for the same selfies, or wander down as the sun is setting and have a tea along the road back to where you’re staying.

I’m writing this the evening before I leave. At the moment the power’s gone out all over Selçuk, the city is dark, and without electric heat the cold is creeping in around the edges. But there’s a wood stove burning in the corner, and candles providing enough light to see by. The power will be back soon, and if you felt like braving the cold long enough on the roof, you could watch the lights flicker back on, all across the city.

Next: İstanbul (IST) to London (LHR)
Prev: Berlin (TXL) to İzmir (ADB)

Footnotes

¹ Roughly 30,000 people

² In this case, about 1,500 years late. The city was partially destroyed by an earthquake in 614 CE, although its decline was more-or-less inevitable since the harbor continued to move further and further from the sea every year. The subsequent sackings over the next hundred years only hastened the decline.

³ Estimates vary, but modern scholarship suggests Ephesus had a population of maybe about 100,000 people, give or take 50,000.

⁴ Which I suppose is what happens when you suffer from earthquakes. The particularly valuable or delicate stuff has been hauled off to museums.

⁵ The Austrian Archeological Institute has been excavating Ephesus since 1895, and stopped hauling the best bits off in 1907. They’ve paid for the protective shell which covers the houses, as well as much of the rest of the work.

⁶ Sensing a pattern, here?

⁷ Well, while we were at the Artemision a tour bus unloaded a bunch of passengers who, without leaving the parking lot, snapped a bunch of pictures and loaded back up, all over the course of about five minutes. I would guess their reaction was more along the lines of “What time’s lunch?”

⁸ Basically just chilis fried in butter mixed with a thick yogurt. The “atom” stands for “atomic.” It’s easily the spiciest thing I’ve ever eaten out of a deli case. I adored it.

⁹ Seriously, I don’t know why most of the cat-crazy people on my Facebook feed aren’t decamping to Turkey on vacations more often. I’ve seen more stray cats — happy, well-fed, friendly strays with the notch in their ear that indicates they’ve been collected, neutered, and released — here than anywhere else I’ve been.