"We Greeks are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness."
Hard to believe we left Corning almost exactly a week ago now, making our way to Boston and then London, then on to Athens and now two days into this cruise. My plans to do a little billable work have fallen by the wayside, as they always seem to do. I've slept the sleep of the dead every night, although poor Peg hasn't really made the adjustment to the eight hour time difference and keeps waking up for a couple hours every night. We've had long talks, uninterrupted by client demands, about what we want the rest of our life to look like. Important stuff, long neglected but now coming into sharp focus. All good.
We've now spent around three days among the Greeks, and this has been our first with the Turks. I think we've both fallen in love with the lifestyle of our Greek hosts, kind and laid back, supremely unhurried. The Turks are, as I've heard someone say, "Arab Lite", aggressive and loud and only nice to you when they want something, usually your Yankee dollars.
Our first stop was lonely Patmos, where John wrote his Apocalypse in fourth grader-level koine Greek. Still home to less than 4,000 souls, it's largely unspoiled, sort of Central California with no people.
Peg and I decided we were too cheap to pay for a taxi or tour bus to climb the mountain to see St. John's cave, and the monastery perched atop the windy bluff over the port of Skala.
It was, in fact, quite a hike, although it only took about an hour of dodging tour buses to get there.
The monastery chapel was, in the Greek Orthodox tradition, audaciously overdecorated. It sits atop a former temple to Minerva. They still have their tax exemption certificate from Byzantium on display in their museum.
And they still pack into church. Greece is something like 95% Orthodox, and in the villages folks seem to actively practice their faith, perhaps as part of preserving their national identity.
Eleven million Greeks staring down almost 90 million Turks. It's been the same story since Thermopylae.
You probably already knew Patmos was known for its famous windmills, but here you go anyway.
The wind was howling the day we were up there, so the arrangement sort of made sense.
The next morning, today, we woke up in Kusadasi, Turkey. The goal of today's visit was to make our way to the fourth largest city in the Roman Empire, Ephesus. Once home to perhaps a quarter million people, it's now home to a few stray cats and dogs, but every day Ephesus finds itself crawling with tourists from all over the planet.
I was quite taken with it all.
Our first stop was the Ephesus Experience, one of the most amazing multimedia displays I've ever seen. Through extremely lifelike graphics, we were transported back to street life here in the first century, to parties in folks' houses, to plays and soldiers marching down the main boulevard to the long silted over port. And, of course, we ended up face-to-face with Artemis, the patron goddess of the city. And yes, she gave me the stink-eye for staring at her chest instead of into her eyes. How could I not?
The city was sacked, then knocked over in an earthquake or two, and finally abandoned maybe 800 years ago. Still, so much remains, from a library that doubled as a mausoleum for a rich local two thousand years ago,
to almost perfectly preserved homes, basically condos built into the hillside that once housed the beautiful people of one of the world's most cosmopolitan cities.
Their wall art depicted gods and animals and these people as they looked while they were getting on with their very finite lives.
I was particularly struck by her. In person she was so lifelike, it almost felt like she was looking back as us.
Of course, being a yutz of a certain age, I also sort of saw Elvira, mistress of the dark.
Another amazing find was a library hiding under the foundation of Domitian's temple, destroyed by the church fifteen hundred years ago.
Inside were wills and judicial documents including death sentences handed down for sacrilege, literally tens of thousands of Greek and Roman documents memorializing the day-to-day life of a place that's been gone for centuries.
It's sort of a boring and unoriginal observation, but to walk the marble streets and peer into the agoras (there are two) and living spaces brings one up short about the things we worry about. This city had barristers arguing about contracts and who should bear the loss when a trireme loaded with olive oil sinks, people fretting over the price of cheese (we saw a price list still written on a wall), which charioteer might distinguish himself over the weekend, and who might be the next emperor. Now they're all dead, dead and utterly forgotten when it comes to their individual lives. Did any of those things matter, really?
On that cheery note, we need to pull ourselves together to go get on a charter bus and ride back to Ephesus for a dinner the ship is sponsoring in the Odeum. Peg's sitting here in the cabin across from me, beautiful and decked out for the occasion. Halloween in a city of the dead. That works.
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