I remarked in my previous post, that the landscape of Cappadocia in places looks more lunar than earthly! I think the two photographs above give a fairly clear indication of what I mean. The one on the left is a scanned slide taken during my trip in 1975. Unfortunately, the colour of the foreground has faded somewhat owing to the passing of 35 years. The one on the right is of the same area but from a slightly different angle, taken during my recent trip in October 2009.
The soft nature of so much of the rock has lent itself to being carved into, in order to provide houses, stables for animals, dovecotes, storage facilities and the like. These days, not many people live in purely cave dwellings. But many houses with stone frontages often still extend backwards into older hillside caves.
Below is a picture of the village of Uchisar which lies immediately below the highest point of this amazing lunar landscape. Caves carved into the rock face can be seen in conjunction with more modern village houses.
In the early afternoon of Wednesday 14th October 2009, we drove into the town of Ürgüp, located in the central Anatolian region usually known by its ancient name of Cappadocia. Here the landscape in places looks more lunar than earthly! This is the result of eruptions from two or three nearby, now extinct volcanoes, which covered the surrounding area with volcanic lava and ash. The resultant landforms are quite spectacular and attract many visitors.
Driving into Ürgüp, we spotted the Melis Hotel and went to enquire about the cost and availability of rooms. The hotel attracted me for two reasons. One was that it was a well preserved old building, very much in keeping with the surrounding landscape. Subsequently, I discovered that it is a 300 year old Greek House which has been very sympathetically renovated and extended. The other attraction was that it had an outdoor swimming pool which still had water in it. Despite the daytime temperature being between 25 – 30 degrees Celsius, various other hotels we had seen in Ürgüp and elsewhere, had already emptied their pools for the forthcoming winter.
The Rev’d John Skinner, with whom we stayed at Selcuk the previous Sunday night, had wisely advised us never to pay the advertised price for a hotel room whilst in Turkey. Having been shown various rooms and been told what the ‘normal price’ for each of these was, I successfully negotiated a ‘special price’ for us staying for three nights and paying in cash with Euro notes. I got a reduction of 16.66%!!!! Something we had discovered in Croatia in July and now in Turkey, is that the role the US dollar used to have for travellers 20 – 30 years ago, has now been replaced by the Euro. Carrying and paying cash in Euro gave us better deals on numerous occasions during our trip.
The outstanding feature of the Cappadocian landscape is one that I have already featured in my previously post. Whilst the most of the lava rock surface is hard, fissures in the rock have allowed water to penetrate and erode the much softer rock beneath. Once exposed, this softer rock has then been further eroded by wind-blown sand grains. This has created in numerous parts of Cappadocia, a series of landforms usually known as ‘fairy chimneys’. They are quite extraordinary as I hope you will see from the accompanying photographs.
The hard caps on top of the ‘chimneys’ protect the softer rock beneath. However, the soft rock does still slowly erode, eventually causing the collapse of the chimney. The different colour and texture of the various rock layers is evident in these photos.
I have mentioned a few times in describing my recent travels through Turkey, that I have once previously travelled through the country nearly 35 years ago in April 1975. Recognising that the only people likely to be reading this blog who knew me 35 years ago are my two older sisters, I thought a blog post of explanation was called for. If there is anyone else visiting my blog who also knew me in or before 1975, then please leave a comment & get in touch!
Although born and brought up in the UK, from July 1970 until mid-February 1975, I lived and worked in Australia. I then left Australia, flying from Sydney, via Singapore, Bombay and New Delhi, to Kathmandu in Nepal. There, on 25th February 1975, I joined a coach party run by a company called Penn Overland Tours and travelled all the way to London, where I arrived two and a half months later, on 7th May 1975.
I travelled what was then known as the ‘Hippie Trail’, except that I did it in reverse! It was in the era when the Shah was still in charge in Iran and the Soviet Union was yet to invade Afghanistan. Both these events happened some four years later, thus putting an end to such trips by Western visitors.
My journey across Turkey was therefore from east to west, entering the country from Iran and staying our first night in Erzurum. From there, we travelled via Sivas, Urgup in Cappadocia, Konya, Pamukkale, (see my previous post), Izmir – visiting Ephesus en-route, Canakkale, before crossing the Dardanelles and heading on to Istanbul. If I ever discover how to put a map into a blog post then I’ll put one in to help readers visualise the journey.
Therefore, my recent journey that I have described so far in this blog – crossing the Dardanelles, driving along the Aegean coast to Izmir and then travelling on via Ephesus to Pamukkale took me along the same route I had had travelled almost 35 years previously, but in reverse. On Tuesday 13th October, I continued that journey in reverse, driving first to Konya, where we stayed overnight, before driving onto Urgup the following day. We then stayed in Urgup for three nights, in order to explore some of the amazing sights of the Cappadocia region about which I shall write in my next blog posts.
The main record I have of my 1975 trip is a series of nearly 400 colour slides taken with a Kodak Instamatic Camera. Such is the manner in which technology has advanced since then, it is now impossible to purchase films for such a camera even though I still possess it. However, courtesy of present day technology, Sybille has successfully scanned a number of my old slides onto a memory stick which will allow me to post them on this blog.
The first of these is on the left at the top of this blog post, alongside a picture I took on my recent trip. Whilst taken from slightly different angles, they show the same three fairy chimneys in Cappadocia, but nearly thirty five years apart. I hope my readers will find comparing the two photos as fascinating as I do.
Following the visit to Ephesus, the synod members were wonderfully entertained to a barbeque supper at the nearby home of Rev’d John and Mrs Linda Skinner. John and Linda were founder members of the Northumbria Community in the North-East of England. In more recent years, they have run a small guest and retreat house just outside of the city of Selcuk and live a lifestyle that they describe as ‘New Monasticism.’ They very kindly allowed Sybille and I to stay overnight in their home when the rest of the synod members returned to Izmir later on the Sunday evening, ready for their respective flights home the next day.
We had breakfast in the sunshine on their terrace the next morning, in the company, (much to Sybille’s pleasure), of a menagerie of animals including three dogs, two cats and a horse. We then bid farewell to the Skinners and set out on the holiday part of journey, initially travelling inland to the small town of Pamukkale, in order to explore the amazing geological phenomenon that lies immediately above the settlement.
The name Pamukkale means ‘Cotton Castle’, an apt description of the hillside above the town. For thousands of years, several hot springs have released water, saturated with calcium carbonate, which has then run down the hillside, leaving snow-white deposits of a rock known as travertine. When one first views the hillside, it appears as though it is covered in slowly melting ice cream.
These hot springs have been used as a spa since the second century BC with the Greco-Roman town of Hierapolis being built on the top of the hillside. People came for the supposed curative powers of the spring water, the golden age of the city being during the first three centuries AD when it was visited by more than one Roman Emperor. With the collapse of the empire and with also suffering earthquake damage, it fell into ruin.
In the second half of the twentieth century, this whole area was rediscovered by travellers. Hotels were built, partly on top of the ancient remains of Hierapolis, and some of the hot spring water diverted into hotel swimming pools for guests to swim in. When I visited in 1975, I stayed in one of these hotels and swam in the swimming pool, not ever realising that my hotel was sitting on top of an ancient Greco-Roman city! It was also possible then, to freely walk across all parts of the white hillside with the warm spring water running across it.
In 1988, Hierapolis-Pamukkale was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the Turkish government was forced to take action to conserve and preserve it. The hotels on top of the hill, which had almost certainly been built illegally, were demolished and visitors, who wish to stay overnight now, have to (as we did), use hotels within the town of Pamukkale itself. Both the hillside and the remains of Hierapolis have been fenced off and an entrance fee is now charged. Non-Turkish visitors are charged an entrance fee which is twice that charged to native Turks. If Turkey ever succeeds in its declared goal of becoming an EU member, that is one thing that will have to change!
It is still possible to walk across the snow-white hillside and paddle in the shallow pools of warm spring water. But the whole area is now closely supervised and there are restrictions on the areas you may walk upon. All this must also be done in bare feet as shoes are completely banned. Hopefully these actions will help preserve this amazing phenomenon so it may be enjoyed by future generations as much as we enjoyed it on our visit on the afternoon and early evening of Monday 12th October 2009.
Although the Eastern Archdeaconry Synod meeting officially ended with the Eucharist and Ordination Service on the morning of Sunday 11th October, most synod members stayed on for a Sunday afternoon outing and guided tour to the Greco-Roman remains of the city of Ephesus some 50 miles/80 km south of Izmir. Although we had originally booked to go on the coach with everyone else, as we didn’t wish to return to Izmir late on Sunday evening, we instead followed the coach in our car.
I had previously visited Ephesus nearly 35 years ago in April 1975 and wondered how different it would be from how I remembered it. The most obvious contrast was the weather. My first visit took place on a cool day, under dark cloudy skies and with a light drizzle falling. As a result, the only photographic record I have is a series of bought slides. On the afternoon of Sunday 11th October 2009, we had clear blue skies, very bright sunshine and temperatures hovering around 30 degrees Celsius.
The other contrast was the number of visitors. Back in 1975, the party I travelled with were virtually the only people visiting the site. As I mentioned in an earlier post, tourism in Turkey was then in its infancy. This time, our coach party was one of many, with a variety of groups being taken around the site, thus making it difficult to take pictures that didn’t contain images of hoards of other tourists!
Rather than trying to describe all that is contained within this amazing site, I hope these accompanying photographs will do the talking for me.
One part of the site that was completely new to me was a series of six terraced houses, built into the hillside on one side of the main street. Apparently, their existence was known in 1975 but no archaeological digging had yet commenced. Having since been unearthed, they have now been covered with protective roofing to preserve the frescos and mosaics contained within them. I hope this picture gives some indication of how the wealthy of Ephesus lived in the last century BC and the first few centuries AD.
Ephesus has many New Testament associations. Acts 19 describes how St. Paul preached, taught and discussed with the people of the city during a period of over two years, bringing many to Christian faith. His time in the city came to an end following a riot initiated by the city’s silversmiths and other skilled workers. This took place in the city’s amphitheatre which is one of many outstanding structures that still remain. Our synod party sat on the terraced seats of the amphitheatre whilst Rev’d Jady Koch, the curate of Christ Church, Vienna, read the biblical passage describing those self-same events.
At the height of its importance as a city, the population of Ephesus may well have exceeded 200,000 people. Its size and economic success was very much based on it being a major port. However, slowly over the early centuries AD, the port silted up. The road on this picture used to lead to the port itself. Now the sea lies 4-5 km away! The city also suffered from a major earthquake in 262 AD and was further damaged by a series of lesser earthquakes during the following years. Therefore, although Ephesus hosted the Fourth Ecumenical Council in 431, its importance declined so that, over the next few centuries, it was slowly abandoned. Fortunately, despite the ravages of time, much of its former glory can still be seen today.
