Antalya and surrounding histories

There've been a lot of superlatives (and harmonizings) lately - 'oldest's mostly,and 'best's, but I'm crowning Antalya and the Sabah hostel 'most relaxing' of the trip thus far.  This might be due to the fact that for the entire day today Corinne and I did little more than walk to the water front to enjoy tea, a beer, backgammon and the clear bluegreen of the Mediterranean.  We just returned from a jaunt through the old part of town - Kaleici - to get sandwiches and are enjoying the terrace and a bottle of wine with cookies and peanuts.  Not too shabby.  We earned our tourist stripes yesterday with a three stop car rental trip east of Antalya to Side, Aspendos and Perge.

First of all, when we arrived in Antalya, I met my new best friend, and he asked me to take his photo and post it to my blog, which he regretted being unable to read.

He says hello

After I recovered my melted heart and we recovered our sleep from the overnight bus ride, we joined an odd pair for our car trip east.  Side first:  it looked like it had once been a magical hide-a-way that has since been discovered by developers.  The land came to a sort of point where the old city stood, and up to that point the city looked like the combination of closed storefronts and resorts I recognized from El Kantoui in Tunisia.  Once there, souvenir shops and viagra tea shops (?) dominated the walk from the Roman theatre to the more Grecian Apollon and Aphroditon temples.

Behind the theatre - wreckage from multiple earthquakes toppled marble facades

The theatre

The face would have been covered with marble

The temples were built over with Byzantine churches - like everywhere else around here

While the ruins were neat to look at, the overwhelming tourism industry made it hard to imagine much else, and we soon moved on to Aspendos, which was the favorite of C and I.  Aspendos was somewhat more removed from the resort set as it was not set on sandy Mediterranean beaches, but several kilometers inland. The highlights of the site were the nearly entirely intact Roman theatre and some beautiful remains of aqueducts which were even more impressive to learn about than to see.  First some photos of the site.  The Apsendos Theatre is the superlative Roman theatre.

This guy was whistling and singing to test the acoustics - which were amazing

The face was incredible - lots of statues (now looted to somewhere) and marble facing

It seated 7000 folks

Behind the theatre and up the hill were more sets of ruins, spread around liberally like in Side - walk through some grass and you are faced with ruins some 2000 years old - it continued to feel like something from a Peter Jackson film (not that one).  What was most striking were the remains of the aqueduct system - the structure itself was lovely set against the mountains and plains of southern Turkey.  More amazingly was how the aqueduct itself worked - essentially they applied much of the knowledge that goes into current plumbing systems with stone and lead piping.  Not only did the duct carry water from a nearby hill to the hilltop acropolis, but it likely employed a closed-system siphon over several hundred meters, as illustrated here (siphon systems here).  Keep in mind that the Romans were not using garden hoses and had to extend airtight waterways over several hundred meters suspended several meters in the air using stone and sometimes lead piping.  Pretty amazing.  The photos are neat for other reasons, but this time imagination was able to cover the distance.  I hope you enjoy!

There was a lovely village next to the aqueduct

You can see the rest in the background - it would have started on the hill

The vistas were pretty breathtaking

To whit

The final site of the day was Perge – a vast spread of ruins outside of another Turkish village.  The ruins were beginning to get repetitive by this point (which feels absurd, but there you go), but we did see the place at sundown and enjoy a fairly intact Roman bath structure – including the below-deck heating areas.  It was mostly walk around time, which again felt fairly decadent – to stroll around the ruins of an ancient city while the sun went down, chatting casually about the possible relationship of our traveling companions (they acted like an old married couple but had only been traveling for two days).  Here are some images of Perge:

Corinne!

The collumnade of Perge

Landscape!

The acropolis from afar

What the entire floor must have looked like - swanky

The sub-floor of the cadrineum (not the frigideum or tepideum)

We returned to Antalya after sunset, having bought some fruit and nuts in a market in Perge – the trip in was a bit tricky without a decent map nor an understanding of Turkish, but we made it intact and had stories and photos to show for it.  Today we relaxed, and tomorrow we are looking east to Selcuk, home of more broken down old stuff and (possibly) surreal landscapes.  Thanks for reading!