Ephesus and Afrodesias

Ephesus is the best preserved classical city in the eastern Mediterranean and is the place to get a feel for what life was like in Roman times. Ancient Ephesus was a great trading city and a center for the cult of Cybele, the Anatolian fertility goddess. When the Romans took over and made it the province of Asia, Ephesus became the Roman provincial capital.

 Ephesus is a huge tourist place and so we had to deal with tons of old people on tour buses. The entrance fee was outrageously expensive and I got really annoyed wh

en

after waiting in line for 20 mins, the guy selling postcards in the street starts leading some tourists to the front of the line telling them that its ok to cut!! Like selling postcards gave the guy some sort of authority to do that. There was no official person monitoring the line and the Turkish people that were cut in front of didn’t even say anything! 

I was annoyed but not surprised. In general, the idea of queing and first-come-first-served is one of those foreign “western” concepts of  "order" that don't work in Turkey as they say here. There are hardly ever lines for anything, usually everyone just crowds around and pushes their way to the front. I hate it.

 Afrodesias is one of Turkey’s finest archaeological sites. I really liked it because it was less overrun with coach pa

rties compared to Ephesus (mainly because its in the middle of the desert in the middle of nowhere). By the 3^rd century AD Afrodesias was the capital of the Roman province of Caria with a population of 15,000. Under the Byzantine empire the city was changed dramatically and temples were turned into churches. The stadium was definitely the coolest thing there.