Pergamum and Ayvalik, Turkey

Pergamum After the Rain

Tuesday 11 October 2011

Our new friend Isa was happy. We were happy. Isa has waited two days for us to hire him to drive us to the ancient fortified hill town, Pergamum Acropolis, and the Hieropolis, the health center. We have just enough time to make our tour before catching a bus out of town after lunch.

We have been luckier than several of the Mediterranean coastal towns. The rains we experienced for the previous three days caused extensive flooding elsewhere and even a few deaths. We just didn’t venture far from our Pension. Bergama had more to offer than we chose to do in the pouring rain. There is a good Archaeological Museum, a Hamami (Turkish Bath) and the Red Basilica, a large temple dedicated to the Egyptian gods Isis and/or Serapis. In the first century AD, a Christian Church inside the main building of the Red Basilica was identified as one of the Seven Churches of Revelation. Another is in Ephesus. We took photos of the Red Basilica from the shelter of our Pension balcony. It was too wet to visit. Ray also liked Bergama because it was the first real Turkish town we visited. There were few tourists and the streets were lined with tea houses filled with local men playing cards, chatting and enjoying their tea. I never saw any women spending the day at the tea houses.

Just a note about cats: Greece gets all the comments about their cats. Turkey is way ahead of cats in numbers per population. Cats are everywhere and most look fairly healthy.

The Acropolis was directly uphill from our guesthouse. To get there you can take a cable car, walk or drive the 5 km of switchbacks to the gates. Isa drove us up and waited for us while we took our time exploring. There were a few other tour groups wandering around so it was comparatively empty, nothing like the crowds of Ephesus.

Most of the buildings and monuments in Pergamum date to the time of Eumenes II (197-159 BC) when Pergamum was a wealthy, developing city with a population of over 200,000 people. The structure that is the most prominent and beautiful is the only Roman monument, the Temple of Trajan, started by Emperor Trajan, who also had the Fountain of Trajan built for him in Ephesus, and finished by Hadrian of Hadrian’s Wall in England. The temple, dedicated to the cult of both emperors and Zeus, was built on a high marble covered podium. On the slope of the hill, parallel supporting walls covered with barrel vaults, forming a passage way, were built in order to support the large platform in front of the temple.

Just the foundations and parts of columns of the oldest temple in Pergamum, the Temple of Athena, dedicated to the goddess protector of the city, are visible today. From the size of the ruins it must have been a very impressive building. Next to it are ruins of a library that contained 200,000 manuscripts which were carried off in 41 BC by Mark Antony to be offered to Cleopatra as a wedding present to replace the 500,000 volumes contained in the famous library in Alexandria destroyed by a great fire. Our guide in Ephesus told us Cleopatra also took the manuscripts from the Library of Celsus, so the Alexandria library must have had a good second start.

If you want to see the beautiful reliefs that once decorated the Great Altar, dedicated to Zeus and Athena, you will have to go to Berlin. The reliefs were taken back to Germany by a German Archaeologist in the 1880s. All that is left is the base. Also impressive was a Theatre seating 10,000 people, built into the side of the hill below the Temple of Athena. Billed as the steepest theatre in the ancient world, it certainly looked as if few modern theatres would rival it for steepness.

The Asclepion, one of the first medical centers of the ancient world, was down the hill from the Acropolis and three km south. The Acropolis was the temple area of Pergamum. The city itself expanded over the valley below. There are parts of the original city walls still standing in Bergama. Isa stopped on the way to point out part of one gateway into the city and an ancient minaret without the loudspeakers that call the faithful to prayers today. Two girls, walking with a younger sister, asked us to take their picture. We obliged and got their address to send them a copy.

We found the Asclepion fascinating. Dedicated to Asclepius, the god of healing, it became increasingly popular. People with health problems would come and stay in dormitories. Their dreams would be interpreted to determine the cure, which could include bathing in the water of one of the three sacred springs. Archaeologists have found lots of gifts and dedications that people would make afterwards, such as small terracotta body parts, no doubt representing what had been healed. Snakes, one of the modern symbols of medicine, were sacred to Asclepius. They were often used in healing rituals. Non-venomous snakes were left to crawl on the floor in dormitories where the sick and injured slept. Of course, Asclepion had an Agora, the market area, and a theatre where the people would be assembled for important announcements as well as entertainment.

We finished our tour just in time for a small lunch before our bus to our next destination, Ayvalik, a fishing town on the coast about 75 km north. Isa offered to drive us there for just a bit more than the cost of the bus ride, so we agreed. His sister Ulun, whose car Isa was driving, called a friend to join us so that they could visit a friend in Ayvalik, and the five of us set off. An hour and a half later we were in Ayvalik, but that is another blog.

 Ayvalik, Made for Walking

Wednesday 12 October 2011

'I lived in Ayvalik for three years', Isa, our driver, told us, 'I know my way around.' We stopped at a little tea shop and Isa greeted several of his cronies, but no one knew where the Kelebek Pansiyon was. Our Lonely Planet map was no help as we didn’t know the names of the street we were on and the street naming convention was different than anything we were familiar with. We had driven down steep, narrow, cobblestoned streets to get to the tea house and we were about to experience several more streets where meeting a car coming the other way meant that one of you had to back up. There was not enough room to pass. Sometimes there was enough room to pass, as long as you had a lookout telling when you had clearance of at least 2 cm.

We came to an old church with a clock on its steeple that had been converted to a mosque, as evidenced by a minaret in the courtyard.“There is a Kelebek Pansiyon sign on the wall!’ I said. ‘You can let us out here and we can walk the rest of the way’. No way were Ray and I going to risk getting stuck in any more narrow alleys. We thanked our driver and said our good-byes and pulled our suitcases over the cobblestones to our pansiyon. There is no way Isa would have been able to get there. This is a walking town, not a car to drive in a car.

Kelebek is managed by Mustafa, a Turkish man who lived on Long Island, New York, for several years with his parents. Consequently he speaks English with a distinct New York accent. Mustafa told us that the streets are straight up and down, often with a 10-20% grade, for a purpose. In the rainy season the water rushed down the hills straight into the ocean, while in the hot summer season the breezes from the ocean have a clear path up the hills to cool the houses. He told us a one of his clients insisted on driving his car to the pansiyon, even after being advised to park outside the old town and walk to the pansiyon. It took him an hour to manoeuvre through the impossibly narrow streets. His suggestion was to tear down many of the old houses and widen the streets for vehicle traffic. Mustafa and our suggestion was to retain the character of the town by closing the old town off to motor vehicles and providing less invasive shuttle service (maybe horse or electric?) to the houses.

Kelebek Pansiyon is in an old Greek House, similar in design to many of the other houses in this district. One of the first moves Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) made after the creation of modern Turkey in 1923 was to declare the republic Turkish. That excluded the Kurds in the east and the Greek-speaking communities in the Western areas of Anatolia. The result was the population exchange between Greece and Turkey. The large Greek-speaking community in Ayvalik was shipped to the island of Lesvos and the smaller Turkish-speaking community of Lesvos came to Ayvalik. That left a lot of empty houses in Ayvalik, some of which have been restored as Pensiyons or vacation homes and some of which have been left to decay. Because Ayvalik and Lesvos are so close to each other, and the main industry of both was olive growing and processing, the move was not as traumatic as in other communities. Even today there is an annual festival linking the two communities and a lot of visiting relatives in both places.

We spent our two days in town roaming the streets and the waterfront. Ayvalik has an active fishing port on the Agean Sea with small restaurants lining the shore. Even during the low season locals and tourists both spend afternoons drinking tea or having a beer while watching the world go by. Horse carts are still used to transport goods in the old part of the city. The harnesses of the many horses were gaily decorated with tassels and brass and some had intricate designs painted on the sides of the cart. At one square the cart drivers sat having their morning tea while the horses enjoyed a break. Down the street we stopped to watch four men playing a version of Gin Rummy using ivory pieces the same size as dominoes instead of playing cards.

It was a relaxed visit. In the summer there are beaches to explore and if you are a diver, red corals to see at 30 M. This was not the time for bathing suits, just walks and stops for tea.