By Elizabeth Warren ~
This is not living in another nation in this world where past and present were sewn so well as have been sewn in Turkey. Where two continents of Eurasia meet, the kingdom of the soul greets its traveler with a book of civilization, whose pages witness to glory and survival and renewal in each rock and each horizon. From glisteny flashy metrow city life of the cities today to marble quarries of yesterday, Türkiye is not a location—but an open book in man’s mind. Ephesus: Walk Through Rome’s Heritage
To its west is the Aegean equivalent of Ephesus, the most sunburned and handsomely notorious ancient setting in the world. Its commercial and empire center back then, today it bewitches the traveler with its Library of Celsus—a two-stories tall frontage made up of perhaps 12,000 scrolls—and Great Theatre seating 25,000 theater-goers.
Walking on marble-grade Curetes Street, the tourist is greeted with fountains, temples, and pillar-columned inscriptions, flesh-and-blood reminders of Roman urban life’s self-indulgent unaccountability. Tog-clad citizens easier to envision are those not yet arrived to struggle or deceitful lying street vendors of Anatolian light.
Bodrum: The Silent Witness of the Sea
A number of miles inland from the coast, the biggest town constructed upon an ancient location, is Bodrum. Brooding over its blue harbour is straddled by Bodrum Castle, 15th-century Hospitaller castle. Within walls, within, stands the Museum of Underwater Archaeology, whose tawdry treasure house of sea spoil, shipwrecks, and amphorae is encased.
Bodrum towers over ancient ruins of Halicarnassas where the ancient Mausoleum of the Seven of the Ancient World once stood. There isn’t much left today, but still wafting through the air is the flavour of yesterday’s days, though now to be enjoyed blended with sea and bougainvillea fragrances.
Cappadocia: Where Earth and Spirit Meet
There in the country’s fall to Cappadocia’s sentimentalism about a dreamworld, renowned for fairy chimneys—volcanic explosion rock spires volcanic in origin weathered tall centuries. No less mythological is otherworldly beauty’s history.
Göreme Open-Air Museum is a cave-monasteries and churches World Heritage site carved out of soft tufa rock, entirely more than a thousand years old and decorated with plastered Byzantine frescoes. Cave painting in the rock enclosed and protected the early Christians.
Every dawn of every day is a carnival of hundreds of balloons floating high in Cappadocia valley skies colorizing gigantic canvases fusing history and nature into a heavenly sky kingdom.
Istanbul: The Endless City of Contrasts
No visit to Türkiye is ever quite complete without the splendor of Istanbul, city of two worlds—and two millennia. From Byzantium to Constantinople to capital of the world, Istanbul is where medieval decadence goes to meet modern chic in glorious harmony.
And at its heart, naturally, the Hagia Sophia, ancient church, ancient mosque, secular museum, functioning mosque. Next to it towers the six-minaret Blue Mosque in its tiling and glint of pinnacle God-made Iznik art, and the Grand Bazaar is a whirling dervish of the commercial centuries, its over 4,000 shops in a maze of archway bazaars.
Amongst the ancient remains, Istanbul throbs with the contemporary: its cafes and museums, Karaköy and Balat areas to explore.
Troy and İzmir: Myth and Modernity
Above the bones, across centuries and war, rises ancient Troy—Homer’s own Troy of The Iliad. Blackened columns, battered stone, and a surviving wooden horse greet one to legend that vibrated off the pages for millennia. Troy is scholars’ and fantasists’ heaven as a UNESCO World Heritage site. History, culture, and myth are entwined here.
Home at last in beautiful İzmir, but Türkiye’s future shines, just across the highway. The country’s third city, İzmir is old and new, palm-leaved boulevards yielding to modern factory and fresh blood invigorating this twentieth century sea port town. There, too, the past remains in shape—and most miraculously in the Agora of Smyrna, open-air museum over a slab of steel-and-glass tabletop.
Türkiye: A Nation Stuck in the Past
The greatest thing about Türkiye is not that it held on to the past—but to the past so joyously spilling over into the present. The saz player coming out of a side street just outside the walls of a centuries’ Roman theater, the Ottoman-urbanized cook in the cosmopolitan café of Istanbul, loam of rich earth is somewhere and everywhere.
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