When it Rains.. It Pours
12.10.2011
25 °C
Thanksgiving is over and so is the weather. There were were sailing serenely along the Mediterranean coast of Turkey under a perfectly blue sky when... Wham! We ran into a storm of biblical proportions and wished we had hired an Ark instead of a Renault. Garbage cans,trees and hydro poles were flung into our path, the turquoise sea turned to slate and threw itself viciously at the cliffs, roads turned into rivers and ancient villages were dislodged from their mountainside perches. We plodded on, but had to skip a couple of historic sites in order to keep dry and maintain our schedule. However, we've been to so many fascinating places on this trip that we could open a Turkish travel agency. Afrodisias is a ruined Roman city that rivals Ephesus, but isn't so well known because of its remoteness. Its claim to fame is this incredible stadium...
It is vast and seated more than 30,000 people a couple of millennium ago. Afrodisias is also known for its magnificent marble sculptures and this beautiful temple of Aphrodite...
And, of course, it had a theatre. Here is James trying a little Shakespeare on a stage that was already 1,500 years old when the Bard was born...
But the most splendid theatre in the Roman Empire of Asia Minor is in Aspendos. Aspendos was a great city 500 years BC, but the Romans built this incredible twenty-thousand seater at the end of the first century AD.
The theatre is so perfectly preserved that concerts and performances are still staged here, and it is so acoustically perfect that it is possible to hear a stage whisper in the back row of the upper gallery - we know,we tried it.
Fortunately the storms had passed by the time we reached the airport in Izmir and flew off on the next leg of our tour - this time to see one of the most unforgettable and unmissable sights in the world. Here's just a taster...
Posted by Hawkson 02:02 Archived in Turkey Comments (3)