The Penn Stater Magazine

The Ruins at Ephesus

May 7, 2011 at 6:30 am Tina Hay 2 comments

I’ve gotten a little behind on this blog thing. It’s hard to keep up, what with all the sightseeing, bus riding, picture taking, eating, getting back late at the end of the day, doing a little laundry in the hotel sink, running off to the next set of ancient Greek ruins, etc., etc., etc. (Yeah, I realize that you don’t feel the slightest bit sorry for me.)

Anyway, a couple of days ago—it feels like weeks ago already, we’ve done so much since then—we visited the ruins at Ephesus (pronounced EFF-uh-soos), a city that dates to 1000 B.C. It’s not nearly as well known as, say, the ruins at Pompeii, and yet I’m told it’s just as impressive if not more so.

That seems to be a theme on this trip: Turkey has some amazing attractions that don’t get much attention, relatively speaking. In fact, Turkey has more than 10,000 ancient cities—which is more than Greece and Italy put together. The country clearly needs to hire a marketing director.

Gökhan, of course, was a font of knowledge at Ephesus: Not only does he have a Ph.D. in archaeology, but Ephesus is where he did his doctoral dissertation. He spent seven years working there, excavating something like 176 different types of terra cotta pipes used in the ancient city’s water system. We came across a stack of old pipes among the ruins and Gökhan said, with a touch of pride, “Those are my pipes.”

Below are a few photos from the visit to Ephesus. Here’s Gökhan telling us about the Library of Celsus, behind him; it’s the signature attraction at Ephesus:

And here’s a shot of the crowds swarming their way down to the library. If this is how many people visit an unheralded set of ruins in the spring, I’d hate to see how overrun a place like Pompeii must be in mid-summer:

Here are Penn Stater travelers Sonja and Paul Jenney in front of a bas relief of Nike, goddess of victory, one of just hundreds of good-sized relics excavated at Ephesus:

And here’s Penn State traveler Hanna Schleyer in the Ephesus Museum in the nearby town of Selçuk. The museum has a terrific collection of relics from Ephesus, including many busts like these that you can walk right up to and photograph. These aren’t replicas—these are the real things.

I’ve posted many more photos from our visit to Ephesus, Selçuk, and the nearby village of Sirince to the Alumni Association’s Facebook page.

Tina Hay, editor

P.S. A piece of trivia: The major beer in Turkey, at least judging from the signs you see at bars and along highways, is Efes Pilsen—and the “Efes” gets its name from “Ephesus.”

Entry filed under: Alumni Association, Penn State alumni. Tags: Efes Pilsen, Ephesus, Legendary Turkey, Library of Celsus.