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Buffet breakfast at the Blanca Hotel in Izmir. It’s a boutique hotel, small and elegant, from the looks of it renovated recently. Rather boring view of the highway.

This whole day felt like an extended course on Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley (not Alan Moore, though that one’s good, too): visits through the remains of great cities from the classical age. I’ve always wanted to be an archaeologist—I already have the whip, the fedora and the leather jacket which, unfortunately, are not as useful to an archaeologist as a teaspoon and a brush.

If you’re interested in history, you don’t see just chunks of marble, ancient graffiti and headless statues. You imagine what used to be there.
This is all that’s left of Sardis, capital of the ancient kingdom of Lydia. Lydia was part of the Persian empire, then the Roman, then the Byzantine. It’s also mentioned disparagingly in the Book of Apocalypse. Croesus, as in “rich as …” was king there. You could say he invented money. Listen to the BBC History of the World in 100 Objects podcast.

The old synagogue.

Lydia is also mentioned in Herodotus. Here’s the tale of Candaules and Gyges as told in another movie about explorers and archaeologists, The English Patient.

Ganyan ang pronunciation ng “chair”.

The gymnasium of Sardis. I didn’t see any cats in this site, although there was a dog who followed us around.

All these photos were taken with a Sony Xperia acro S phone. Saved on luggage space and left my camera.

Then we visited another Temple to Artemis. That’s our guide Fulya, whom my companions have taken to calling Sandra Bullock. I pointed out that she looks more like Paulina Porizkova. (Hindi nila naaalala si Paulina, ako lang yata ang bakla dito.)

The ruins of Laodicea, one of the seats of early Christianity.

On the way to the hotel we stopped at the Varol textile store. We had reached Pamukkale, where cotton is grown. “Pamuk” means cotton, so Orhan Cotton. Turkish fabrics, especially towels, are of a very high quality. I’m not sure what this is exactly, but it’s pretty.