JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Loosely translated: This exhibit on the Philippines ranges from the Cordillera in the North and travels to the South to Mindanao and shows considerable archaeological treasures from very ancient times.

This is an exhibit that is very poetic and elegant, and allows us to discover an entirely unknown world.

Thanks to Jomari for the translation.

This is the first major exhibition in France in the last twenty years devoted to the Philippines.

Visit the museum website.

The daily breakfast of yogurt with honey and black coffee, plus cereal. Of course the buffet at the Ozkaymak Hotel in Konya offered other choices, but this is the only food I can ingest so early in the morning. Aaaaaa morning sunlight. Never had so much vitamin D, and I live in the tropics.

First stop: the Mevlana Museum, shrine to the 13th century Persian poet and mystic Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi, known throughout the world as Rumi. (In his lifetime part of Turkey was under the Seljuk Sultanate.) Rumi advocated absolute tolerance and positive reasoning, qualities we tend not to associate with religion today.

No photography is allowed inside the main building, but the outer rooms display artifacts from the daily lives of Sufi mystics, including the Whirling Dervishes.

Rumi said: “Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.”

Outside Konya is the Sultanhani Caravanserai. A caravanserai is an inn for traveling groups and their horses, camels, donkeys, (caged) lions, livestock and assorted baggage. Note the very high clearance—if you’re traveling with elephants, as merchants did on the Silk Road, they’re welcome, too.

Thanks to Turkey’s immense highways and our excellent driver Sabatin, we got to Cappadocia (Kapadokya) ahead of schedule. Kapadokya was the capital of the Hittites. There’s Old School; they’re Old Testament. Genesis.

It was as if I had arrived on Arrakis without the services of a Navigator. Dune without the sand. Or the sandworms, although some of the weird rock formations rearing up from the ground could be Shai-Hulud. (The emperor of the Ottomans was called the Padishah Sultan.)

The entrance to the underground city of Kaymakli was lined with shops guarded by my usual welcoming committee.

The Turkish take care of their cats and dogs. According to Fulya, strays are rounded up and spayed/neutered. As the facilities cannot accommodate all the animals, they are released and given food and shelter by the local residents.

Clearly an arrangement that works for the cats and dogs.

Kaymakli the underground city is a network of tunnels, and as you go below temperatures can be subzero. I’d borrowed a friend’s The North Face goose down jacket, which is the greatest winter gear known to me. People climb Mt Everest in these things, they weigh next to nothing and can be compressed into 8 x 5 packs you can throw in your luggage.

The tunnels are narrow, and often you have to walk in a crouch. It’s like doing squats, except that you could slip and pitch headlong into the next “room”. After 10 minutes of walking on your haunches you work up a sweat. Conclusion: the residents of Kaymakli had quads of steel. Which was useful, as many of them were early Christians on the run from persecution.

The living spaces gouged out of the soft volcanic rock are arranged around ventilation shafts so people could live comfortably while avoiding detection. To close the entrances they rolled giant millstones across the openings. No one could get in; the only way to dislodge the residents was to flood the tunnels, which would take too much water.

Just before dark we checked into our final hotel in Turkey, the 5-star Dinler Park in Urgup. This cat thought he owned the joint.

I really am not a morning person. Breakfast at the Colossae five-star hotel and thermal spa in Pamukkale. Lots of European and Asian tour groups. At mealtimes the huge dining room is a reenactment of the Tower of Babel. Which is not here but in Iraq.

My room has a jacuzzi. The water just sits there, though; it’s more like a small swimming pool.

First stop, the necropolis of Hierapolis, a big Phrygian city in Greco-Roman times. Sarcophagi in assorted shapes, some as big as houses. (Yes, we have bigger (much newer) mausoleums back home, fully-furnished with functioning kitchens.)

Then we stopped at the travertines of Pamukkale. That’s not snow on the mountains—the rocks turned white from the mineral deposits of the hot springs.

You can walk barefoot in the hot spring water. I was too lazy to take off boots, socks, leggings, get my feet wet, then put my footwear back on.

During a stop in Afyon I had a coffee and the local specialty: yogurt with honey and opium poppies. “Afyon” means opium, which is their primary crop. Opium is grown under government supervision in Turkey, for medicinal purposes.

The yogurt with honey and opium poppies is delicious. I don’t think I got high, but I can’t tell the difference between my “normal” state and intoxication.

This family of cats lives outside the restaurant where we stopped for lunch. The cats I’ve seen in Turkey are very friendly, or maybe I just reek of cat.

This was the view from my seat for most of the day. We’re driving to Konya, capital of the Seljuk empire. Why is it more exhausting to sit in a bus for an hour than to walk for the same period? I’m almost halfway through the Moby Dick podcasts but I keep drifting into unconsciousness.

This is the “filler” part of the trip; things pick up once we get to Cappadocia. On the other hand I’ve communed with the highways of Asia Minor. This song kept playing in my head.

By the time we got to Konya it was nearly closing time at the Museum of Mevlana (more familiar to us as Rumi) so we put off the visit to the next morning.

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.

I have not been on this schedule since the sixth grade. Alarm at 0600, breakfast at 0630, leave suitcase outside door at 0700, get in the bus at 0800. I’d skip breakfast but there’s no coffee pot in the hotel room. Or potable water. When you visit Turkey, remember that water is not free, even in restaurants.

Ephesus the ancient Greek, then Roman, then Byzantine, then Seljuk, then Ottoman city in Anatolia (Asia Minor) has two reigning tourist attractions, both female divinities.

The more recent one is the Virgin Mary, who is believed to have lived in this nondescript house on a hill. There are no records to support this claim: the BVM is supposed to have traveled to Asia Minor with the apostle John after Jesus’s death, but there was no forwarding address. This house reportedly matches the description provided by a German nun, who saw it in a vision. It is now a pilgrimage destination.

I suspect that Ephesus was the best candidate for the BVM’s address because for centuries before Christianity the city had been associated with another, much older female divinity—the Greek goddess Artemis who was merged with the Anatolian goddess Kybele to become the Lady of Ephesus, who is portrayed as a woman with many, many breasts (though some think they might be testicles).

This is all that remains of the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: pieces of stone piled into a column in Selcuk. The original temple was burned down by one Herostratus, who wanted to be remembered for something, anything. This makes him the first fame whore on record. “Why didn’t Artemis protect her temple?” people asked. Tradition says the goddess of fertility was busy that day, helping a woman who was in labor. The child grew up to become Alexander the Great. The temple was rebuilt, the size of a football field. Later it was destroyed by a Christian mob.

The ruins of Ephesus give you some idea of its grandeur and sophistication. Its main avenue is lined with the remains of shops, you can see the pipes in the ground for the indoor plumbing, and there are holes in the street where large torches were planted at night.

The ancient city is still occupied, just not by people.

Cats make themselves at home in the great archaeological sites. These ones are better-groomed and behaved than the ones at the Colosseum in Rome.

I knew the Romans had public baths, but communal toilets? Can taking a dump really be a social activity? Outside of politics of course.

Scholars think this is an ad for a brothel. There’s a foot to tell patrons where to go, a woman and a heart indicating what they could get, and a bill (credit card?) reminding them that it wasn’t free.

This cat is going there.

(Insert bad joke about someone losing their head.)

The facade of the Library of Celsus. They read scrolls at the time, which made it easier to beat bad writers to death.

The 25,000-seat theatre built on the side of the mountain. “What’s on tonight?” “Oedipus Rex.” “Sophocles again? I’d rather gouge my eyes out.” Rimshot.

Outside the Sultanahmet is the Hippodrome, where they held horse and chariot races during the Byzantine period. (Think Ben-Hur, killer wheels optional.) Note the carvings on the base of the obelisk portraying the audience at the track.

Today the Hippodrome is a park occupied by vendors selling guidebooks and souvenirs. Do not look interested or even make accidental eye contact—you will end up buying something that you will leave on a table and then throw out when it is encrusted with dust.

“Hello,” said a vendor. I feigned deafness. “Hello!” he called out. I ignored him. “I’m not trying to sell you anything, I just want to ask you how you are,” he huffed. Aha, the guilt approach. I’m still not buying anything.

The 3,500-year-old Obelisk of Thutmose III the Egyptian pharaoh once stood in the Temple of Karnak in Luxor. Around the 4th century, the Emperor Theodosius took it back to Constantinople as imperial loot.

The Hippodrome also had four life-size bronze horses, the Quadriga, which is now in the Basilica of San Marco in Venice. The Venetians took it home as war loot. They were supposed to be on their way to the Crusades in 1206, but they ended up sacking Constantinople instead. Very convenient, as Constantinople was their business competitor.

There are many Venetian treasures at the Louvre in Paris. Napoleon’s army took those home as war loot. You could think of history as a series of looting expeditions.

Hagia Sophia was an Eastern Orthodox cathedral during the Byzantine era, a Roman Catholic cathedral during the Latin era following the sack of Constantinople, and a mosque during the Ottoman era. In the 1930s it was secularized and turned into a museum. Turkey is 99 percent Muslim, but it is a secular state. It has no state religion.

Back to my neck exercises: the ceiling of the corridor leading to the main door of Hagia Sophia.

You’re looking up, but you get the sensation of falling.

The dome of Hagia Sophia is the fourth largest in the world, and the oldest. Consider the architectural challenge of building a massive dome 1650 years ago. (The TV series of Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth starring the lovely Eddie Redmayne as a builder in medieval England goes into some of those problems.)

Those figures under the dome are not angels. They were paintings of saints that were covered up when the church was turned into a mosque. The artists simply painted wings over the figures.

I think Yeats was referring to this mosaic in Sailing to Byzantium.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

* * * * *

Four hours later I’m at the airport in Izmir, boarding a tour bus to Kusadasi. We stop at Mosaik, a store that sells Turkish delight (local name: lokum) in different flavors, apple tea, spices, wine and olive oil products.

The effusive store owner has a foolproof sales tactic: the first taste is free.

Another local product recalling the area’s Greco-Roman history.

This cat was the welcome committee at the Tatlises Hotel in Kusadasi.

*Blasted wifi, the first draft disappeared.