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The problem with visiting Antalya, on Turkey's
southern Mediterranean coast, is that you simply don't want to go home.
We happened to arrive the day after a storm with near hurricane force
winds and, as you can see below, the sea was heaving violently and dark
clouds were muscling out the sun. The next day,
however, the sun had chased away the clouds and had the sky all to
itself, and Poseidon had regained his composure, leaving the sea a
tranquil blue. We were staying on the fifth floor of a hotel
perched on a cliff rising from the sea, and I opened the sliding glass
door to our balcony and snapped this photo of the snow covered peaks
across the bay.
We loved strolling through Kaleici, the historic
quarter, full of old but perfectly restored Ottoman houses, most of
which have become carpet shops. Unfortunately, their tourist trade has pretty much dried up
ever since George W started squawking like a hawk in heat for war. This guy lounging
with his dogs pretty much summed up the mood there - relaxed! And
this lazy seaside terrace cafe struck me as very Riviera. |
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We came to Antalya for a conference, and you can
see our colleagues blowing off steam at the evening soiree. In Turkey,
there is no shame in dancing. No one is cajoled for his
"white man's overbite." In fact, after a few years in Turkey,
our friend Bill found his inner rhythm and is now a
veritable pelvis on wheels. We
immediately felt at home here after coming from Eskisehir, where few
locals speak English and seeing a tourist from America is akin to an
extraterrestrial sighting. In Antalya, people called out to us in
English, German, Spanish, Russian - anything to get us into their shops
- and they looked at us more like customers (or prey) than freak show. So an
eight-hour overnight bus ride through the dark landscape punctuated by
the piercing screams of a disfigured infant in the seat behind us took us from the barren, conservative
Anatolian steppe to the cosmopolitan Mediterranean-meets-the-mountains. |
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| While every little town in Turkey boasts an
archaeological museum, Antalya's is world class. The god on the right is
Poseidon who, along with scores of other larger than life marble
statuary, once decorated Perge's grand theater. In the middle is a
finely worked marble sarcophogus depicting, from the left of the photo,
Cupid standing on two swimming dolphins, Medusa encircled by a laurel
wreath and Cupid's mother, Aphrodite, the goddess of love, astride a
sphinx. The museum also has a small but impressive collection of
Christian art, like the triptych below, salvaged from 17th century
churches. |
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| We rented a car and headed out early one drizzly
morning to see some nearby ancient sites. The most striking,
due to its breathtaking mountaintop perch, was Termessos, a city
inhabited by, you guessed it, the Termessians. Their steeply
walled city proved impregnable to even Alexander the Great, but it was
no match for three Americans armed with a Swiss Army knife.
Erin-Kate is scrambling over remnants from the extensive baths, now
retreating into the lush landscape, and she is posing with Elizabeth in
front of the Artemis-Hadrian temple. |
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| The cliffside theater at Termessos, although not as
well-preserved as some others nearby, offers an unforgettable view.
Wandering among the broken marble columns, one can imagine watching a
play while enjoying a backdrop of verdant mountains, swaths of azure
sky, and a lush valley emptying out into the aquamarine Mediterranean.
After a bit of Thespian reckoning, we then wandered over to the
necropolis, where hundreds of sarcophagi litter the slopes and spill into the valley
below. |
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| In Perge, a contemporary of Termessos, the ruins are
spread over an extensive flat plain. It's best known for its
Hellenistic gates, through which victorious emperors would proceed among
the cheers and praise of their subjects to celebrate the most recent
conquest. Details from mosaics, frescoes, and intricately carved
friezes - strewn about like leaves - hint at the once glorious past of
this Greco-Roman city. At the Nymphaeum, from where the picture on
the bottom left was taken, fresh spring water gushed forth from the
Earth, flowed under the reclining figure of the river god, and ran
through the marble channel running down the middle of the colonnaded
main street, cooling the whole town off in the sultry Mediterranean
summers. |
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We ended our day by dropping Elizabeth in Side, a
charming seaside town teeming with tourists scampering over its many
ruins. As soon as we got there, we walked out to the Temples of
Athena and Apollo which stand on a splinter of land jutting into the sea.
It was a magical time at a picture perfect spot, with the setting sun
silhouetting the temple's ruins and the storm-tossed sea surging all
around us. The only reason we left was because we were about to
hop on a bus for another overnight journey to that city of cities -
Istanbul. |
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