The Seven Churches, part II: Ephesus.

To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: These things saith he that holdeth the seven stars in his right hand, he that walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks: I know thy works, and thy toil and patience, and that thou canst not bear evil men, and didst try them that call themselves apostles, and they are not, and didst find them false; and thou hast patience and didst bear for my name's sake, and hast not grown weary. But I have this against thee, that thou didst leave thy first love. Remember therefore whence thou art fallen, and repent and do the first works; or else I come to thee, and will move thy candlestick out of its place, except thou repent.

- The Book of Revelations

Why does she have so many tits? I mean, come on; get a load of THAT.

- An unnamed Turkish friend

That morning I hadn't even bothered waking up at dawn to hysterically fling the curtains open or sob gently in front of the television as slick-haired mustachioed gentlemen gestured pointedly at happy sun faces or sad clouds that skittered across Doppler maps of Anatolia. I presumed that Satan would, indeed, win, and that I would come all the way across the planet without pressing my cheek against the heat-cracked pillars of the Library of Celsus at Ephesus. (This was something that I presumed would be forbidden, but the thought of it left me breathless and panting like a spaniel in heat.) I reclined in the darkness, allowing the Hooved One's victory to seep into my bones, embrittling them before my time and causing them to ache delicately.

From the kitchen I could smell the salça simmering seductively in a vat of beautiful, incredibly fresh butter, and could hear my friend's mother stirring something and humming. When she opened the door to the back porch, a shaft of gilded light snaked through the hallway and under the door.

A shaft of sunlight. The. Bright. Sky-disc. Was. Up.

Play it cool, I thought. You can do that, right?

I entered the kitchen slowly, my body loose, and beheld the four happy Turks who had begun to settle down to breakfast. Sit down, a menthol-cool voice whispered into my ear, and eat the delicious food before they start staring at you.

"So", the patriarch began while tapping his soft-boiled egg open, "I take it that today you two will go to Efes, yeah?" My eyes moistened and my vision swam; I presumed that "Efes", along with being the number one beer name in Turkey, was also the Turkified name for Ephesus (EFF-iss-iss), and the answer was hells yes. I couldn't drive a stick-shift, which is apparently all one can get in Turkey, but if I had to provide excruciatingly slow manual pleasure to a half-blind goat-merchant for a ride there while the sun shined WHILE THE SUN STILL SHINED, I was poised to make it happen.

***

Twenty minutes later the car slowed a little, and my friend/chauffeur began to scan the sides of the highway for something. "We can't be near", I said, trying not to allow sheer animal desperation to enter into my voice, "because the sign back there said that Selçuk is twenty-nine more kilometers away." "Ah", he said, guiding the car into some person's yard, "but the ayran is here."

Now don't get me wrong: I do love some good ayran. Ayran is very simple to make: take plain yogurt and add some lightly salted icewater to it, and then shake it up into a frappe. OK, so it sounds absolutely horrid when it is described, but take it from me: when it's hot and dusty out, and you're lucky enought to get your mitts on some ice-cold ayran, drinking it makes you feel as though you've been french-kissed by an archangel. You know, one of the really saucy ones with the three sets of wings. Or is that a seraphim? I digress.

He got out of the car and walked up to the door and knocked. Mind you, from the outside of this place one would assume that this was just some old house, but from previous experiences I knew that this was likely one of THOSE PLACES that everyone knew about and which would provide me with LOCAL COLOUR and ETHNOGRAPHIC PLEASURE.

A woman clad in şalvar came to the door and stared at my friend. At this point, had this been most places in the US, the woman would have fogged his ass with military-grade assailant-spray; because it was Turkey, she smiled brightly and began to shuffle out to a small shed near the door to fetch a tiny tea-table and Turkish stools. The Turk sat and began happily humming, merrily awaiting his treat; I was mildly aghast. Because I had not been offered any explanation as to why this woman, why this house and why oh God why these tiny stools that I was threatening to render into kindling, I was quite uneasy. It would have been like me going to some random person's house on my way to work and knocking on their door to be like "GIVE ME SOME COKE. AND A POLLY-O STRING CHEESE IF YOU HAVE ONE. ALSO SOME COOKIES. NO, NOT THAT SNACKWELLS SHIT."

True to his word, the woman disappeared into her house and came back out with a carafe of very thick ayran, which she poured into two glasses. As I drank, my friend explained that this woman was known throughout the entire province of İzmir as making the most sublime ayran in the whole of Western Anatolia. It was true; I may never again taste something so strangely refreshing. "And who would have thought", he mused, "that someone without electricty could make something like this."

The shadow of a passing cloud darkened the yard for a moment and my hysteria returned, now coupled with a healthy fear that I would poop my pants later as karmic retribution for having enjoyed this creamy, salty and only partially refrigerated treat so much. I clutched my friend's arm and croaked in a voice that sounded terrible and distant - like a faraway air-raid siren - that we needed to be on our way, lest something quite un-magical happen in this land of enchanted goat's-milk treatiness. As we left and as my friend paid her, the old woman asked us where we were heading. "Efes", my friend said. Her eyes glinted and, for a but a tiny moment, I thought I saw gathering tears. "That place is like an old friend", she said in a misty, far-away voice. "You know, a friend with whom you don't speak anymore." She paused and wiped off a glass with a rag. "When I was a girl, I wanted to be trained in the classics and archaeology. They were my first true loves. And then..."

In the trailing of her last word, I could feel the last forty years of Turkey's turbulent history, and I knew even without her telling me so that she was illiterate. The land of the galloping mare's head had come a very, very long way, but someone - something - had left her behind, alone with some goats, their milk and the salt that could be mined directly from the soil in her barren yard.

My heart/husk rattled within the tin barrel that was my chest with trepidation. I, too, had abandoned my first love, and worse still, I had abandoned THE SAME LOVE THAT THE OLD AYRAN WOMAN HAD. And and AND, I was soon to be hurtling at speeds generally reserved for particle acceleration on a Turkish highway toward one of the Seven Churches of the Apocalypse. You know, toward a place that God Himself told an angel He'd eff up by moving their candlestick out of its place lest those who'd left their first loves repented. Or something. Definitely with the candlesticks, though.

Oh, of course I still loved the classical world - why else would I be dragging several of my Turkish friends on death marches all across Anatolia if I didn't? - but my secret, first true love was the daring, brilliant and hubris-doomed city of Athens. Athens, which, while tantalizingly near, was still a sea away from where I sat and a world away from my newly-favored ethnographies about contested landscapes, genocide and the reconciliation of sacred/historical/archaeological space in large cities. OK, so it's pretty close to that last one, but you get the drift.

At last, we reached Ephesus and beheld the parking lot, which was an ocean of blinding whiteness - white gravel, white tour buses, pasty white Northern Europeans/North Americans bulging unattractively out of inappropriately cut white garments, aclutch their pallid white children. White bullhorns blatted in the sun-shattered heat and white dust swam lazily in volutes, kicked into the air by white strappy sandals. White-filtered cigarettes were devoured and ground into the white earth, which whispered briefly in protest.

I simultaneously wanted to die and to live.

Walking through Ephesus is an experience that is not really describable. The throngs of bleached tourists were, at first, quite unnerving, but as anyone who knows a damn thing about the ancient world, and indeed, of Ephesus, it is and was a city that can appreciate nothing less. The Star of Asia. The jewel in the diadem of the Ionian city states. Ephesus: second only to Rome in size, stature and grandeur. It would have been filthy, smoky and gloriously and wretchedly stinky as well, and there, in the burning Aegean sun, I made my peace with the reality of one of the most fascinating and engaging ruin sites in the whole of the world.

Ephesus would likely have evolved into a modern Turkish city had it not been for deforestation, which led to erosion, which silted up the city's famed harbor and turned it into a malarial fen. And then, oh wait, there were earthquakes too, because THEY don't suck at all. Finally, the inhabitants of the city left the burned-out remains of their own Wonder of the World - the Artemesion - and their once-splendorous pearl of the Aegean and fled toward Smyrna and to the interior of Anatolia. Abandoned, silted over and forgotten, Ephesus would await excavation in the twentieth century.

After spending as much time as I thought would be possible in the site itself, I darted into the souvenir tents that lined the path to the parking lot. After searching for twenty minutes, I found a small reproduction of the Artemis of Ephesus, replete with several penduluous sphereoids hanging from her upper torso. There were many of these statues to choose from, but I chose the one with the very large hat. After commenting on the polymammaric nature of the statue, my friend asked me why I'd chosen that one.

Together we walked toward the car and the promises of a renewed, long-lost love affair, of five more apocalyptic churches, and of the endless delights that Turkey herself provided for me every day. I realized upon reaching the car that I'd not answered his question, and I turned toward the city's ruins as I spoke.

"Because it looks like a candlestick", I said.

***

Me and the Ephesian amphitheatre

Until next time, I remain,

Domonic