This morning, breakfast and then back to our room to wait for the worst heat of the afternoon to pass. The GF did his standing while I rested my fingers (napped). The around 2 we took the shuttle down to Selcuk and found ourselves a taxi to take us on today’s excursion.
We went through the countryside towards Aydın – rolling hills covered in fig trees and olives and of course poplars and the other trees of this area, deep green against orange soil.
We arrived in Magnesia on the Meander, magnesia not where the magnets come from and the meandering river has since meandered away.
It was a quiet ruined city, with a total of six people visiting including us in the wide fields strewn with broken stones. Of course many of the most interesting finds had been taken away, to museums in Berlin or Istanbul or Aydın and it felt a good argument for repatriation, not just from other countries but even from other places, to keep these things where they belong.
The site is currently being excavated – or rather was until the pandemic broke – so there was a little barred shelter over an excavated house and it seemed strangely more real than the reconstructed ones in Ephesus as one really got a sense of those walls buried underfoot.
We’d heard there was a stadium as well and the Magnesia caretaker told us to drive up the next little road and ring the bell and he’d open it for us.
So we drove and then walked and rang the bell for the gate to open and walked a little further and turned a corner and the stadium opened up before us, row upon row of seats climbing up a hill, seating 30,000. A magnificent site, and with lovely reliefs all along the sides. To think this is the secondary sight of a secondary sight.
We went to a vineyard for a late lunch or early dinner, perfectly pleasant but overpriced, and then returned to Selcuk for coffee. The GF’s twittering was now ratcheting up as the Euros final is tonight, and he and the rest of England, is a wreck.