After yesterday’s slightly overwhelming day, today we decided to stay around Selcuk, which is a lovely little town. It’s bisected by a road, with the markets and other things on one side and the sights and old houses (many now turned into guesthouses) on the other side.
We started with the museum which was fairly uninteresting until we turned a corner into the room with the two Artemis statues facing each other in a dark room. There was a remarkable power to the statues, one the beautiful goddess with a garland of the zodiac, and the other the colossal goddess, bearing temples on her head and accompanied by Cybelean lions.
The third was another goddess, an older one than the other two, a small gold figure with a straight body incised with the vertical lines of her dress, and a wide flat serene face, a little too big for her body.
Next we went to the Isa Bey mosque, a Seljuk era building, where the GF was approached by the imam and handed a pamphlet which, I must say, was not a very effective bit of proselytising. On his little rack of religious literature was a notice in Urdu saying ‘Dear brothers, these books are to convert the unbelievers. Please don’t take any.’
We then went up the hill with the ruins of the basilica where St John is buried and the citadel where he wrote his gospel.
It was fiercely hot but an atmospheric place, with relatively few people around, and overlooking wide green fields. On the site of the basilica, perhaps on the site of St John’s grave there was a little group doing something mysterious with little coloured stones and crosses. I stopped to watch and one of the women came over and handed me a rosary with a cross – so I also got proselytised. On returning to the hotel I looked up the inscription on the cross to find it was from a place in Bosnia where there have been a few apparitions of the Virgin, and where pilgrimage has only recently been permitted by the Church.
We found a café which made for a pleasant stop, and walked through some nice quiet streets till we reached a tree lined path running along the wide road towards Ephesus etc. Off this road was what remained of the Artemision, where the goddesses had once been, and one of the seven wonders of the world. Here, hidden from the road, was a wide yellowed field with a handful of columns, the central standing one with a stork’s nest on it and the fort rising up behind the trees. On one side was a still pond with a goose and some frogs and tortoises (and more tumbled masonry), and all around trees and tall shrubs feeling quite separate from the world and time. At the foot of the standing column a stork walked around. There was no one there except at the very entrance where a couple of tourist touts called after as we went in but made no move to insist. This was, I think, my favourite place in Selcuk, perhaps because the three goddesses were still in my mind.
It is a fine little town and reminds me of Cholula.