The Cotton Castle Surprise
When we left the Sabiha Gokcen airport with a 10 day car rental, we had really just planned on travelling the 4 hrs to the Dardanelles and ancient Troy for school augmentation purposes. TOO EASY!¹ I soon realized that we could hit numerous unique sites if we took a simple, 30 hr road trip through western Turkey. (Side note, we’ve mostly stopped reading travel sites for cool places to visit; they almost always list UNESCO sites anyway so now we just check their map.) Ephesus, Pamukkale, Safronbolu plus the Aegean coast (fine, we still read some travel sites). Hit the bathroom kids, we’re going for a drive.
Surprise Travertine
Certainly compared to what we’d just seen in Greece, Ephesus was astonishing for the extent and preservation of the ruins. However, Pamukkale (pamuk: cotton, kale: castle) was the real surprise. The area is yet another hot springs, super-saturated with calcium, resulting in an expanse of pure white travertine. Actually, part of the surprise was that you are allowed to walk all over it, provided you take your shoes off. We expected an interesting geological site with some ancient ruins built to utilize the hot water, but were shocked by the beauty and scale of both the geologic and archeologic features. In fact, Em kept remarking that she didn’t even have a mental category for this thing she was seeing. It is huge. And blindingly white.
Surprise Hierapolis
As we walked up the travertine, we occasionally caught glimpses of the archeological site above, but only when we climbed to the top of the amphitheater did the scale of Hierapolis become clear. The city covered many acres and included the amphitheater we stood atop, plus, numerous Roman temples, two churches, several column-lined roads and a huge necropolis still covered with enormous stone sarcophagi.
The travertine channels that ancient hydro-engineers slowly built up centuries ago still lay snaked along the ground nearly everywhere, showing the extent of the Roman ‘spas’. We even found one bath house with an open hole allowing us to explore within, where, with a cell phone flashlight, we found a pool and benches plus calcium deposits on the walls where water flowed in.
Surprise Churches
As we climbed the necropolis hillside, we came to the site that archeologist have recently claimed is the burial of St Philip the Apostle and walked through the remains of a 1st century church built around his tomb. Regardless of which Philip is actually buried there, this church is from the very, very beginning of Christianity and is by far the oldest church we have ever visited. Interestingly, the layout, even at this early date, was already in the classical cross shape.
Further up the hill, we came across St Philips Martyrium, where he was crucified, upside down, and on the site of which an octagonal church was built, complete with room for dozens of pilgrims (and of course their tourism money).
Surprise Sunset
After descending from the churches, we walked past the Temple of Apollo, the Nymphaeum, Roman Bath, a modern pool with people swimming amongst collapsed marble columns, and finally the city gates. Admittedly, the sunset wasn’t actually a surprise, but the horrible air quality from every house's heating fire made it a nice, deep golden even with a cloudless sky. After it set, we descended the last section of travertine and put on our shoes in the illuminated twilight.
¹My brother-in-law, Andrew once told me about someone in his US Army unit/that he was responsible for training, who responded to orders with one of only two replies: “YES, SIR!” or “TOO EASY!”. He never said “No”. Perhaps a bit apocryphal in the recalling and/or the telling, but Em and I reference it often.
