We are gradually moving west across Turkey and our first stop today was the house where Jesus's mother Mary went to live and hide after the crucification.
Apparently a nun living in a monastery in Germany in the 1800's started having vivid dreams about Mary's houses location, which at that time was unknown. After telling everyone at the monastery about her dream in great detail, a journalist wrote a news story, but no one took it seriously. However, many years after her death an archeologist heard about the article, and searched exactly where she described and found the foundations of the house.
Is that the whole truth or not? I don't know, but it was very nice and peaceful building and it had a nice restaurant nearby.
It was a couple of miles from the ancient city of Ephesus, which was our main event of the day.
Ephesus dates from about 500 bc and was a Greek town under the control of the Romans. It has three extremely famous buildings, the first of which is the library pictured above.
The second is an enormous amphitheatre that could seat 25,000 people.
We were very lucky as we arrived just at the same time as another tour group, and one of the tourists was an amazing singer who sang a beautiful song that could be heard around the whole amphitheatre.
The third most famous building is the social toilets. Our guide says that they were communal, and people would gather to use the facilities and have a really good chat.
Unfortunately the toilets are now roped off, but when we came here in 2008 I sat on the nearest toilet (obviously just for demonstration purposes) and Darren took my photo.
Photo - October 2008
The guide also told us that as the seats are made of marble then in the hot summer weather they would be nice and cool to sit on, but in the winter they would be freezing. He said that rich people used to pay someone to sit on the seat and warm it up before they then arrived to sit down.
Finally, we reached our hotel on the seafront at Kuşadası. The sun was just setting, and I managed to hold this pose for about half a second.
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