Doyle and I made a quick sashay into Turkey this week. He wanted to see Ephesus, and I absolutely felt duty-bound to show him the most spectacular Greek ruins in the world! Smile. We then visited three other ancient cities in short order: Priene, Miletus (which I hope you recognize!), and Didymas. They lie in a straight line near the coastline, just south of the Mycale (or Dilek) peninsula that juts out into the Aegean Sea and almost touches Samos.
Two thousand years ago, Priene was a harbor city right on the Aegean Sea. It was built on a flat shelf above the sea, just below a dramatic mountain. What was the ocean floor then is now the rich farmland of the Meander River Valley. The first picture shows the temple against the mountain. The second picture shows the cute little stone chairs in the amphitheater. The third looks for all the world like Fred Flintstone's workshop. I can imagine Barney Rubble working out there on those stone gears, which are actually the drums, or sections of worked stone, they stacked on top of each other to make pillars. The fourth picture looks back across the valley floor toward the site. You can see where the temple stood, and the city walls, running diagonally down to the bottom, may be an indicator of where the ancient sea level stood.
Then it was on to Miletus. It was a fifteen mile drive across flat farmland, but in ancient times Melitus was built on the south side of a deep inlet of the Aegean Sea. Like Ephesus and Priene, it now lies about five miles from the present coastline. Miletus, of course, was the scene of Paul's meeting with the Ephesian elders in Acts 20. The best preserved structure in Miletus was the theater, but as we were wandering around it was impossible not to wonder where the meeting had been.
It appears that, in the first century, the city lie on a couple of low lying hills next to the sea. Archaologists say the city was situated on a peninsula, sticking out into the Aegean like a thumb, and it was thus surrounded by water on three sides. It had four harbors, the largest of which lie directly west of the theater and directly to the north. Paul would have ferried by this ampitheater as he made his way into the harbor after his stay at Samos.
The last stop was Didymas, near the modern Turkish coastal city of Didim. Wow, were we in for a treat! It contained the second largest temple in the ancient world, in a remarkable state of preservation. It had 122 columns, just slightly fewer than the temple at Ephesus, which was one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient World. I couldn't resist stretching myself across the top of one "drum" lying on the ground, and it was 6' across. We read that the oracle here was second in importance only to the famous oracle at Delphi. This is where people came for answers in those days, putting their faith in the wisdom of men (women, actually).
The second picture shows a pillar of the temple after it had been toppled by an earthquake. It turns out that Turkey and Greece have been prone to earthquakes for thousands of years. They lie on the end of a major fault line that starts in the Great Rift Valley in Africa, extends up through the Red Sea and Israel, and runs across Turkey and the islands into mainland Greece. Kind of like the San Andreas fault in California. There are a bunch of verses in Psalms and other Old Testament books that refer to earthquakes, although sometimes we miss that fact when we read them. Psalms 18:7 "Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations also of the hills moved and were shaken ......." (See also Psalms 60:2, 77:18, 97:4, 5, Job 9:6, 2 Samuel 22:8, etc)
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