Tour - Day 10 - Izmir - Pergamum - Asclepion - Troy - Canakkale

It’s getting colder now that we’re headed more north. Our first stop today was the acropolis of Pergamum.(An acropolis is the high part of a city, usually where the important people and important buildings were located, with most of the townspeople living below.) We rode a gondola to the top of the mountain and then walked around the site, again the site of Bronze Age, Greek, Roman, Turkish civilizations.

Going native?

Then back down to the bottom of the hill to visit the Asclepion, an ancient medical center. Treatments included massage, mud baths, drinking sacred water, herbs and ointments. Diagnosis was often by dream analysis. The physician Galen who was born here in 131 A.D. was one of the most important early physicians, adding greatly to the knowledge of the circulatory and nervous systems. The site is amazingly well preserved. People slept in a dormitory, then walked through a tunnel to the round treatment building.

Of course wherever we turn there are cats. Donna said she thinks Turkey really translates to CatLand. Good thing I can’t bring any home in my luggage, because they are so friendly and just want to be picked up and petted and they purr and purr (and of course if I happened to have a handout they probably wouldn’t turn it down). These cats are feral, but totally socialized, and also clean, well groomed and fat, and they have bus loads of tourists every day to pet them so I can’t really feel too sorry for them. But each is cuter than the next.

From Pergamum, we headed to Troy, with a pitstop on a high hill above the Agean Sea. That land you can just make out through the haze is the Greek Island of Lesbos.

Troy was of course made famous in the Iliad, but after seeing Ephesus and some of the other sites, Troy isn’t as well reconstructed. Plus, there are nine different levels (different civilizations) at Troy, one built on top of the other, so they don’t really want to reconstruct one level at the expense of another. At the entrance they have a kind of stupid looking Trojan horse that you can climb into and have your photo taken, but we didn’t. Seems as if the Trojans would have been pretty stupid to take this horse into their city when it has windows and what looks like a house on top of it.

Jon told us Homer’s story about Troy and the Trojan wars and how it was fought because of a beautiful woman, but then he said it’s nice story but probably nonsense. More likely the war was fought because Troy controlled the Dardanel Strait which connects the Agean to the Marmara Sea, the Bosphorus, and ultimately the Black Sea, and they collected taxes from anyone who wanted to pass by. Also there are ancient pictures on pottery depicting a horse being used as a battering ram to knock down the gates, not as a place for soldiers to hide. Anyway it was interesting to be there.

Tonight we are in Canakkale right on the Dardanelles Strait - our hotel is right across the street from the water. Tonight was our last official dinner together as a group - tomorrow night we will be back in Istanbul. Of course we’ll probably all go eat somewhere together, but without Jon, and it won’t be the same. This hotel is neat - there are two towers and we are on the 4th floor of one. There is a center living space in the middle and then about 12 rooms open off the center space. We travelers, Jon and Hussein are the only ones on this floor, so Donna, Armando, Jon and I stayed up in the “living room” until late.

One block from our hotel is the Trojan horse used in the Brad Pitt movie a few years ago - in the morning we'll walk over and have a better look, so I'd better turn in now.