stevenpiziks | The Cruise: Miletus and the Temple of Apollo

So many temples, so little time.

For today's outing at Melitus, we had to get up extra early. Darwin was losing his enthusiasm for ruins, especially after the hot, crowded tour from yesterday. But we persevered and boarded yet another bus for Melitus and the Temple of Apollo, which are in modern-day Turkey.

We had an excellent, outgoing Turkish guide who narrated the history of the area while we were riding the bus (other guides hadn't done this). At Miletus, we explored the little archaeological museum there and then hit the town of Miletus.

Miletus was a fairly big deal back in the Bronze Age, with a population of 80,000 or so, but it fell into ruin over the centuries. The big thing for me was the amphitheater. Miletus has the remains of a huge Greek theater! I've been teaching Greek theater for a long, long time, but all my information came from reading and from photos. Now I was actually at one!

The theater was impressively huge, and could seat several thousand people. The stage was gone—it had been made of wood—but the stone supports were still there. I immediately identified the parts of the theater—the parados (where the chorus entered and exited), the altar, the skene (or where it used to be), and the orkestra (which evolved into today's orchestra pit). I only half-listened to guide, who was saying stuff I already knew. It was much more interesting to explore the place and see all this for real. I tested the acoustics by clapping my hands several times and yep—they were as good as everyone said Greek theaters are. I didn't know about the tunnels and archways for the audience, though, and I didn't know that the Greeks chipped out the bottom of the stone seating so you could tuck your feet under the benches when someone wanted to get by.

I could have spent the whole day there, but we had to move on to the next stop: the Temple of Apollo.

The bus took us down the road to the ToA, which is in a tiny, tiny town that only exists because of the Temple tourists. We disembarked and I saw that =this= was a temple!

The Temple of Apollo (and Artemis) was huge and impressive in its day. The front steps led up to a forest of 25 huge, HUGE columns. Each was at least 10 feet in diameter—and all of them were broken. The temple had been destroyed twice, once by Muslims and once by Christians. The Eastern Orthodox Christians, as they often did, also erected a church on the temple grounds to "reclaim" the land. Alexander the Great had the temple rebuilt after its first destruction, but after the second, it stayed a ruin, though the church was removed after a couple hundred years.

Once you're past the columns, you find yourself at another staircase that leads up to a big slab of marble with columns flanking it. It was here that the Oracle made pronouncements. Apollo's Oracles (soothsayers) were usually women, but in this temple, they were often men, too. The Oracle got high and went into a trance behind one of the columns, and another priest would put a petitioner's question to her. She would mutter incoherently, and the priest would emerge from behind the column and translate what the oracle had apparently said. If it made no sense ("Should I marry this woman?" "When the bats fly at sunrise, the crows will build their nests on the far mountain." "Wait—what?" "Okay, next!"), that was your problem.

The rest of the temple was a huge open area, unroofed these days. Darwin and I listened to our guide, then poked around for a while, trying to imagine the place filled with pilgrims and priests and workers and slaves and others. Now the only inhabitants are a few stray cats who accept petting from visitors with varying degrees of amusement or hostility.

When our time was up, we headed back to the bus, and out front of a souvenir shop, I found some statuettes for sale: Ares, Atlas, and Tyr and Fenris. Which one doesn't belong? :)