The road meanders through a little crossroads village, with the requisite men hanging around the café and narrow cobblestone streets with houses snuggled right up to the road.
After the village, we hit countryside pretty quickly. Peaceful rolling valley farmland, with the flooded (rice?) fields, sheep and cows. The drive to Miletus is quick, only 10 minutes, and except for the dog attacking the car (these darn dogs! They are everywhere! Normally they just lay in the middle of the road and you have to drive around them like obstacle courses, but occasionally, as in this instance, they run after the car jumping at the doors. Makes it vital you remember to keep your windows rolled up pretty high!), it’s easy and non-eventful.
There is a museum before the site that has an overview of both Priene and Miletus, but we want to go to the site first. Pooh, there are 3 buses here already. Oh well, it won’t be quite as intimate as Didyma, but ok, we’ll deal. Well, OMG, there could be thousands of people here – you’d never know. The place is immense. Miletus was one of the greatest commercial centers of the Greek world until the harbor silted over. Settled in 1400 BC by the Minoan Greeks, the Ionians arrived in 1000 BC and slaughtered the men and took over. At some point in time the Romans conquered and rebuilt a lot of the temples and baths. The most magnificent thing here is the Theater – and it is the first thing you see as you arrive. Holy cow – it could seat 15,000 and it is still in amazing condition. And strewn all around it is a battle field of reclaimed pillars, marble and various and sundry other pieces of architecture uncovered during excavation.
It’s massive. We climb up into the theater, but there are too many people to take pictures. So we figured we’d come back. We peeked around a corner and found a rather muddy hallway that we figured we’d explore to see if we could find the agora (market).
Oh yeah, we found the agora all right! And the rest of the site – including the water monuments and main gate across a pond. It’s just vast.
As we are walking down to the pond, there is a cacophony of noises – we can’t figure it out. Turns out its sheep that are baa-ing over by one of the temples combined with what can only be frogs. It’s crazy loud. We’ll post a video of it and link it here when we can.
We start to make our way over to the Faustina baths, passing by the south agora, that is rather flooded from the rains, but still shows the outlines of the different shops and stalls once held there.
The baths are immense and so well preserved. The round arches and warming rooms are huge. We’re particularly taken with the arches. The architectural knowledge to build these things is pretty amazing when you think about how old they are.
I’m also taken with the lion statuary in the last room next to the pool. I can just imagine being in here bathing in the warm water in the 14th C BC!
This was so unexpected. And so wonderful. Also notice how many people you see in these pictures. As we said there were at least 3 or 4 buses here when we arrived and we barely ran into anyone – except in the theater – which is my only regret – that we didn’t go back and take pictures inside on the way out. Oh well, I’d say next time – but I’m thinking there won’t be a next time.
Back out on to the country road we head – no attack dog this time, only the cow hearders trying to keep the cow out of the road. Onto Priene, our last stop of the tour.
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