Urban poetry

This is a good example of the advantages of being able to Google places I've visited after the fact. I took this picture the day I visited Ephesus, and if I had any idea what the building was then, I no longer remember it. I was intrigued by the glass shapes sticking out of the domes; they looked like giant soda bottles and I've never seen anything like them. And I loved the giant stork's nest on top. The actual storks wouldn't be showing up again until spring, but you could see their nests everywhere.

I would have liked to know more about those domes, but unfortunately I didn't know where exactly I took this picture. I was walking around a little before getting back on the bus, I knew that. At the Basilica of St John, maybe? Checking the time stamps on other photos narrowed it down. It was at the Ephesus museum in Selçuk, not the basilica. And by using Google Street View, I was able to find the building. It's a public bathhouse across the road from the museum. I still don't know the significance of those peculiar domes, but I guess I can live with that.

The Seven Wonders of the World

This is the view from the Basilica of Saint John in Selçuk. The single column that you can see on the left-hand side is most of what remains of the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Looking at this picture made me realize that on this trip I saw the locations of three of the seven wonders: the Temple of Artemis, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Statue of Zeus at Olympia.

They're always coming up with new versions of Seven Wonders, but the original is the only one I ever remember. I've seen the Great Pyramid, the only one of the wonders still standing, and I've seen where the Lighthouse of Alexandria was, so that's five of seven. I'm almost certainly never going to Iraq and no one knows whether the Hanging Gardens of Babylon even existed, so unless I happen to find myself in Bodrum, Türkiye, where the omnipresent Knights of St. John used stones from the famous Mausoleum to fortify their castle, five of seven is all I'm going to be able to check off. And that's fine with me.

More of the basilica

In the 6th century the original wooden church on the site was in ruins, and the Emperor Justinian had it torn down and replaced with a magnificent six-domed basilica, modeled after the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. The wall and columns on the right are reconstruction, of course, but I especially love the marble on the columns. Obviously, you build with what you have—no one said, “Oh, I'm sick of all that white marble everywhere, let's have some fun!"

St. John's tomb

I really had to restrain myself from titling this post, Who's buried in St. John's tomb? Because, as it turns out, the answer is “no one.”

Unlike Mary, there is historical evidence for John's presence in Esphesus, and most traditions have him dying of old age there, the only Apostle who wasn't martyred. But during the reign of Constantine, only a few hundred years after John is believed to have died, for some reason the tomb was opened and was found to contain no bones. This has been explained as proof that John, like Mary, was assumed into heaven upon death.

I think it is more likely that the traditional tomb was just built in the vicinity of where John was known to have been buried—that's certainly common enough in history.

Basilica of Saint John

After the House of Mary, we went to Ephesus. There was far too much there, and I have too many pictures still to process, to do justice to it now. So it will have to wait until I'm home, along with the rest of the pictures from the Classical Greek sites.

Selçuk, where this basilica was constructed in the 6th century over the traditional site of John the Apostle's grave, is near Ephesus, but not part of that city.

(The fortress in the background of the picture is from the Ottoman Empire.)