This is a place-holder page for Turkey, with a few pictures to be going on with. Here is a page with a few pictures of the great mosques of Istanbul. Also, here is a page about King Midas and the Golden Touch. Midas was a Phrygian king in a place called Gordion, which was where, 500 years later, Alexander cut the Gordion Knot. If you want to follow the day by day story of our two weeks in holiday, click here.
Turkey is a mountainous country, prone to earthquakes. Here is a sketch map of the mountain ranges that surround the high central plateau (which was the core of the Hittite Empire three thousand years ago), and a parallel map showing the classical provinces of Anatolia..
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| The main mountain ranges of Turkey, and its classical provinces (maps from "Ancient Turkey: A traveller's history of Anatolia" by Seton Lloyd, University of California Press, 1989) (alternate Canadian purchase here) |
Here are some miscellaneous pictures that will be placed appropriatedly as the site builds.
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SelçukA site in Selçuk, near Ephesus, remarkable for the variety of antiquities in the one picture. In the foreground, the foundations and one column of the Temple of Diana, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. At the top, a Selçuk fortress (12th century) and below it a Selçuk mosque of the same date. To the right of the mosque and fortress is the remains of the church in which it is said St. John wrote his Gospel. |
Pergamum (Pergamon) |
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| Our wonderful guide, Ahmet Isçimen, striking a pose at the hospital at Pergamum. Hippocrates was once its chief administrator. | Some surviving columns of the Roman temple of Jupiter in the Akropolis of Pergamum. |