Ephesus, Turkey Part II

After our time in Ancient Ephesus, we headed to Mary’s House.  Catholics believe that Mary was taken here by St John, where she lived until she died.  It was a small chapel and you weren’t allowed to take pictures in it, but there really wasn’t much to see anyway.

We lit two candles for our kiddos again and then walked by the wishing wall, which I had no clue what was, until I looked it up.  Apparently people leave their wishes on this wall and hope for something miraculous to happen.

(I thought this was funny!)

The views in Ephesus were beautiful.  I was taking these out of the car window so it was hard to get a decent picture, but it was really pretty.  (Side note: I put these pictures on my program to write blogs a while ago and apparently if the original file isn’t on the SD card in the computer, it won’t let me resize any of these anymore.  I’m not sure what’s going on, but that’s why they’re all small.  If you want to see them bigger, just click on them.  When I try to make them bigger, it just makes them blurry.)

After Mary’s House we went to a museum than held a lot of the relics they’ve found in ancient Ephesus.  It was FULL of carvings and statues made from stone.  Pretty neat to see.  And the picture on the right is of old bath houses we passed during our drive.

This is what’s left of the Temple of Artemis, which was considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.  (The picture in the middle above is the statue of Artemis.)  The one pillar is all that remains, although it has been completely rebuilt three times throughout history.

We only saw the ruins of the Temple of Artemis from the ruins of the Basilica of St. John.  The basilica was up on a hill, and again, there were beautiful views.

The church was completed in 565 AD and was made almost entirely of brick and stones, with the pillars being made of marble, which have held up better over the years.

St. John is said to be buried here in this tomb.

After the basilica, we had a mission to accomplish of returning a rug for friends that had bought one on their trip to Turkey earlier.  They decided they didn’t want it anymore, so we took it back for them.  We ended up having a traditional Turkish lunch at this ranch-type place where they made and sold the rugs also.

I’m not 100% sure what some of this stuff was, but I know they used quite a bit of the Greek yogurt or tzatziki sauce.  I’m not the most adventurous eater, but I tried everything and it was all pretty good.

Next we went and watched them making the rugs that they were selling.  They had hundreds of rugs for sale, made from cotton and silk, ranging in prices from $100 to $80000.  Why anyone would pay that much money for a rug is beyond me, but to each his own.

Apparently it takes these girls like a year and a half to make some of the larger rugs, which is why they’re so expensive.

She showed us how she knotted the yarn on the loom and it doesn’t look all that hard, but it does look very time consuming.

They also made their own silk yarn here.  They had the little silk balls in water and she rubbed them with that weird broom looking thing to catch the single strand of silk and then started the wheel going round and fed all those individual strings in to the wheel and it unraveled all of the silk balls.  It was fascinating to see how it all worked.

We weren’t allowed to take pictures of the handmade ones, but this rug was machine made, and still a couple hundred dollars.  It was beautiful though.  Maybe we’ll get one someday when we have a house big enough to put it in a very low traffic area (like an office) where kids and dogs are not allowed.

We did end up buying ourselves leather jackets in Ephesus, but of course I didn’t take pictures of them.  Oops.  I will have to do a separate blog post on them when it’s actually cool enough to wear them.