Living in a foreign country for an extended period of time, you sometimes feel like you're fitting right in with the locals in terms of your daily life. Playing football with fellow university students, going for a drink in Kizilay on a Friday night...these elements of routine make you occasionally forget your foreignness and help you pretend that you're just like any other Turk. But when you tell your students, "Hey, guys, this weekend I'm going to Selcuk and Efes, and we're going to see the ruins, and the camel-wrestling championships! Doesn't that sound cool?" and they just roll their eyes, you can just tell they're thinking one thing: Yabanci. Foreigner. Sure, they've been to Efes (Ephesus, in English) themselves, and maybe even seen the camel-wrestling. But you've got that gleam in your eye, the little bit of Orientalism creeping in. Camels...wrestling! Won't that be exotic?
You learn not to care, though, and enjoy yourself regardless. So with that in mind, a group of us (Kevin, Suparna, Tania and I, followed on the bus by Hannah) headed off on Friday for Izmir, a city on Turkey's North Aegean coast. Formerly Smyrna, Izmir has a lot of history, or so I'm told, but what it is nowadays is basically a huge modern city, third only to Istanbul and Ankara in terms of population, and home to many of my (mostly rich and secular) students. We didn't get to explore it much, though, because it was just a stopover point, a place to crash after getting a late-night flight. Our hotel room was cold, reeked of cigarettes, and cost 25TL ($16...ridiculous, I know!), a far cry from the hospitality we were to see in Selcuk. There, just an hour and a half's minibus ride away, we found the ANZ (short for Australia New Zealand) Guesthouse. The name confused us until we met Harry, a Turk who apparently grew up in Australia and has the accent to prove it. Friendly and welcoming, not to mention only 16TL ($10), the ANZ is the place to stay if you're in Selcuk.
Selcuk's a small place, its main draw being its proximity to Ephesus, as well as a few historical sites in the town itself. Ephesus is literally just 3km away, so we borrowed bikes from the hostel (free! thanks, Harry!) and pedaled our way over there on Saturday morning. The bikes had seen better days—most were dual suspension mountain bikes that once must have been pretty expensive, but now were rusting and losing pedals and the ability to change gear. Nevertheless we persevered, arriving around noon on a beautifully sunny day. Ephesus is quite something. I've seen a bunch of a Roman cities after spending a summer in Jordan and five months in Turkey, so nothing completely blew me away, but Ephesus was probably the most complete, best-preserved city I've seen, beating out Perge in Southern Turkey and Jerash in Jordan. I certainly don't know much about Roman architecture, but I was very impressed by the library at Ephesus, which a quick Google search informs me is known as the Library of Celsus and which apparently employed sophisticated architectural techniques to preserve manuscripts. Anyway, it's pretty.
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| From Selcuk and Ephesus Highlights |
Of course, every Roman city worth its salt has a theatre as well, and Ephesus didn't disappoint in this regard:
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| From Selcuk and Ephesus Highlights |
Of course, I'm just wasting your time before getting to the thing you really want to hear about: Camel wrestling! Again, that's camels, wrestling with each other! This is apparently a tradition across the Middle East, including Iran and Afghanistan, but I'd never seen it before I came to Turkey. Selcuk is home to the championship event for Aegean camel wrestling, and so over a hundred battle-tested camel veterans arrived to grapple for the title. The spectators included, by my count, about four thousand Turkish men, approximately fifty Turkish women, and nearly a hundred bewildered tourists. It's a riot. Here, the arena from a distance:
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| From Selcuk and Ephesus Highlights |
We shared the walk over to the arena with some hopefuls:
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| From Selcuk and Ephesus Highlights |
...and then got to the main event itself.
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| From Selcuk and Ephesus Highlights |
It's hard to explain what the camels do, exactly, and the picture above doesn't do the sport justice. Basically, two camels are led into the main arena, and then a comely young female is paraded before them. This makes them foam at the mouth, like below:
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| From Selcuk and Ephesus Highlights |
And then they chaaaaaaaaarge. The camels spend the next few minutes with their heads dangerously close to each others' naughty bids, using their necks almost like arms, trying to flip the other one over. The match is ended when one of them runs away like a little girl, or when one is on the ground and in danger of serious injury, at which point the referees standing by call the match. Here's a typical sparring match in video format:
The event itself is a spectacle. It's mostly men, but some bring their families, and there were dozens of little charcoal grills where they were cooking chicken, beef sausages that they claimed were camel, and kofte. Everyone's drinking raki and having a great time.
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And so were we...
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| From Selcuk and Ephesus Highlights |
We left after a few hours, when the sight of two camels necking had become somewhat old hat, in order to check out the rest of the town. Selcuk actually has a lot of stuff to see for such a small town. After a filling (second?) lunch, we checked out the St. John's Basilica, the aqueduct, the citadel, and finally the Temple of Artemis. This last one was rather surprising: the Temple of Artemis is one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, even described by the classical writers as the most wondrous of them all. And yet it sits in a field outside Selcuk, abandoned in its ruination, playing a distant second fiddle to the nearby Ephesus. Of course, the fact that it's been completely destroyed, and had its reconstructions destroyed, and their reconstructions as well, probably contributes. Still, it was an odd thing to come upon.
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| From Selcuk and Ephesus Highlights |
We wrapped up our tour of Selcuk on Sunday and took a late afternoon bus to Izmir. Even with more time to explore, Izmir didn't yield any fascinating discoveries, only a very good pastry shop and a mall where I found a fun-looking John LeCarre book. But I'm not here for modern comforts and uninspiring 21st-century cities. You can have them. I'll take my old rocks and grappling camels anyday. I'm a tourist, you see.
