Selçuk

After breakfast, included in the price of my room and quite a spread, I rode into Selçuk.  After touring by bike a bit, I headed up the hill to the Basilica of St. John.  These are the remains of first a memorial built over the burial place of John, the youngest of Christ's disciples, then a small church, and then a lager church.  The final basilica was pretty much destroyed by an earthquake in the mid 600s.  What is there today is the result of excavations begun in, as I recall, the 1800s, and continuing since then.

A little of the back story.  Turkey, and all of Asia Minor, was an important area in the spread of the early church.  Paul, the Apostle called by Christ, lived here for a time, and wrote his first letter to the Corinthians from here, I think.  After Christ was crucified, his best loved disciple, John, came here.  Since Christ, as he was dying on the cross, asked John to care for Christ's mother, Mary, it is believed that Mary came here with John, and that they both spent their last days here.  John certainly died and was buried here.  Soon after John died, a memorial was built over his grave.  Since then, emperors and priests have built churches over that original site.

Today, the site is extensive.  The original basilica, with a wooden roof, was built in the shape of a cross, with the nave at the east, and John's grave near the altar.

The entrance to the site

The signor the cross was on almost all of the capstones.

The view along the long axis of the church.

The tomb

The marker

The sides of the main portion of the church:

Left side

Right side

I wandered around for an hour or two.  The place became almost overrun with tourists, so I left.

As I was riding down the hill towards the main road, I spied a stork with babies in her nest on top of a column.  I stopped to watch them, and got to see her feed them.  (Yesterday when I stopped for lunch, I watched a pair of swallows feeding their young in a nest in the ceiling of the restaurant.  I guess that wasn't mayonnaise on the table top . . .).  As I went around town, almost every column had a nest with storks and babies in them.  Merri these are for you!

Not their best side, but these are chicks . . .

Around the base of this arch was a lot of stork guano.  A lot.

I rode to the site of Ephesus so I could get a handle on what tomorrow will bring.  30 Turkish Lira is the tariff to get in, plus you must run a gauntlet of shills and hawkers about 150 meters long.  If I hear "It doesn't cost anything to look!" one more time . . .

But there is a certain honesty in some of the signs:  "Fake Genuine Watches"  Of course, those are illegal to bring to the USA, but my Sprout watch died, and I have no way to tell time except to squint at the sky.  What shall I do?

I spent the rest of the day writing to all of you, and now I'm hungry.  Dinner time soon.