On This Day – Pamukkale and Heirapolis

Continuing the tour of Ancient Turkey on 27th September 2014 I was at the site of Heirapolis/Pamukkale  an ancient Hellenistic and then a Roman city because it benefits from a rejuvenating spa of constantly warm water that the ancients were rather fond of.

The source of the spring is carefully locked behind bars because as it emerges from the earth’s core it brings with it a lethal cocktail of poisonous toxic gasses that will overcome and kill in seconds.

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Entrance Tickets, Pamukkale and Hierapolis (Turkey)

Heirapolis/Pamukkale  is the site of an ancient Hellenistic and then a Roman city because it benefits from a rejuvenating spa of constantly warm water that the ancients were rather fond of.

The source of the spring is carefully locked behind bars because as it emerges from the earth’s core it brings with it a lethal cocktail of poisonous toxic gasses that will overcome and kill in seconds but once separated from the noxious fumes the clear water flows down towards the edge of the mountain where it calcifies and forms startlingly white travertine pools of dazzling white calcium deposits like a fresh fall of snow that you mind find in Archangel, Alaska or Alberta.

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Turkey, Pamukkale and Cleopatra’s Pool

With the car now restored to temporary working order we now loaded our bags and pleased to be leaving the less than four star Grand Sevgi Hotel were relieved to see it for the last time in the rear view mirrors of the car as we made our way to Heirapolis.

This only took a moment or two but at the entrance Hagi (the gadgi) turned the engine off and then it immediately wouldn’t start again and this didn’t look very promising at all especially in consideration of the three hour journey home later today.

It was early and the visitor numbers were proportionately low but there were still a great deal of coaches in the car park and there was some competition to get through the entrance barriers and into the site.  We needn’t have worried however because it was big, very big and soon the visitors were dispersing in all directions and there was plenty of personal space for everyone to enjoy.

Our guide rushed us through several centuries of ancient history with rather indifferent haste and the reason for this was that few people were really that interested in the history and wanted only to get to Cleopatra’s thermal pool with its anti-ageing secrets locked in the warm waters of the spa.

“This site is exceptional by virtue of its superlative natural phenomena – warm, heavily mineralized water flowing from springs creating pools and terraces which are visually stunning. It is on this outstanding natural site that Hierapolis, an exceptional example of a Greco-Roman thermal installation, was established. The Christian monuments of Hierapolis constitute an outstanding example of an early Christian architectural complex.” – UNESCO

Heirapolis/Pamukkale  is the site of an ancient Hellenistic and then a Roman city because it benefits from a rejuvenating spa of constantly warm water that the ancients were rather fond of.  The source of the spring is carefully locked behind bars because as it emerges from the earth’s core it brings with it a lethal cocktail of poisonous toxic gasses that will overcome and kill in seconds but once separated from the noxious fumes the clear water flows down towards the edge of the mountain where it calcifies and forms startlingly white travertine pools of dazzling white calcium deposits like a fresh fall of snow that you mind find in Archangel, Alaska or Alberta.

On its journey it is diverted into Cleopatra’s pool and visitors pay an extortionate amount (just my skinflint opinion) of money to swim in the naturally heated thermal pools in the hope of discovering the secret of everlasting youth.

All around this part of the Eastern Mediterranean there are all sorts of places that claim to be Cleopatra swimming pools and I for one am becoming rather sceptical about the claims.  In the days before Ryanair, high speed rail or motorways she seemed to be able to get around much easily than I imagine it really was possible two thousand years ago!  Actually, I have done this sort of thing before on Santorini in 2003 and I am convinced that you only need to do it once to achieve everlasting good looks and a second attempt might reverse the process so I declined to do it again here.

At this point we parted company with the Lithuanians and the Dagenham Ladies darts team and left the thermal pool and choose instead to go and visit the ruins of Heirapolis.  And how glad we were that we did.  It was quite a slog to the top of the old city but at the end of the climb was a restored ancient theatre that surely has to be amongst the best that we have ever seen and that includes Segesta in Sicily and Merida in Spain and also (again in my opinion) the ruins that we had visited yesterday at Ephesus .  To miss this treat in preference to swimming in a dubious Cleopatra themed swimming pool was a cultural crime!

With everyone else splashing about in the water we felt rather smug about this as we made our way back down and after stopping for a coffee made our way to the edge of the mountain side and the pure white frost of Pamukkale.  A few years ago visitors used to wander all over this site and at Cleopatra’s pool they built a hotel but too many people meant unacceptable damage so with the assistance of funding from UNESCO the hotel was closed down and demolished, the damage caused by diverting the natural spring was reversed and visitors are now restricted to only a small section of the geological wonder.  Pamukkale is now a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Along with hundreds of other visitors we paddled through the dazzling turquoise pools and winced as we made our way through hidden and sharp travertine surfaces and then we were glad to put our shoes back on and walk awhile through the site.  It was good, I enjoyed it but to be honest I am not sure that it was really worth the agony of an eight hour return trip bus trip.  And it is only eight hours on a good day but I will tell you about that next time.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Split-Second Story

In 2009 I visited the Croatian City of Split for the second time…

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Letters

I liked all of these sights in Rome but I was intrigued by something at pavement level.  All of the manhole covers displayed the Roman symbol SPQR which, I learned later, is the motto of the city and appears in the city’s coat of arms, as well as on many of the civic buildings.

SPQR comes from the Latin phrase, Senātus Populusque Rōmānus (The Senate and the People of Rome), referring to the government of the ancient Republic. It appeared on coins, at the end of public documents, in dedications of monuments and public works, and was the symbol on the standards of the Roman legions.

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Catalonia, Greek and Roman Antiquities and the World’s Oldest Profession

“here then, is the proper setting for things Roman, – not Hadrians’s Wall or Bath or St. Albans in cold, wet Britain at the outer edge of the civilised world, but Empúries… on the edge of the great tideless sea – Mare Nostrum.”            John Payne – ‘Catalonia, History and Culture’

The Ancient City of Empúries in Catalonia…

As I said, I had no real expectation of seeing the excavations at Empúries but then Kim took me by surprise and without any prompting suggested a visit.  I expressed my astonishment and reminded her that only recently she had told me that she didn’t especially like ancient ruins but then she corrected me on this point and being more specific told me that she didn’t mind visiting archaeological sites but she would prefer not to go every day!

So with that misunderstanding sorted out we drove to the entrance and paid the very reasonable admission price of €2.40 – so reasonable in fact that it didn’t raise my expectations very much above zero!

How wrong I was however, because this was a very impressive site indeed.  At the lower level we walked through the two thousand five hundred year old Greek city which turns out to be the most important Greek archaeological site anywhere in Spain so rather surprising then that it is not a UNESCO World Heritage Site and remains for the time being on the tentative list already having been rejected once.

After the Greeks came the Romans and they made some improvements and adapted the city to their own preferences and style and later when militarising the peninsula built a whole new city further inland and here we walked around the remains of the Forum, the Temples, the Amphitheatre and sections of the old city wall and inside these the public baths and the once grand villas of the city patricians.  It wasn’t on the scale of Pompeii or Herculaneum of course but as only an estimated 20% of the site has been excavated then who knows what treasures lay buried under the parched dusty fields.

Between the Greek and the Roman cities there was a small but informative museum with a chronological history of the site and several display cases with largely unimportant finds on account of the fact that all the interesting stuff is in a museum in Girona.

After the Romans left the city was occupied by the Franks, the Visigoths and the Moors and then in the Middle Ages it began to be dismantled and used as a quarry and a convenient source of building materials for new towns and villages springing up along the coastline.

Deconstructing the Roman empire…

This is something that has always perplexed me. The Romans built a great city with roads and aqueducts, fresh water, sewage and waste disposal systems, palaces and gardens grand villas decorated with mosaics and statues and then medieval man came along during the dark ages and tore them down – not to build something better but to construct something significantly inferior.

I would like to have overheard the town planning debates and the rationale applied to do this. “We don’t need stone roads”, they’d probably say “a muddy track will do just as well because we don’t need chariots and trucks either.” “We don’t need all these fancy sewers, we’ll dig a hole in the middle of the village to take a crap!” “We can’t really see the point of all these aqueducts and fresh water filtration systems, we’ll just drink the dirty river water!  “And finally we don’t need all of these fine villas with their air conditioning and shady gardens, we’ll take them down and use the stone to make the foundations for some mud huts!”

Spanish highway prostitution…

After an hour or so walking around in the blistering heat of the afternoon we left Empúries and set off back on the road towards Figueres along some busy main roads.  At a roundabout Kim spotted a young girl dressed all in white and looking like the women in the eighties pop group Boney M with thigh high boots, a mini skirt so short it was almost superfluous and a tight top at least two sizes too small to accentuate her bust.

“What on earth is she doing?”, asked Kim and I told her that she was a prostitute, “No”, said Kim, “Yes”, said I, “No”, she repeated as she twisted around in her seat to look out of the rear window “Yes”, I said again and then told her the sordid story of roadside prostitution in Spain which for some is a real problem.

Well, I say a problem but it depends I suppose on your perspective.  It doesn’t seem to be a problem to the authorities who do nothing about it, it doesn’t seem to be a problem to the sex tourists who come to Spain to find a prostitute by the roadside and it isn’t a problem to the organised crime gangs who control this lucrative business and is probably the reason the authorities cannot stop it.

It certainly is a problem however for the girls, many of whom come from Eastern Europe and have been lured here by the promise of housing and employment and then find themselves trapped into sex slavery repaying their travel and accommodation costs, being kept permanently short of cash so that the debt never gets repaid and living in fear of beatings and abuse.

Here in Catholic Spain, in a country that prides itself on conservative family values, the country of the evening paseo in the Plaza Mayor and where children’s clothes shops are full of expensive embroidery and lace this nasty business all seems so grossly hypocritical, where people turn a blind eye to something that they cannot possibly approve of.

I can’t imagine anyone, except Xaviera Hollander perhaps, choosing prostitution as a career but to quote Thomas Hobbes life for these unfortunate women can be “nasty, brutish and short” and in the twenty-first century in mainland Europe it is something we should be collectively ashamed of.

I must confess to being a sort of Dorling-Kindersley tourist flitting between palaces and museums, historical centres and plaza mayors, beaches and mountains – picking out the best and turning a blind eye to the crime and the grime but there was no way of missing it here.  To be fair I have never seen that much of this roundabout prostitution in other parts of Spain but here in Catalonia it seems to be a particular issue that surely needs urgent attention.

I read once that the police in Llieda have addressed the problem by requiring the women to wear yellow hi-viz jackets so that they do not present a hazard to motorists and I have to say, come on Spain – I don’t think that that is adequately dealing with it!

Sadly of course it won’t get dealt with quickly because as we know prostitution has been around for a long time and a visit to a Roman antiquity such as nearby Empúries with their well advertised brothels  is ample evidence of that.

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The Roman City of Herculaneum

The Roman Amphitheatre at Pula

The Aqueduct of Segovia

The Roman Buildings at Mérida

The Roman Ruins at Segóbriga

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The Roman Buildings at Arles

Verona

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A Life in Ruins – France, Arles

We had chosen to visit Arles for two main reasons, its Roman heritage and the painter Vincent Van Gogh.  The city has a long history, and was of considerable prominence as a principal Roman Province and the Roman and Romanesque Monuments of the city were listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1981. The Dutch post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh lived in Arles in from 1888 to 1889 and produced over three hundred paintings and drawings during his time there – that’s a lot of paintings in only a short time.

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France, Arles – Romans and Post-Impressionists

We had chosen to visit Arles for two main reasons, its Roman heritage and the painter Vincent Van Gogh.  The city has a long history, and was of considerable prominence as a principal Roman Province and the Roman and Romanesque Monuments of the city were listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1981. The Dutch post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh lived in Arles in from 1888 to 1889 and produced over three hundred paintings and drawings during his time there – that’s a lot of paintings in only a short time.

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Ancient Greece and Rome

Rome

Roman Amphitheatre at Pula

The Aqueduct of Segovia

Segesta, Sicily

Segóbriga

Split

Athens

Herculaneum

Pompeii

Palace of Knossos

 The Colossus of Rhodes

Croatia, Split and Diocletian’s Palace

We walked through the centre of Diocletian’s Palace, which is the middle of the old city of Split where all the most important historical buildings of the city are to be found.

The Palace is important as a historical monument because it has survived pretty much intact and is remarkable for the diversity of its buildings, which include an octagonal domed mausoleum, a rectangular Temple of Jupiter, a cruciform lower level of the Vestibule, and circular temples to Cybele and Venus.

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