Ephesus and White Faces

After a comfortable night of sleep in Kusadasi we met with Cheryl and our Argentinian friends, Mirta and Henry for breakfast. Breakfast was the standard fare of cold cuts, scrambled and hard boiled eggs, bread, fruit, cereal and yogurt. Cheryl, Don and I agreed to skip the offered tour of Epheses and do it on our own. Our friends, Mirta and Enri Herrera decided to join us in our rebellious undertaking. We hired a cab and worked out a deal with him to take us to Epheses, with a stop at the house of Virgin Mary on the way. It was a simple drive from the hotel to the historic sites and our cab driver took us to Mary's house first, with the agreement to meet us at the end of the tour.

The explanation of why Mary lived here in Turkey is this: after the crucifixion of Jesus Christians were being persecuted and killed, especially the followers who were closest to Jesus. As he was dying on the cross Jesus said to his disciple, John, "My mother is your mother now. You must care for her as I would." So John wanted to protect Mary and he removed her to Epheses. This is where Mary lived out the rest of her life.

The house is a simple, one-room stone cottage high on a hill, nestled under some trees. There is a shrine to Mary inside the cottage and many people come here to pray to her and leave their prayers written on a scrap of paper or cloth, which they tie to a wall along the path to the cottage.

The house was discovered when and elderly German nun had a vision of the site near Epheses and described the hillside and the cottage in perfect detail. She had never been out of Germany, so she had never seen this site. A French priest went searching for the site and found the cottage. To support this idea, descendants of the Ephesians revered this site and worshiped there.

On the bus our guide explained that in the Muslim religion Jesus is considered a prophet and is revered, as is his mother Mary. So Muslims, as well as Christians, make pilgrimages to this place.

After visiting Mary's house we met our cab driver and proceeded on to the very large and impressive ruins at Ephesus. There we rented headsets and followed along the main street of the ancient city as we learned about the structures and life in the first century.

Epheses is a very well preserved archeological site. The city was a major trading hub before the time of Christ. It was an important center for the religious cult that worshiped Cybele, the goddess of plenty, who is represented in statue form as a woman with 100 breasts (plenty). Later, as the Greeks became more involved in this region, the deity became Artemis, goddess of hunting. The region was bandied back and forth between the Persians and the Greeks over many centuries, but continued to be a prosperous trading city. When Alexander the Great stopped in he was quite impressed with the new building that was going on and offered to pay the cost to finish the temple if the town would dedicate it to him. The townspeople tactfully responded that it wouldn't be fitting for one god to pay for a temple to another god, and they went on building their temple to Artemis.
There were many buildings in various stages of reconstruction or deconstruction. Some of the more memorable were the public toilet, which boasted 46 seats and was described as a place of public meetings and discussions. Another, of course, was the brothel, with the typical footprint and heart carved into the stone street to show the way. Diana's Temple was magnificent as well.
While we were strolling through the city we noticed a group of teenagers, giggling and busy, also visiting the site. Some of the girls had painted their faces white, with bright red lipstick and heavy black eyeliner. We kept meeting up with them and they were flirting with Don and got him to take their photo.By the time we arrived at the library they were all on the steps posing for a group photo, so Don got silly and ran and got into their group. They thought this was very funny and several of the students and chaperones began to chat with him. In the meanwhile I had a group of my own clustered around, all asking me questions. Of course I had a few questions for them--first of all why the white faces. Well, it turns out they were a photography class and their assignment was to take pictures of faces, so some of them made up their faces for the project. They were getting ready for a show of their work. They spoke good English and were full of questions about me and our trip and any number of topics, so we chatted for about 15 minutes. Then I gave them all cards and told them to check out the website to see some of Don's photos of their group.

Later, as we moved through the city, we arrived at the theater, a huge stone odeon which could seat 20000. The school kids were there putting on some kind of act, which they had obviously rehearsed. We could not understand what it was about, but they did the same structured presentation several times over before we left.

We finished up our visit and found the site and city very impressive. It is so amazing to think that a busy population lived out their lives here 2000 years ago.

Link to more pictures of Ephesus.