St John's Basilica

Saturday April 5th, 2014 Selcuk
I had a better night last night and got a lot of sleep. I managed to eat a bit of breakfast this morning before we went off to tour St John's Basilica, which is about 200 meters from our pension.

The picture is the entrance to the basilica courtyard. John, one of Jesus' disciples apparently came here with the Virgin Mary around 40 or 50 AD. He wasn't popular with the Emperor Domitianus (sp?). who ordered him executed twice. However the executions never took place. Some believe this was due to miracles. Except for being exiled for about 15 years to Patmos Island, John lived here until he was about 100 years old. On this hill is where he did a lot of his writing that is in the Bible. A couple of hundred years after he died, this basilica was built over his tomb. It eventually became a mosque and lasted until it was leveled by an earthquake in the mid 1300s.

 Anita is standing by John's tomb.

 There are Christian symbols on much of the stonework.

 Anita's artsy shot of a poppy growing among the ruins.

 Anita is standing in the baptismal font.

It was nice being here almost all by ourselves. As we were leaving, the tour buses started to arrive.

 Just down the hill from the basilica is the Isa Bey mosque. We went back to our room to grab a scarf for Anita and walked down to see it. It's still in use so we were lucky to get there between prayer times.

 The courtyard was nice but the interior was quite plain.

 Later we went downtown behind the bus station where there's a huge Saturday market that takes over several streets. There was an unbelievable amount of fresh produce available. There were also a few vendors with pots and pans or clothing. I bought a T-shirt for 15 lira ($7.50) and a bagel for .9 lira (45 cents). We went back to our room to eat fruit, bagel, cheese and water. After lunch we went up to the roof terrace and quaffed a few cold ones. I must be feeling better.
For dinner we went back to the same restaurant we had gone to last night only this time I ordered chicken schnitzel and Anita had lamb kebap. Again, good food for a total of 40 lira ($20). The waiter brought us a glass of apple tea on the house. He chatted with us awhile to practice his English. It's his uncle's restaurant. They're all Kurds from Iran. We could hear music and singing somewhere in the neighbourhood and he explained that it was the AK Party celebrating their recent municipal election victory.

After dinner, we walked down to see what was going on. They had big loudspeakers set up on the back of a pickup truck blaring the same inspirational theme song over and over. A couple of drummers played along. Sometimes when the recorded music stopped an old man would play some kind of weird flute, the drummers drummed, and a few people in the crowd danced. After we got home we could still hear somebody, the winning candidate I suppose, speechifying to the crowd. That just ended.
We paid our bill on our way in to our room. It worked out to about $60 per night including breakfast and a big dinner on the night we arrived. Very reasonable. The lady who looks after the place couldn't be nicer. She gave us a cup of apple tea and a couple of key chains for souvenirs. I also took a novel from the shelf of books that have been left here. Might need it when we're on the Greek islands.
Tomorrow morning we have to get up at 5:30 to catch the 6:49 train to the Izmir airport. Our flight to Istanbul and then on to Athens leaves at 10 am.
Turkey has been great. We're a bit sorry to be leaving. The people here have been very polite and helpful always. The merchants are masters of the soft sell. They'll ask you in for tea but they don't hound you.
I know that younger women have reported feeling uncomfortable about inappropriate attention in this country but we haven't seen any overt harassment. When we went to the Blue Mosque we did notice that an older tourist woman and a young tourist woman could be dressed identically in long pants but only the young woman would be asked to wear a loaned wrap-around skirt before entering.
It seems that older men arrive on their little, old motorcycles (reminds us of Anita's father and his friend Wally riding their mini-bikes around Craigmont) and spend most of every day playing board games and drinking tea in parks or cafes.
Drinking tea out of little glasses seems to be a national pastime. You rarely see takeout cups. Everyone returns their little glass or a man with a tray of fresh glasses of tea walks around and collects the empty ones.
Turkish people really know how to have a good breakfast.
When you enter a restaurant, you are warmly welcomed. When you leave you are sincerely thanked for your business. No-one expects a tip although we still tipped most of the time because the service is so good. Once they told me I had forgotten my change and tried to give it back. This is very refreshing considering the 15%, 20% or 25% expected for often mediocre service at home.
There's lots more to see here someday. This is a country where we could imagine a return visit.