Travelling Hopefully - Ho For the Seaside

 We left Konya and pointed the nose of the minibus towards the Mediterranean. First though we had to cross the Taurus Mountains. The Taurus Mountains are located between the Aries Hills and the Gemini Plains. I saw my first snow in Turkey clinging modestly to the peaks as we wound our way through. Scenery abounded and I photographed as much of it as I could through the window as it went by.

Once over the Taurus Mountains we stopped for gozleme at a family home nestled among the ruins of a Roman bath. The family have monetised cooking by selling a delicious lunch to passers by. Replete we headed on to Antalya, a seaside town famous for its Roman harbour and ceremonial gate memorialising the day that the emperor Hadrian dropped by for a visit. It’s called the Visitor’s Gate.

No it isn’t, it’s called Hadrian’s Gate because Hadrian couldn’t pass by a rubbish bin without naming it after himself. Hadrian was an emperor of the Antonine dynasty widely regarded as the high point of pagan Rome. There were six emperors in the Antonine dynasty only two of whom were actually related to each other. “Dynasty” being a rather broad definition applied by later historians.

Antalya is a pleasant town with the usual collection of old buildings. There’s a Seljuk mosque, Ottoman houses, a Roman harbour and a statue honouring the town’s founder back when it was the Kingdom of Pergamon. Even that doesn’t seem to be the beginning of the story as artefacts have been found which pre-date even him.

All this means there are lots of narrow, twisty streets and a bizarre variety of souvenirs to be hawked from every second shop. It also means people have been dying here for ridiculously long period of time.

As evidence of the previous point the next day we visited a charnel house. Sorry I mean a museum dedicated to the dead. The museum is planted on top of an ancient cemetery that appears to have been used from pre-Hellenic times until well after the Romans adopted (or abducted) Christianity. As is traditional in cities of this age the cemetery was discovered when the foundations were being dug for something else, in this case a convention centre.

The museum now occupies the site and displays selected pieces of the sarcophagi, ossuaries and grave goods that have been unearthed. There was no mention of what became of the convention centre. Presumably it was relocated to somewhere a little less corpse intensive. After our visit to the museum we were similarly relocated.