Rita’s blog

Before we returned home, hoping for another near future
trip, adding many more towns, ruins, landscapes, carpet warehouses, museums such as Aya Sofya to our experience, Sis and I had shipped many of the  most beautiful carpets and kilims we had seen to Jackson, Mississippi, and I had begun drawing pads of quick sketches, some taking half a day or more, of  Sofya,the  former Christian Church turned Mosque, then museum –said to surpass even the Taj in architecture and art.   What comes first to my mind are the many miles of peach orchards at the feet of many rocky mountains near Izmir, an hour and 45 minutes from Istanbul by air.  The vegetation on the brown and gray mountains looked like scraps of multicolored carpets scattered about on crags and rolling hills.  We stopped in a small city to wait for an airport bus to take us home in Sultanamet to bed and breakfast at the Acropol and there, while Sis looked for olive jars and scarves, I dropped into a very old ruin of a mosque still in use.  Only a cat greeted us, but what surroundings this cat enjoyed as rain dripped into puddles, deep enough for minnows to swim in, on marble steps.  This was the climax of the entire journey and the first rain we saw.   From pillar to post the marble floor of this vast interior was laid ear to ear with hundreds of all sizes of prayer rugs of various design, color, and mostly wool or silk.  There was nobody present in an adjoining roofless outdoor patio either, but remnants of Greek columns, boulders of granite the size of  a large trunk, all chiseled with text and labels from history by Greeks or Romans, lay about on the grass and against an enclosing wall.  What a treat.  If we had known the language we could have guessed at what had been going on at the time these pieces of architecture were either rocked by earthquake or war or flood or had been dug out of the grounds where an older previous church or mosque had stood.  We had seen  the BCE remains of the Temple of Apollo at Didim and  the still standing  25,000 seat amphitheater at Ephesus, shaken up and damaged by an earthquake–  but still remaining–  much of the original  semicircular seating area. The four story stage  was still there big and bulky as an small office building, awaiting restoration so that the speaker or singer could be heard in every seat– except, of course, the demolished semicircular arc ends which lay scattered about for over a mile, awaiting catalogue-ing and classification by architects and engineers, historians and archivists.  We had been driven in a smaller van for two days in the Kusadasi-(is it that or Kusahdahsiy when we were corrected wit pronunciation.  I like English koosadaysi.