Warmed Toilet Seats, Old Coins and Cheaters…

If you’ve not been to Ephesus, Turkey, it is one spot you need to experience.  Started as a city in 550BC by the Greeks and then dominated by the Romans, it is the largest active excavation in the world.  It is compactt therefore, easier to experience.  We had been there in the early 1990’s and at that point our guide told us that at one time the city had 330,000 inhabitants the majority of which were slaves.  On this visit we were told 400,000.  Maybe they adjusted the number, who knows.  On both of our trips we had highly educated guides.  On the first trip our guide was a professor of history and this time our guide was an engineer.  Yes, we believed them because of the quality of the tours we booked.  Anyway, this time we had friends with us who hadn’t been. We get out of the bus and the heavens open.  What should have been an hour to an hour and a half  was 30minutes. Here’s some of what my friends missed:  The Greeks and Romans were ingenious and sneaky engineers.  They built cisterns on the tops of the hills to catch rain water.  It then flowed downhill to provide running water. At right there is a picture of the latrines.  The seats were marble and therefore, cold in the winter.  So, the slave owners would send their slaves down to the latrines and have them sit on the marble to warm it up.  When it was warm, here came the owner.  At their feet was running water for them to clean themselves.  Read more…

Now on to Olympia, Greece,  home of the Olympics.  Once you’ve seen Ephesus it kind of puts a damper on other sites with multitudes of ruins.  What was interesting here is that at the entrance to Olympic Stadium, there had been a corridor of statues.  These statues were of Zeus but below the statue they were identified as cheaters.  The inscription not only listed their name, but their offense and their fine.  (Huh.  I know of quite a few athletes that could use this treatment.)