Antalya

We started our day with a talk by Edip Özgür, he is a retired field archeologist and former curator of the archeology museum of Antalya.

He talked about his early work on five mounds of stones. He had surveyed the area the year before and was sent to examine them closer as they clearly were man-made. He found some local workers and spent three weeks removing stones in just one quarter of one mound. And he hadn’t found anything. He invited his mentor from school to come look before he gave up. She noticed that the dirt under the stones was a different clay from the dirt outside the stones and told him to keep digging.

He found some treasures that were buried with a Phrygian prince that had come to the Antalya region. They are now displayed in the museum.

The Phrygians had dug a pit and put the dead prince and artifacts in the pit and burned it, but not everything burned. Then they covered it with dirt and stones. The clay from lower in the pit ended up on top, making it different than the surrounding soil.

After the talk we visited the Antalya Museum of Archeology and saw some of the things he talked about.

Here is a Nemesis statue taken from a fountain in Perge. We’ll be going to Perge tomorrow and see the fountain.

They also had a collection of sarcophagi that were quite elaborate.

The Sion Treasure was found in 1963, a group of objects given as a gift to the Sion Church from a bishop in the Justinian period (527-565 AD) of the Eastern Roman Empire.

They also had some of the Icons from St. Nicolas church which we will stop to see in a couple days on our drive to Fethiye. Here is John the Baptist holding the Bible.

We then had some free time to walk through Kaleici, Antalya’s Old Town.

We stopped to get the full experience of Turkish ice cream, with the whole show. It’s really good, but a different texture. The powdered root of an orchid is used as the thickener. This makes it pretty thick and it sticks well to itself. You chew more than lick it.

We walked over to Hadrian’s Gate and walked through it.

In the late afternoon, a lawyer who put himself through law school by leading tour groups in Turkey and lives in Antalya came and talked to us about the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey.

In 2010 the constitution was changed to double the number of judges on two of the high courts. The current regime then got to appoint all these new positions, effectively stuffing the courts with a majority appointed by this regime.

The previous president had 140 cases of insulting the president, the current regime has over 40,000 pending cases now, not including the cases that have been concluded. The sentence is often 5-7 years in jail.

The Turkish people have been voting for opposition candidates in local elections and the Turkish constitution allows people to observe and report on election results, so this lawyer and many others have watched ballots being counted, so he was pretty confident that the last few elections have been more fair. There are reports of ballot box stuffing and dumping votes in previous elections according to our guide.

We both had a home hosted dinners this night. We are split up into small groups of four and invited into homes that the tour company has found to host us. I went to a couple that had a young daughter and they both work in the hotel and travel industry, their English was quite good. They also have a nanny that takes care of their daughter and they often speak in English. The food was really good.

Donna visited an older couple whose son’s family lived upstairs from them. The son’s family also hosted some of our group. The man studied geological engineering but only worked in the field a few years. He then got into airport management and was the manager of the Antalya airport before he retired. His wife majored in theology and studied all religions. They owned some land in the nearby mountains where they grew some fruits and vegetables. They served a bean salad with fava beans from their garden. They served figs from their trees for desert. They said they spent most of the pandemic at their cottage in the mountains because they felt it was safer.