there are ruins everywhere in turkey but the coolest ones yet have been the ruins of the city of olympos, which is a twenty minute bus ride up the road from sundance.
it was so big i had to go see it twice, and even then i could have spent more time there. the city starts at the water's edge and goes back from the beach, buried in the forest. parts of it go up the hillsides. at the top there is an akropolis.
the trees eternally overgrown. everywhere, dead wood snaps beneath your feet, the sound of it, dry like it is bonedead since forever. every step makes dry leaves rustle elsewhere as if something is following you, always out of sight. sometimes the wood is bright white and fresh where the trees are cut out of the way of the path, sometimes old and dry and grey, as if the forest grows over every year and has to be pruned. water collects everywhere, mucky leaves floating, and mud; a stagnant pool at the bottom of the monumental tomb.
in the forest you are always walking on rock -- small broken up cobblestones or big blocks of stone tossed and the corners and edges chipped. big stone columns far removed from any structure, tossed there or broken and spilled down from buildings higher up. tons of grey stone quarried and moved, and undone like nothing.
and the awful roman temple that i remembered as having had stains on the altar -- this was the first time when i visited it in the whispering forest after dark -- but in fact there was no altar, nor an altar with stains, when i visited it in the daylight. still, this would have been a deathly structure once upon a time, presided over by cloaked men, chanting from under hoods, dark tapestries that allowed no echo. now the sun coaxed the leaves up through the pieces of the collapsed ceiling.
<< powers and princes of earth, and you immortal
lords of the underground and afterlife,
jehovah, raa, bol-morah, hecate, pluto,
what has a brilliant, living soul to do with
your harps and fires and boats, your bric-a-brac
and troughs of smoking blood? >>
on the other side of the river is the necropolis where the flies still buzz and the flowers seem to grow brighter. someone had gathered a bunch and put them inside one of the broken open tombs. already they were wilting. soon they would be dry. then dust.
you can't see the whole ruin site at once except from on top. each part of the ruins is sunk into the forest now, linked only by trails littered with rock.
white and yellow flowers grew in the dirt collected in the stones of the city wall leading out of the ruin site. the valley where are the ruins of olympos was full of hostels -- pansyons -- the Lemon Pansyon, the Orange Pansyon, even the Canada Pansyon. other than the people at sundance these are the only people i've seen in weeks. there were hammocks stretched out in the trees and children in swung them. people in traveller's gear and speaking german and french and english, strangers, a girl in a shawl of earthy colours and boy who had her bag while she slipped it over her head -- and thinking that might soon be me, but also knowing: that << no one knows what's gonna happen to _anyone, except the forlorn _rags of growing old: and anyway i wrote the book because we're all gonna die >> ... walking back up to the bus station past shops with gourds hanging in the frontyard trees, then onto the bus and up and out of the valley, making one stop for more passengers at a little restaurant where they were arc welding over customers' head as they drank tea beneath.
