Quest Day 3, Ephesus

Three weeks ago today Derek and I were in Ephesus. The picture above is a wall below "The Virgin Mary's Home". The home is a Catholic shrine -- built on a foundation that is believed (by some) to be the home Mary lived in from some time after the crucifixtion of Jesus until her death. It was good to go through this home with a couple of Catholics from Derek's work who were obviously filled with awe at the chance to be there. The wall above is one where people leave notes -- I think prayer notes. I'm thinking it is something they want St. Mary to help them with.

This is us standing by the spring of healing water. Our guide told us that we should not drink the water because we would get sick -- but some people we saw did it anyway since they believed in its healing properties. Other people just rubbed the water on themselves. We just took a picture by it.

These are some of the ruins in the ancient city of Ephesus. There were a lot of things to see and my main complaint was that we had to follow our tour guide around and didn't get to see everything we could have if we were on our own. Our tour guide did tell interesting stories -- but I wanted to know his sources for them. He seemed like a nice enough man but his eyes were kind of creepy looking and I thought he looked scary. Still, this was a great place to visit and Derek's favorite of the week and a half we were gone.

The building behind Derek is the Library. They put it back together from the pieces they found. The original library had three stories but they haven't found enough pieces to put all three stories together. Our guide said "next time you are in Ephesus you might find that there is a third story on the library."

In the background of this picture is the theater. When we went in to see it one of the tour groups were seated in it and someone was singing to show how good the acoustics were. They actually held concerts here fairly recently to raise money to help in the restoration of ancient Ephesus. The problem was that the loud music and the stomping people did damage to this ancient theater. The damage will take much more money to fix than the money the concerts raised. Oops.

Before visiting Ephesus we read quite a bit from Paul's letter to the Ephesians and once we got back to the ship we read more about Paul in Ephesus from the Book of Acts. This is a part of the reason that we enjoyed going here. It is fun to go places that are linked with Christian history.

After visiting Ephesus we were taken to a store and shown how Persian rugs are made. Our tour guide has a school where they teach people how to make rugs so that they can make money and preserve the art. They are made by hand and it takes a lot of time. It takes about a year for the big rugs I think. The rugs are beautiful and very expensive. They really wanted us to buy one. The Turkish government will ship it right to your door for free -- once you've bought it! The larger rugs were running around 20,000 Euros I think. This was yet another thing we didn't buy but they were very impressive.

It was a little chilly that day, but with jackets on it wasn't too uncomfortable. The sun was shining and, generally speaking, it was a good day.