Mooching Around Samos

Tuesday, 25 August 2009. The Captain announced last night that we could not sail into Thira, on the island of Santorini, because of bad weather. So instead we sail into Samos town on the island of Samos.

Samos, like Thira, is also a tender port - by which I mean that there is not a harbour large enough to take a large cruise ship so Thomson Celebration anchors off the shore and we transfer into their tender boats for a short ride much closer to the water than we get onboard the ship!

As we climbed out of the tender boat we could see a fortress on the hill in front of us and decided to walk up to it. We went up the hill to a dead end that delivered us to someone's front door and we swerved to the right and then up a bit more only to find we had gone past the fort and landed at a church on top of the hill.

The church had the ruins of a far older basilica on the land adjacent and we had a look at that for a while and then went for a look at the Greek church with it's garden full of orange flowers.

The church was open to visitors, but it was such a nice day that we opted to stay outside and we made our way inland to find ourselves on a busy main street.

I enjoyed the bustle of locals doing their shopping or standing on corners to people watch - I suspect they were watching us actually as I must confess there were a few sights amongst our fellow passengers, as there are in any large group!

At the top of this street was another ruin - a temple to the goddess Diane, the Roman name for Artemis. However this had at the most a couple of stones and it was the equivalent of knocking your garden shed down and erecting a sign saying "the site of"... A bit like New Brighton did with their open air baths actually... Several decades later there is still a big empty oblong sunken patch on the grass with a sign next to it!

We walked back down the hill to the harbour and then walked along its length. Two young children were begging, a boy of around six, sitting cross legged in the baking heat, playing a tiny bazouki stringed instrument. He was getting a tune from it too. A girl of at the most three years old with a small accordian around her shoulders that she squeezed in and out, looking lost and obviously not wanting to be there. Heart rending, but then you see the mother, sitting in the shade, smoking and reading magazines, taking money from the kids whenever they had enough to give her and sending them back, scolding the little girl who wanted some shade... You can feel sorry for the kids but it's not them that end up with any money you give.

You can get some idea of the steep slope behind the harbour from this shot where the steps keep going up and up way up to the roof height of the yellow building in the distance.

Some of the bars had spent a lot of thought on their theming!

The harbour was bright with small boats painted in reds and blues. It would have made a good watercolour and I did doodle a bit in a small pad of watercolour paper that my daughter, Gill, had bought for me. I find boats quite difficult to do though, so I gave up on that one!

On the other side of the far harbour wall was a crowded beach, people swimming and laughing, unaware of the tragic little drama being enacted on the harbour wall. We walked back along towards the point where the tender boat would pick us up, but I wanted to sketch the view of the castle first.

I spent half an hour capturing the outline and some of the detail and we went for a drink in one of the cafe/bars before heading back to the ship. I finished the sketch later in the Horizon bar, adding all the stonework and roof tiling detail and scribble hatching the trees and shrubs.

We were wondering again about tomorrow. We had heard Athens was affected by fires. However the captain had good news - we would be going tomorrow.

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The Temple of Artemis

Monday, 24 August 2009. We left the more modern delights of the steam locomotive museum at Camlik and travelled to a car park by the side of a marsh. The ground was, thankfully, dry and covered in fallen stone.

In one place a single column had been re-erected. I have seen photographs that look like the column rises from a lake... This was the site of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The list of awe-inspiring buildings and sites of which the only one left standing in a condition to give sightseers any idea of what it may have originally been like is the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Of the sites, two were in Egypt; two in Greece; two in Turkey and one in Babylon.

You can get an inkling of what this temple may have looked like if you visit (as we shall, later on this trip) the Parthenon, high on its hill at Athens. But the Temple of Artemis was almost four times the size of the Parthenon.

The Turkish Artemis is not the same goddess that the Greeks worshipped. She was a godess of fertility and hunting and was depicted with either many breasts or perhaps with eggs, hung from her body to represent motherhood and fertility. In fact there was evidence of five temples built one above the other. Wars, earthquakes and vandalism had done for them. The previous temple had been the pride of Ephesus.

It was burned down in 356 BC by a young Ephesian, Herostratus, who wanted to go down in history. It was such a hideous crime that his wish was quashed by a law making the mentioning of his name punishable by death. And yet... we know it... The rebuilt temple that became one of the Seven Wonders was the first building to be constructed entirely of marble. 425 x 225 feet, it had 127 columns to hold up the roof. It was still under construction when Alexander the Great came here in 333 BC - by coincidence he had been born the night Herostratus had burned the previous temple down. The building reportedly took 120 years, although some now dispute this and think half that time would be a better estimate.

It was built on this marshy ground to try to save it from the effects of earthquakes. Silting of the river and coast had caused the ground to rise by at least 4 or 5 metres since the 8th century BC when the first temple had been built. To prepare the ground large quantities of charcoal and fleeces were trodden into the marsh. It stood until destroyed by the Goths in 262 AD when both Ephesus and the cult of Artemis were in decline. Constantine, the Roman, rebuilt Ephesus a century later, but left the temple crumbling. The single re-constructed column is all that remains standing of the temple. Beggars, mostly children, swarm around visitors with hands held out. Their controller, their Fagin, sits by his car, watching...

We didn't stay long. It was enough to see what there was to be seen and to be able to say we were there. The coach returned to Kusadasi and the Thomson Celebration, stopping on this hill for a photo opportunity overlooking the port and ship. That brings to an end our day in Turkey. Tonight the ship will sail back towards Greece, though we have a change in destination for tomorrow. We were due to visit the port of Thira on the island of Santorini. But the port is a tender port - the ship would anchor offshore in the lagoon of this island group and ferry passengers in by tender boat. The weather is such that this would be too dangerous and so we will be heading for Samos instead.

I took the photo of Kusadasi's fortress as we sailed out of the harbour.

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