Antalya

After breakfast outdoors on the terrace, our tour leader took us on a walking tour of the Old Town of Antalya. It’s a beautiful place, with Roman walls still intact in many places, and breathtaking views of the sea from atop high cliffs. The city is decorated with flowers everywhere, and the many parks are lush and green at this time of year.

The restored, Ottoman-era houses date mostly from the 18th and 19th centuries, though a few are older. Most have been heavily renovated into businesses. An example is our hotel, which actually consists of three houses that have been made over.

The walk ended at Hadrian’s Gate, built to honor the emperor’s visit to this city during his reign. Only half the gate remains — an upper level succumbed to earthquakes long ago, and much of what is now seen is reproduced, though some is original.

The bus met us at the Gate, and although our destination was near, traffic and one-way streets turned the journey into a longer and more circuitous excursion. We finally arrived at the Muze Antalya, the city museum.

This museum is quite large for a local city museum. Most of the artifacts here come from Perge, a city we will visit tomorrow. In ancient times, Perge was a neighbor to Antalya. Today, Perge is within the metropolitan Antalya area.

The Perge site yielded an amazing number of well-preserved statues, some representing emperors or other dignitaries, and others depicting gods or mythological creatures.

Two of the museum’s treasures include a life-sized statue of Hercules, and the Sarcophagus of Hercules. The sarcophagus is obviously not purported to be the burial place of a mythological figure. Rather, it gets the name because the intricate and nearly perfectly preserved carvings depict the feats of Hercules.

Our afternoon was free. Some group members went shopping (surprise!) and a few went to the Hamam (Turkish bath). We went to a free city museum that is just down the street from our hotel. It was small, but gave some insights into the history of the city.

We walked to a larger museum that had been pointed out to us by our tour leader, but discovered that is is closed on Sundays. So we joined the remainder of our group members sitting in or around the hotel pool, which was quite pleasant.

Another hotel guest, a tall blond woman — from Germany, we think, and probably 40-something or older — caused something of a stir with our group when she came into the pool area and promptly removed her top. She spent pretty much the entire afternoon lounging in only a bikini bottom. Not what we expected to see in a Muslim country, or at a hotel pool where families with young kids were swimming. But we Americans were probably more concerned than the Europeans. And no, we have no photos.

In late afternoon, OAT brought in a retired local archaeologist to chat with us. The fellow was a bit hard to understand, and spoke more about his own career than about the archaeological finds in the area. But his narrative of the excavation of a burial site was made more interesting by the fact that we had seen the artifacts recovered in the Antalya Museum that morning.

The archaeologist also brought us a “gift” of a book he’d written on iconography. He even signed them for us. We mused that it’s a good way for old, retired professors to unload unsold copies of their old publications.

We finished the evening by walking just a few short blocks to a restaurant perched on the cliff, overlooking the sea. The group enjoyed the evening meal together, watching the sunset.