"In this West Turkey blog, I wandered through 5 cities/towns in the Izmir province on the border of the Greek Islands. "I spent a week discovering the coolest and most historic places in Izmir, Selcuk, Ephesus, Sirence, Cesme and Alacati and tried my best to fit it all in a story for this post". Finally I take a few minutes to discuss the 20th century history of this region and understand why a place with such heavy Greek influences are missing al the Greek people."
so those hills that you see behind me that is Greece
and right now I am in western Turkey, in this post we're gonna explore
some of the more fascinating places in this meeting ,point of
cultures and try to understand why so many places in this part of Turkey
looks Greek
okay so it's 10 am right now and I am inIzmir, which is the
third largest city in Turkey the second busiest port in all of Turkey and
the second largest metropolitan area in all of the Aegean sea which
is primarily dominated by Greece and all of its little islands in
fact when you take a look around the city it looks a lot more like a
Mediterranean city than it does like the traditional Turkish city with
this architecture and trees right next to the main port is the main
square of the city called konak square which is marked by this
symbolic clock tower behind me.
It was built in 1901. definitely the most
recognizable symbol of Izmir. right next to it is this little
beautiful mosque which is really really small so when people
actually pray out here sometimes a lot of people line up outside the
mosque praying out over here because they can't all fit in there.
where are you from? Bangladesh Welcome. Thank you
so for the second stop of the day I’m in this town called
Şirince which is actually like 70 kilometers south of Izmir near the
city of Seljuk. This place is famous for its traditional white houses.
it's also famous for being in a valley right next to this huge hill and
you get gorgeous views across the valley from pretty much every house but
it's also famous for these pretty cobblestone streets and this
market and everything that's around it
So Sirince is also really really famous for
its wine apparently almost every
house in this village or town makes their own wine and they sell it and
it's mostly made out of fruit. They have a lot of wine tasting things in
almost every street in the town. I just met a guy from LA who
actually went to my university out in Izmir and we're both here so
we're going to do some wine tasting now. Is it made in Şirince?
maybe the peach? I like this
oh sh**. Oh no
oh god
so Şirince is not exactly known for hiking but I thought
I saw a vantage point that looks really cool and I’m really
glad I hiked up here okay so I thought I was gonna end the vlog here but
I found some goats ,so I had to include them in the final shot for
the day. Now I gotta get down somehow.okay so it's the second day and I am in
Ephesus which is a very famous archaeological site next to Selcuk
which was the city where I was at yesterday. Ephesus is one of the greatest
cities of the ancient world. this was built back in 10th century bc by
the ancient
Greeks but then around 133 bc it became a Roman city and
it became one of the most important cities in the entire Roman
empire second in size and importance only to Rome itself and at its
peak between first and second century a.d there are around 400 000 people
living right here. there used to be a port over here that had access
directly to the Aegean Sea so what a lot of people don't know about
Ephesus is that it's a very important site for Christianity.
It attracted a lot of early Christian settlers
including apostle Paul or St Paul supposedly Saint John was also
here but more on that from another location later I’m in one of the
main attractions of Ephesus called the terrace houses. The cool thing
here is that you can sort of come in inside this building that was
excavated and see what living inside these buildings from ancient
Rome used to look like at one point so it's very fitting that just like
every other building in Turkey there's a cat in this building as
well behind me is the library of Celsus which is the most impressive
building in all of Ephesus and I’d say one of the better works of
Roman architecture preserve in the whole world it was built in 133 a.d and
used to be the third largest library in the ancient world at one point.
It's definitely the most crowded part of this whole
site and if you want to get a good picture by yourself I think the only
time to get it it would be like 8 am right when it opens up so just from
all the grand architecture you can probably tell Ephesus had a lot going
on for it and its prime but the thing that led to its rise was one
of the things that left its decline the main port of Ephesus got silted
up it became a very hard place to access and slowly it started to
lose importance and then in 3rd century 80 the whole city was sacked
by some Germanic goths which sort of marked not only the decline of
the city of Ephesus itself but also the Roman empire in general, so over
time the city got forgotten and buried until the 19th century ,when
it was excavated again and today it's one of the largest excavated sites
in the whole world
okay so right next to Ephesus are the ruins of the
temple of Artemis, an ancient Greek temple that used to be one of the
ancient seven wonders of the world but there's not really much left
of it except for this one lone pillar behind me so it's not the most
impressive thing left ,okay so I just took a taxi for like 15
minutes to get to the site up in the hills sort of in the jungles to
see this very special place
so right now I’m at this place which is believed to be
the former house of the virgin Mary or Jesus Christ’s mother. Remember
when I said earlier that saint john is believed to have come to Ephesus
too along with Saint Paul but apparently when he did come to Ephesus he
also brought the virgin Mary with him and this is the house where she is
believed to have spent her last couple of years you can sort of go in take
a look but you can't film there or take photos and people are
worshiping inside and outside so if you do come here please be respectful
today I’m in the westernmost point of the province of
Izmir and the westernmost point of western Turkey in a place
called Çeşme this place is actually
literally five kilometers from the Greek border that way behind me
all the hills you see here from the coast that's Greece right there
This is a pretty touristy town with lots of nice beaches and some cool
stuff which I’m about to explore, Thankfully this is a lot lot lot
cooler than Izmir and Ephesus because those couple of days were hell back
there
right next to the coast and sort of the harbor of
Çeşme is this beautiful well-preserved and kind of big castle called Çeşme
castle that was built by the Ottomans in 1508 here. As you might guess
this part of the Ottoman empire was very exposed to attack and got
attacked a couple of times by the Venetian empire back in the days
and then they built this castle to have a line of defense
against the Venetians. The castle itself has a lot of walls and stairs
that you can walk around and explore and it's also got some cool
rooms full of like exhibits of ottoman history.
okay that's it for today ,right now I’m back in Izmir
to visit the most historical site in the city which is the ruins of
the ancient city of Smyrna. The first city that we know of in Izmir was
actually founded by the trojans 3000 years ago and ever since then
this place has hosted civilization starting from the ancient Greeks,
the ancient Romans, the Byzantines, the ottomans and everything else in
between. The ruins of this particular city was actually built by the
ancient Greeks in the fourth century bc and then it was completely
destroyed this place in an earthquake around the second century a.d
and it wasn't really excavated until 1933 and now you have this really
cool but compact archaeological site and without a doubt the most
stunning part of this whole archaeological site is this arcade with arches
on all sides that you can walk through. This used to be the old agora
of the city of Smyrna and you can sort of walk underneath these arches to
get a feel of what it must have been like to live in the
ancient Greek or Roman empire so now I’m going to talk a little
bit more about the more recent history of this place from about a hundred
years ago and just try to explain to you why everything in
western Turkey looks so Greek but there are no
Greek people left here. If you haven't watched my
vlogs from Sarajevo or Istanbul I would recommend watching those two to
get a better idea of the greater history of this region, the ottomans
were basically a dying empire for around 100 years before they even
broke apart but at the end of the 19th century in 1897 the places under
the ottoman empire directly had a population of around 19 million
people out of which 75 % were Muslim but the other 25 % importantly were
Christians Jews or people from other religions. now there was also
another 20 million people living in places that were just nominally under
the name of the sultan of the ottoman empire but were entirely out
of his control so when the 20th century started they (Ottomans) had
tried really hard to modernize their military which was pretty
backdated at the point but despite that they lost the Italo Turkish
war
which means they lost all their territory in north
Africa and in south western Turkey these islands they lost to Italy which
now belong to Greece Then the
ottomans lost the next Balkan war in 1912-13 which meant they lost
pretty much all of their territory in the Balkan peninsula except
for eastern Thrace which is what the European part of Turkey is today.
One important thing to note is while these wars were happening and
Ottomans were losing territory there were a lot of people that were
displaced. Around that time 400 000 Muslims that were living in areas
that the ottomans lost control of had to flee the area similarly 400
000 non-Muslims that were living in what is ottoman occupied territory
sort of had to flee that area to go to other places for safety.
Then world war one started and if you know it was at first
a war between Russia and the Austro-Hungarian empire and the Germans the Russians were a big enemy of the ottomans
and they had lost a war to them previously so the ottomans teamed up
with Germany to do a surprise attack on the black sea coast of Russia and
all the allies basically at that point declared a war on the ottoman
empire now the ottomans ended up losing that war along with Germany and
Austro-Hungarian empire and what happened at the end of world war
one was just a bunch of bad treaties and a bunch of bad ideas.
At that point it was still a bunch of empires ruling the
world that were trying to get more territory and what they did to
ottomans: partitioned the country that we know today into different
protectorates that were controlled by the British, the French and the
Greeks. This whole area of western Turkey and Izmir was basically
inside the Greek protectorate and then in 1919 the Greek army under
a lot of assurances from the British prime minister decided to land in
Izmir
which was called Smyrna at the time with 20 000 troops
and they're basically trying to take over this whole area. At the same
time the French also invaded Turkey from the south but in the
following three years the Turkish forces fought back with like
surprising ferocity under Kemal Ataturk who is considered the founder of
the country and they pushed back the French and the Greeks and at
one point the Greeks kind of realized they're screwed because they
never got the kind of help that they were promised by Britain and there
was no way they were going to win this war and this was a lot more complicated
for the Greeks than it was let's say for the French because there were a
lot of
Greek people living in this area or just living in
Turkey in general so what ended up happening is more than three years
after the war started the very end of the Greco-Turkish war
happened in September 1922 in Izmir when the Turkish forces finally recaptured
the very last city next to Greece and what happened after that was
very very tragic. The whole city got burned down and all of the Greek and
Armenian quarters in the city were completely destroyed. Around 10 000 to
25 000 people died and a lot of bad stuff happened after that
too. After this war sort of ended the governments of Greece and Turkey
agreed on the great population exchange of Greece and Turkey
which meant that anyone that was ethnically Greek and
Christian had to move to Greece even if they and their ancestors had
lived in Turkey their whole lives. At the same time anyone that was
ethnically Turkish, even if they didn't speak Turkish, that was living in
Greece had to move and leave Greece and come to Turkey So the
governments agreed on this but the people who were displaced were the ones
that were the real victims and it's been a hundred years so there
aren't a lot of people alive who remember what happened these days. The
whole story of this place is far more complex and I’m really
simplifying it but I’ll leave some links in the bio in case you want to
learn more about it and sort of understand what really happened.
There's a really good book about it that I read
too that I’ll link in the description below so you can check
that out too if you want to get a really really deep understanding of
what happened in this region. Alright guys that was enough of a
history lesson. I’m gonna end the blog from here today because this
is my last day in Izmir and I’m going back to Istanbul. If you liked the post
don't forget to hit that comment box and share it with your friends
who you think might like it. If you wanna support the blog feel free to mark
to my blog and read more post from Turkey.
I’ll catch you guys from the next one.thank you…
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