Who says history is boring? History becomes more than facts and figures when you actually visit the places, where it all happened, see the sites and enjoy yourself in the places where our civilization was born. Nowhere is this more evident than in Turkey.

From 2000 BC to 1500 AD Turkey was a center of culture and a crossroads of civilization where people from Europe and Asia mingled, fought, traded and built great cities. A lot of this history has been preserved and a modern tourist visiting Turkey today can learn about the past while enjoying the sunshine and beauty of this ancient land.

The Western and Southern regions of Turkey abound in places of both modern and ancient importance. The classical literature of the West, the Iliad and the Odyssey, not to mention the recent Hollywood movie, has glorified the legend of Troy. But Troy is more than a legend. Troy existed over 4000 years ago and was the center of a great civilization. Ruins of the ancient city can be seen in the Turkish province of Canakkale (Dardanellas), which lies in the Marmara region of Western Turkey.

The walls of the ancient city and a museum containing a replica of the famous Trojan horse are popular tourist destinations. In fact, now there are two Trojan horses to be seen, as the horse used in the Hollywood epic has been donated to Turkey.

If you travel southward from Troy into the Aegean region of Turkey there are more great sites to explore. The city of Pergamon was an important center during the Hellenistic period, when the successors of Alexander the Great ruled great stretches of the Middle East and Asia.

Today the modern city of Bergama contains the ruins of Pergamon. Ancient Pergamon was one of the principal military, political, and cultural centers of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Its library, consisting of two hundred thousand volumes, was the second largest in the world. The largest library was that at Alexandria. The famous physician Galenus (Galen) was from Pergamon.

Present day visitors to Bergama can visit the ruins of the Theater of Pergamon, which seated 10,000 spectators, the Temple of Dionysus, the Temple of Athena and other sites at the Acropolis of Pergamon, but the books of the ancient library are long gone, as they were given to Cleopatra as a wedding present!

Another city in the Aegean region that is both a present day tourist stop and an ancient center of culture is Ephesus. It was an important ancient port city whose remains have come down to the present day in very well-preserved condition. The ancient harbor however in time became silted in, with the result that Ephesus now lies inland from the sea. The Temple of Artemis located in Ephesus was one of the “Seven Wonders” of the ancient world. Banking in the modern sense got its first start in Ephesus. The philosopher Heraclitos was from Ephesus. The apostle St. Paul lived in Ephesus, St. John wrote his gospel here, and many pilgrims come here to visit a house where the Virgin Mary is said to have stayed.

The “House of the Virgin Mary” is in the vicinity of Ephesus, ( 5 km from Ephesus). It is believed by many Christians and Muslims that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was taken to this stone house by Saint John after the crucifixion of Jesus, fleeing the persecution of the Christians in Judea, and lived there until her assumption into Heaven according to Catholics and Orthodox. According to traditional belief, Mary left Jerusalem together with St. John sometime around 40 A.D. and came here where she died. The church dedicated to her name here is the first in the world accepted by the Vatican as a place of pilgrimage for Catholics.

Pope Paul VI visited Virgin Mary’s House in July 26, 1967 and Pope John Paul II also came on November 30, 1979. The Turkish government and Vatican officials said a visit by the new Pope Benedict XVI to Turkey in November 28, 2006 will proceed as planned.

Troy, Pergamon and Ephesus are just a few of the places that you can visit in Turkey where you can walk in the same places where the great figures of ancient history went long before us. An ideal way to visit these historical sites and feel this mystic atmosphere of ancient cities, sandy beaches and secluded bays is to join land tours in Western and Southern Turkey, or to combine a land tour with a luxury yacht charter cruise.

Gurhan Ebren
www.elpasotravel.net