Pergamum
Trip Start
May 20, 2008
1
5
73
Trip End
Sep 15, 2008
Bergama,
Izmir,
Turkey
Sunday, May 25, 2008
We arrived to Pergamum a little ahead of schedule so we had to wait on our tour guide. In Turkey all tour guides are licensed. Visitors are supposed to only use the licensed tour guides and site officials will run off anyone trying to present themselves as a guide. The guides are also certified as to what languages they can speak. This keeps visitors from getting conned and ensures that they get correct information. Our tour guide, for example, is not licensed to be a guide at any tourist site. The tour company contracts with the expert local guides to lead our group at the different sites we visit.
I am so sick of Turkish computer keyboards
Built on tallest mountain around
. The letters are in all the wrong places. The "i" is to the right of the "þ" so I'm always having to backspace to correct it so some strange character doesn't show up in i's place. Likewise, the comma, apostrophe, period and other characters are rearranged. Ugh.Sorry I digressed. The ruins at Pergamum are on top of a huge hill overlooking the modern day city. My guide book says Pergamum is famous as the home of the Asclepion which is a healing center/hospital. Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius' personal physician, Galen, trained at Pergamum. He added considerably to the knowledge of the nervous and circulatory systems. His work was the basis of Western medicine until the 16th century!Pergamum's best days were between the time of Alexander the Great and the Roman domination of Asia Minor (around 200 BC) when it was one of the Middle East's richest and most powerful small kingdoms.
The theater at Pergamum is vertigo inducing. Builders decided to take advantage of the great hillside views and built the 10,000 seat theater into the hillside. Rather than making it wider, they made it higher creating incredibly steep steps with patrons having to look almost straight down to the stage. I didn't get very far down the steps before my brain kicked in and İ turned around.
Another famous sight is the Temple of Zeus. Originally covered by gorgeous friezes a sultan stupidly allowed 19th century German excavators to remove most of the famous building to Berlin where it is now housed in a museum.
The library at Pergamum was world renowned with more than 200,000 volumes. Can you imagine so many books during this time period? Only the library in Alexandria was larger. The Egyptians felt threatened though so they cut off the supply of papyrus to Pergamum. Scientists in Pergamum set to work to find an alternative and they came up with pergamem (Latin for parchment), a writing surface made from animal hides, which quickly did away with the need for pressed papyrus reeds.
With the exceptions above most of the rest of Pergamum was in pretty poor condition. The ruins were impressive but I think we've about maxed out on ruins. Now it's off to Kusadasi.
