10/12 – 10/15/24
For three days, I seemed to always be in the shadow of the mountain. I could see it from Priene, my first stop after the airport: Mount Latmos, hovering over the hazy cotton fields of the Meander plain. As I drove up the familiar narrow road to Kapikiri, the mountain filled the horizon, never quite coming into focus.
I checked in, as I had twice before, at the Karia Pansiyon. The owner, Emin, was a bit older, with a noticeable limp; otherwise, nothing seemed to have changed since my visit seven years before. There were the same tractors and mules on the single paved street, the same mangy dogs snoozing in every convenient shadow, the same pervasive but inoffensive aroma of cow manure.
I stopped in the ancient agora, where a small playground had been set up, for a picture of the Temple of Athena looming over the windswept lake. Then I walked up, past vine-hung houses and the buried theater, to the city walls. Although I had visited them several times, I felt the old thrill of discovery as I followed the gray stone blocks up and down through the boulder fields. A crescent moon was bright overhead by the time I reached the lake.
As sunset burned on the water, I walked up to the Lake Castle. Crimson light poured through gaps in the walls and washed up the sides of the mountain, suddenly clear against a paling sky. I walked back to the pension by moonlight.
The next morning, after a leisurely breakfast overlooking the ruined monastery on Kapikiri Island, I drove up to Ephesus for a long day of filming. Returning about an hour before sunset, I walked out to the salt flats beneath the Lake Castle. Again, I stood and watched the changing of the light over mountain and lake. As the sky darkened, the salt flats began to glow. A stiff breeze filled the air with the rustle of reeds. Mount Latmos blushed and paled, and stars began to spangle the sky.
I spent the following day filming at Miletus and Didyma. I had never seen Miletus so dry. Somehow, the lack of water made the site even more mournful, the ruins protruding forlornly from cracked mud flats. Heat radiated from half-buried marble blocks, and the distant shape of Latmos presided over a waste of dead grass and leafless trees.
It was evening by the time I returned to Kapikiri, where a mercifully cool breeze was pouring off the lake. I walked up to the Temple of Athena again, and listened to the wind whistle over the ancient walls. As I picked my way through boulder fields to the ancient Carian necropolis outside town, a haloed three-quarter moon rose over the mountain, and rosy wisps of cloud filled the sky over the lake.
On this final day of my sojourn in Kapikiri, I drove the few kilometers to Golkaya. There, after some white-knuckle driving up one-lane streets, I found the trailhead for the Yediler Monastery, a large Middle Byzantine complex on the lower slopes of Mount Latmos. I lost the way repeatedly, following treacherous goat paths into the scrub. After two hours of frustration, however, I found my way to the monastery gate.
I spent a contented hour exploring the buildings, peering into cells and scrambling up heaps of rubble. The views were predictably majestic, with Lake Bafa gleaming on one side and Mount Latmos looming on the other. There was a timelessness to the place – the unfiltered sunlight and metallic sky that define the Mediterranean in my memory. I was sorry to leave.