Kusadasi, Turkey: Miletus and Didyma

Roman Theater in Miletus

In Miletus, our guide focused primarily on the Roman Theater, a true semi-circle which had the architectural advantage of easy replication on any flat site in the Roman Empire. Arched tunnels not only served as passageways through which patrons could reach their seats, but also supported the stadium seating, allowing those further back to see over those in front of them. The Greek Theaters in Ephesus and elsewhere, on the other hand, were built into natural bowls with seating going up the side of the hills and are not true semi-circles.  We had a few minutes to look around the theater on our own.

Wildflower where once a planned city grew.

Miletus was the birth place of Hippodamos, the father of urban planning.  While we were in Ephesus, our guide had spoken about how Roman cities were laid out according to a specific plan that took into account how many people lived there, with the size of the theater being enough to serve 10% of the population at once. Knowing 18 inches as the width of a seat, the population of the city can be calculated from the size of the theater, helping to know the size of other facilities like hospitals while doing excavations. Season ticket holders had their names or symbols carved into their seats.

About noon we were off to have lunch in Didyma at exactly the same restaurant where my youngest daughter Amy and I dined four years earlier.



Our group arrived before any other to the restaurant. Dictated to some extent by the season, the food choices were different. The juicy, fresh peaches Amy and I enjoyed last time nowhere in sight, but the delicious meal included lots of treats to go with the panoramic view of the Temple of Apollo.

Temple of Apollo from Restaurant

Our guide proclaimed the Temple of Apollo as his favorite site on this tour. Again he described it different aspects than our Turkish guide had four years earlier, including the construction techniques. Pointing out the precisely flat sides of the stone blocks that allowed them to fit together perfectly, he said they were cut with silk thread, which is an incredibly strong natural fiber, pulled back and forth rapidly for hours. He said he observed the technique in a demonstration. The incredibly time-consuming process required water to be regularly applied during the process to cool it.

I tried to verify this online, and I came across fascinating video about huge watermills in the Roman Empire that created flour for bread. At the very end of the video, there's a briefly stated theory that these sophisticated watermills, created many centuries before the industrial revolution, might have been used to cut stone blocks, harnessing energy from the water power plant rather than what would have been hard, painstaking work for slaves. When dealing with events that happened hundreds and hundreds of years ago, everything is open to intepretation. Who knows exactly what happened or what people were thinking over 2000 years ago?