Pergamon and Assos

Yesterday was another long day on the bus. We drove from Kusadasi to Pergamon to Assos--about 10 hours en route.

Assos has fabulous Turkish ice cream! They are proud of its elasticity, rather like gelato. Some of us dashed out to find the ice cream stands while others took a dip into the Aegean when we arrived last night around 6:30 with two hours free before dinner.

Pergamon has some ruins remaining, but I've seen the best in Berlin in the Pergamon Museum that not even our coordinator has seen! When the Germans came during the 19th century to build a railroad for the Turks, they were allowed to remove and take back to Germany a certain percentage of artifacts from the site. The gigantic Pergamon or Zeus Alter is in nealy perfect condition and will never be returned to Turkey. Pergamon is also famous for its hospital and medical healing center or aslepion. Medical doctors attend conferences here to combine history and science. The snakes, of course, represent shedding the old skin for the new. We've seen the snakes in various friezes along the way. They've evolved into the sign we associate with MDs. (There's a Latin term for that, but it escapes me right now.) Finally, Pergamon is famous for parchment, and I was fortunate enough to purchase a small parchment-covered book.

When the Egyptians prohibited the export of papyrus, the King of Pergamum ordered that a new material be found. The new discovery was "parchment," a fine material from sheep or goat skin, highly polished with pumice stone and slit into sheets. Therefore the name of Pergamum has been perpetuated and seen as synonymous with the word "parchment." (Yenen, S., Turkish Odyssey, 349)

Assos has an acropolis that we'll see this morning before we leave for Troia (Troy). It's not the ruins that attract the tourists; rather it's this quaint little pebble beach on the Aegean (where a couple of our Fulbrighters are already swimming) and strand of boutique hotels just across the Aegean from the Isle of Lesbos that I can see as I sit here in the hotel lobby. I'm going to stroll down the strand to look for picturesque sites before breakfast.