Yeats, the Irish poet, must have loved Turkey. He wrote so lyrically of it in Sailing to Byzantium:
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees…
Caught in that sensual music
The travertine is a magical white wonderland with mineral waters and restorative hot springs, verging on the edge of another world.
Your photos captured the essence of the place - the genius locii, as the Romans would say.
They highly esteemed such locations, building spas and mineral baths and even temples on the site. The name Hierapolis in Greek means "sacred city" and the ancients regarded such locales as under the guardianship of presiding spirits.
The white traventine shoals seem other-worldly seen against the backdrop of the blue mountain ridges.
It must have been breathtaking in the evening at l'heure bleu, and so inescapably romantic.
No wonder the women bathe in the calcite pools. Cleopatra took milk baths. It must be the calcium!
To leave such a place is difficult. I can hear the strains of longing in Yeats' final lines:
set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
A lovely post, @sweetsssj
What a beautiful comment, thank you so much for the extra information. So many people visit this place for the obvious visual attraction but forget it has quite the historical impact for the area.
thanks, sssj - I finally caught up with you! I'll keep an eye out for your posts :)
Woah is that poem where the movie title comes from " no country for old men" ?
And your comment is pretty cool! you seem to be caught up in the romance of ancient greece and rome, and that time period, must have been fun to be wealthy back then! But without wealth back then life SUCKED haha, noone could just fly around the world like we can now! technology RULES!
But we can ALWAYS romantically yearn for time travel to experience the "good ol days" but it was just realy nasty and smelly and back then you could die of a broken leg and noone would be there to help you, al you could have was Opium really, but you were able to just sit around and grow whatevr plants you wanted IF you had land but getting seeds was ot like today where you can just go online! the internet has made our lives thousands of times easier....life is changed so much and we take it for granted, we see material goods as dirty now because they are so easy to acquire, well, we should be grwing more plants and cherishing the biodiversity with seed banks etc
GODAMN This was awesome ancient rome was legit man! im telling you! Its almost as if it was a better city than what we have today! Imagine ancient rome but with computers and internet! Just drop computers and electricity into this ciuty and you basically have modern day rome?
It must have been SO FUN to wander around this city especially at night imagine all the cool parties you could stumble into! imagine all of the cool stuff you could find , houses of men who collected rare things from all over the world
imagine finding someone who had cannabis plants back then! Probably got them from China o India and started growing cannabis in his roman garden! imagine how awesome that would be to find back then and being able to smoke cannabis in ancient rome
These images evoke such an ancient feeling inside, the feeling of civics, of having a city, a place you can walk around at night and have order, a place where you feel the AESTHETIC of vaporwave, 3d modeling of columns,
Thanks @ackza - Quite a comment! I love the photos you included and the comparison of modern Rome to ancient Rome, but with computers. Brilliant!