Still a work in progress, but rate of progress tapering off. Organizing everything "properly" takes time! A little distraction June 6th 2012: The transit of Venus. I saw it!! (And have published a brief note about that for those of you who care about thrills in my life!)
Just before we get to the pictures, a message, new 11 Nov 12, for several fellow tourists: If you recognize your name in the following, another of our happy band has created a DVD full of pictures he would like to send you, but the contact details he has appear to be invalid. Email a postal address to me, and word of whether you prefer "ordinary" DVD or Blu-ray, and I'll pass the information on to JaMcC. No charge by either of us. This message for... St&Ly Rei, Pe & Ca Sta, St&Pa Bu, BeBro, Fr&Es Ca, Al&Eli Lev.
Fairly new at 26 June 12: A sub- sub- page about our visit to the Sultankoy Carpet Co-op, Camlik, near Kusadasi and Ephesus.I've tried to publish some of the wonderful information we were given there about oriental carpets.
There's an item which may "amuse", further down, added 05 June 2012, 10am UK, about one group's trip home.
At the moment, things may be hard to find and/or not displayed very well. I have broken up what was here before to make the separate parts load into your browser more quickly. But now things are not all in one place. The "gallery" of "best photos" on this page will be something of a random selection for some time to come. Some "bests" may be hidden on subsidiary pages. And "bests" shown here will usually be repeated on the subsidiary pages. And some "non-best" things may be here, en route to subordinate pages. Sorry!
I would like to thank Tauck for my splendid experience on this trip. The programme was intelligently paced. The people we met face to face, and, judging from the fruits of their labors, the many people behind the scenes, did a wonderful job for us, the travelers. We ate and stayed at many excellent hotels, restaurants, etc, but, given the time we spent aboard their ship Le Levant", and the quality of that experience, Compagnie du Ponant deserves special mention here, too.
And of course, no account of this trip would be complete without mention of Keith and Renee, who worked so hard, with such competence, and good cheer. (The mosaic workers of Rhodes do good work, and so quickly, too, of course. If you didn't encounter this gate, it was near the top of the old town.)
Photo sharing: There are many online photo-sharing sites. I have used Flickr.com for many years, for free, without regrets. I have put a few photos from our trip there. I tagged them "athist12-c" for "ATHens/ISTanbul trip, 2012- Cruise portion". If you have photos to share, this is one easy way to do it. Just be sure to tag each photo "athist12-a" or "athist12-c" or "athist12-i" ("Athens", "Cruise" and "Istanbul" portions of trip), so that the other Taucktorians can find your contributions to the venture.
Further down this page, below the photos, there is other material for you...
On the hilltop in the center foreground, highlighted by the sun, was the palace and military stronghold of Mycenae. Occupied from at least 3500 BC, at it's height in the second century BC, it was declining by 1200 BC.
On the hilltop in the center, highlighted by the sun, about 500 feet across, was the palace and military stronghold of Mycenae. If you look VERY closely, you can see people on the top. (Click for Wikipedia article.. opens in new tab.) Occupied from at least 3500 BC, at it's height in the second century BC, it was declining by 1200 BC.
There is no doubt that there was a city of Troy. And someone, somewhere, negotiated an alliance between many Greek city states to attack Troy. And the "headquarters" of that was probably on this hilltop. Here ruled Agamemnon.
My first Greek islands! (Delos a ferry ride from Mykonos, where we were put ashore.) First stop on our cruise.
This gives you an idea of the color of the seas in the Aegean.
Our excellent guide explains the Serpentine Column in Istanbul's Hippodrome. From Wikipedia: "The Serpentine Column has one of the longest literary histories of any object surviving from Greek and Roman antiquity- its provenance is not in doubt and it is at least 2,489 years old." (Full article). Originally sited at temple of Delphi. A drawing of the column from 1582 shows the serpent's heads still in place. One of them is in Istanbul's excellent Archaeology Museum. (Photos from there, from my '09 trip. (But none of serpent head.))
In other words: Go here if you want to see everything, elsewhere if you have a more modest appetite.
Each link will open a new tab or window. Just close the new window, and you will return here. (You may want to set your browser to go directly to the newly opened tab, if it isn't set that way already.)
In some pages, these sub-pages lead to sub sub-pages.
We saw these magnificent buildings frequently while we were in Istanbul, so I have given each its own page...
Blue Mosque
Hagia Sophia
"New" Mosque
Suleymaniye Mosque
("Suleymaniye Mosque?", I hear Taucktaurians asking. No, we didn't get to that one. Details on its page.)
I'm always a bit skeptical about lists of "the top x whatsits", but "The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World" is a list which, if nothing else, has a bit of a history. And our cruise took us to the sites of three of them, so maybe a brief page about them isn't out of place?
I was very lucky... my return flight left at a sensible hour, and it was direct to London, only 3-1/2 hours. Pity the poor 3am crowd...
One group from our "family" had to get up at 3am to catch a flight which was just to Germany, and from there they had (had) connecting flights. All went according to plan until about 30 seconds into the flight, a bird (owl?) decided to enter one of the jet engines. Not good for bird. Not good for engine. All went according to the pilot's "bird strike" plan... they returned to the airport without any outward signs of distress or difficulty, everyone got off, and started to re-plan their journeys home. Why did this have to happen to the group who were already having a tough trip, what with the early start? Wouldn't wish it on anyone, but wouldn't it have been easier to endure at a more sensible hour? Ah well... just goes to show how good the planes and pilots are.
Actually, my own return home wasn't entirely according to plan... Got back to Gatwick, expecting to be met by a taxi... and no one there. And office had no record of my booking, no recollection of the courtesy message I sent them via their website recommending double checking flight status... which I assume they do anyway... in light of the fact that there were some "issues" about striking workers which might have affected my flight.
Ironically, this was the second time in a row I've not been met, and a second company, as I wasn't going to continue using the people who let me down last time. Happily, this time I was at Gatwick, from which a train is very easy, and also I was coming off an easier flight.
Here is a sample of one use of the data collected by the small yellow cylinder I wore around my neck on the trip, a Holux M241 GPS data logger. (You can buy them on eBay for about $45. An excellent design, which comes with superb software.) I was too conservative in my settings... only used perhaps 5% of its capacity. "Only" recorded 390,000 bytes of data! (The brown squiggly line on the left is some walking I did by myself one afternoon.)
While the map/ diagram is pretty and fun, the real benefit of using the data logger is that I can tell where I took a particular picture, if the logger was being used at the time. I've also put a high resolution version version of the above map/ diagram online. It will open in own tab/ window. Just close that to get back to this page.
I am perhaps a bit paranoid about the dangers the web represents. While, as you can see, I have sometimes mentioned names, and shown faces, I need some "reason" to overcome a general reluctance to do so, or obtain specific permission in advance. It is not for me to publish things about you, is it? So I hope no one will be offended by the lack of "our group" photos, or the lack of many photos just of us having fun? And I hope that even while being cautious, I haven't published anything you would like removed... by all means contact me if I have... link below.
Hmmm... this could do with "some work", but for what it is already worth....
The timeline spans 3,000 BC to 2012 AD. So far so good?
Forgive the US-centric point of view, but as most readers are likely to be from there, I hope I may be forgiven.
Start over at the right-hand side: "C" marks when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. "GW" marks when George Washington and his friends rebelled. Had you notice that the USA has existed for only about half of the time that Europeans have lived in the Americas?
N.B.: All other letter pairs are written vertically... apologies for my inconsistency with "GW".
Within the long rectangle, I've marked in the approximate spans of "Ancient Greece" and the reign of the Western Roman Empire, and the Republic which came before the Empire. All other "entries", as the "C" and "GW" entries we have already dealt with, are for specific dates, and are shown as dots inside the rectangle.
Continuing to the left, we come to "N"... the time the Istanbul "New" mosque was started.
Then the block of six letters. Vertical pairs, as I said.
continuing to the left:
Just before I expound on the three "see below" items....
Don't be fooled by the timeline. Athens and Istanbul did not start in 3000 BC. Wikipedia says of Athens:
The oldest known human presence in Athens
is the Cave of Schist which has been dated to
between the 11th and 7th millennium BC. Athens
has been continuously inhabited for at least
7000 years. By 1400 BC the settlement had become
an important center of the Mycenaean civilization.
Humans have been leaving archaeology in the Istanbul area since the 7th millennium BC... 8000 years BC. They may even have been there at a time when there may have been no channel between the Black Sea and the Aegean. The Wikipedia article on the Deluge Theory makes interesting reading. For more, see a National Geographic article, discussing the discovery of "shorelines" 300 feet down in the Black Sea. Imagine if humans had lived there when the "refilling" of the Black Sea began.
And so to my three "see below" items:
The battle Kadesh gave rise to the treaty of Kadesh. A clay tablet copy of the treaty, created about 3,270 years ago, is in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. There is more on this at the top of a page from my 2009 trip report.
The museum also has a early example of human writing. It is a 4,500 year old ledger, listing quantities of barley, flour, bread, beer. Also shown on the page I just cited.
The other "see below" item, "Acrotiri Artifacts" refers to the marvelous things we saw in the museum at Santorini, the objects retrieved from the Pompei-like "time capsule" site on the south side of the main island.
Below here: Perfect it isn't... but started, it is, at long last! Thank you Taucktorians for "inspiring" me. I've wanted to do this for years... finally made a stab at it, arising out of the above.
The illustration below is an overview of something I have just published elsewhere. (Link follows diagram.)
The bottom bar shows All Time Since The Big Bang.
The bar above is the right hand third of the bottom bar, stretched out.
And so on up the page. Each bar shows a magnified version of a part of the bar below it. The colors tell you how much of the bar was reproduced at higher magnification.
Note that in most cases, the magnification is on the order of twenty-fold.
The right hand end of every bar is "now".
A few highlights....
Top bar is the past 2000 years or so, with the small green bit at the left being, roughly, the span that I feel one person can "know".
You have already been taken back to the beginnings of agriculture but the second bar.
In the fourth bar, mankind has been with us only for the small purple bit at the right if you are generous, a quarter of it if you define human-ness more narrowly.
In the penultimate bar, the small horizontal bar at the right is roughly the reign of the dinosaurs. Doesn't look like much, until you work out that humanity's existence, let alone "reign", at this scale, couldn't be shown because even a single line would be too thick.
The last bar: All Time So Far is split roughly at the point where planet Earth was born. Not only have we not been around very long, but even our planet is less than half the age of the universe. As often as I have worked on the ideas behind this timeline, I must admit that I had forgotten that particular fact.
Give you a new perspective, I hope?
I've only done the following in haste... see what numbers you get: If the bottom bar were one mile long, then one inch would represent 220,000 years. Hence the need to magnify, and then magnify again... over and over!
If you would like to look more closely at that, you can open it in its own page. Alternatively (and better): in a separate part of my online life, I have written up the details hinted at in the overview diagram above. My "time line of the universe from Big Bang to 2000 AD" is now ready for your enjoyment. Comments welcomed. As I am now in my 18th hour of this day, I hope someone will avail themselves of the link I created before heading for bed.
Links here to external pages will usually open in new tabs or windows, because of the way I've written the page. In addition, my power browsing guide may be with worth a visit!
These pages written on an "old fashioned", non- widescreen system. It may enhance your enjoyment to view the pages in a window that doesn't use the full width of a widescreen display.
Glutton for punishment? (Well, you have read down to here, haven't you?) As you may know, the wonderful trip with Tauck was not my first time in Athens and Istanbul. (It did provide, however, my first visits to the intervening places.) I had a quick visit to both back in October 2009, and the link will take you to my write up of that, where you will see photos of things that we saw on the 2012 trip. In some cases, changes may amuse you.
I hope you found the Hagia Sophia as breathtaking as I did... both times. Imagine, if you will, how different my experience was in '09 when the void below the dome was mostly filled with scaffolding while restoration work was being done. Still breath-taking then, but it was even nicer without the scaffolding!
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