Smyrna (Izmir)

The modern-day city of Izmir, Turkey's third-largest city, was the ancient city of Smyrna in Biblical times. The ruins are right in the middle of the city, straight across the street from a school. The guide told us an amazing story about when he was a child and his family first moved to Izmir: he said he went to a movie theater that he thought was terrible. The wall that they played the movie on was all old and cracked. It turned out that that wall was part of an ancient wall that had once belonged to a building on the edge of Smyrna's agora!

Because the modern city is on top of the ancient city, not much has been dug up; we only saw the agora, which the guide said was used as a cemetery in modern times, so no one really objected to excavating it.

Pictures:

Looking in from the entrance

Yep, that's a parking lot beyond the pillars.

Those pillars would have supported a roof that went around the agora over a stoa. 

The cool part about Smyrna is that we get to see some of what would have been under the city in ancient times:

If I remember correctly, the little channel running down the floor served as a drain, while the spaces on the side could be used for gathering or selling (although I'm a little fuzzy on that last part, so I could be wrong)

Here, I have to give a shout-out to two of my high school friends, Lindsey and Selah (the two girls Pasadagavra is dedicated to). Do you ladies remember when we were in high school, and for senior class religion, we had to act out a historical scene? We picked the martyrdom of Polycarp of Smyrna, a church father from I think the second century. Polycarp was supposedly meant to be burned at the stake in the public arena, but when the Roman soldiers lit the fire, he would not burn. They got frustrated by this, so they stabbed him, and there was so much blood that it doused the fire. They then decided to burn his body so that the Christians wouldn't start worshiping him.

When we three decided to put that on as a play, I don't think it went over very seriously. We were all in drama, so we borrowed some of those very generous gray fake beards (one of them made me think of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner every time I saw it), and borrowed some swords and tunics from there too. To make the fire, we tied some red streamers to a standing fan and laid it on its side, and then turned it on or off as the scene dictated. Everyone was laughing hysterically.

I bring this up, because even though no one has excavated the arena yet, they know where it is! See the hill in the picture below? According to our guide, the arena was partway up that hill!

I couldn't zoom in on the spot they were pointing out, but it was a little to the left of the Turkish flag and down some of the way.

Obviously, they can't excavate it because there are people living on that hill, and they don't want to move.

Anyway, after seeing and hearing that, we went underground to look at the arches and some of the ancient graffiti:

I don't have any pictures of graffiti, sorry. 

If I'm remembering this right, then that red wall at the very edge was the wall that was part of the movie theater the guide told us about

One of the professors and I speculated that this was one of the Amazons. 

The next picture is the face of Faustina, the wife of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, put there because when Smyrna was damaged by an earthquake, she poured a lot of money into repairing it:

And finally, just some beautiful carvings:

Smyrna (like Ephesus) was a powerful trade city in ancient times, and is also one of the seven churches mentioned in Revelation. In Revelation 2:8-11, Jesus warns the Smyrnian Christians that they are about to suffer persecution, but promises complete eternal life for those who remain true to Him even through persecution. What a reassuring promise!

Incidentally, our guide mentioned that there has always been a body of believers in Izmir since the time of Revelation.