I started this almost a month ago in a cafe right outside the museum. Life’s gotten pretty busy since then, and I’ve just gotten around to publishing it now:
A couple of weeks ago, I was at the ancient Lycian city of Xanthos. The site sees relatively few visitors, and the 3 lira admission is only weakly enforced. In the couple hours I was there, maybe 4 groups of people showed up to look around. The city is far from being one of lesser sites in the area though; once the capital of the Lycian Leauge, the ruins cover several acres, and many buildings including an enormous theater are in excellent condition. The main boulevard stretches straight through the center of the town towards the mountains and still bears the wheel ruts and polish of heavy traffic. It’s as broad as anything you will find in Pompeii or Rome and points to the importance of the city in a region of wealth and abundance. The site stretches on for quite a ways down the road, leading past the ancient walls, and wrapping along the hillside towards the necropolis. Despite the number of buildings most are unmarked and only a few single sentence plaques denote the histories of individual monuments.
I was walking around a particularly dense area of foundations, when I passed a man in a newsboy cap with a large mustache sitting on a cornerstone. There was a modern city nearby and locals without much else to do often loiter around archaeological sites. I was staring at a hole in one of the foundations, trying to figure out its purpose, when he called out that it was connected to a still functioning cistern. He proceeded to show me the other holes in the foundations where sewers ran, and pointed out the spot up along the mountains from which the ancient aqueducts, still intact, led water down to the city, explaining through strained English that these Lycian sewers still supplied water for modern town down the hill. Seeing that he hadn’t scared me away yet, he offered to take me around the rest of the site, and led me through the ruins working through limited English to give me the best site tour I’d ever been on. He pointed out the sites of many of the public buildings, mostly unmarked, as well as the former sites of the temple of the Nereids, the tomb of Payava, and a cast replica of the frieze from the Harpy Monument, all now in the collection of the British Museum. We ended out by the necropolis as the sun was setting. I thanked him tremendously and offered him ten of the twenty lira I was carrying on me. He rejected my offer, and as we said goodnight and I geared up to go find a place to camp. I headed off towards the next village and he started down the road to make the several kilometer walk back towards home.
A month later on my way back home to the states, I’d given myself a one day lay over in London, primarily in order to see the antiquities from the regions I’d just been in, mostly housed at the British Museum. For anyone who’s ever been to the British Museum, they know the collection is overwhelming: the Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, statues from Easter Island. And in this incredible museum built from artifacts from all over the world, in the center of the room I found to be the most impressive and overwhelming out of all them, stood the Temple of the Nereids taken nearly in its 
entirety from Xanthos. On either side of this room were two more large rooms each centered around objects from Xanthos. As I walked, hundreds of people came through each room, inspecting and taking in these monuments. With all the people seeing these monuments, I was reminded of one person who never would: my guide who’d shown me around the city itself. Everyone in London was looking at objects taken from the place he hung around every day waiting to talk to people about his country’s past, and show them the homes of buildings that he would never get the chance to see. Struck with this I lingered around the temple before slowly making my way through the rest of the museum, populated by foreign objects.
By the time I’d left it was dark outside. I struggled through the crowd around the exit, and emerged onto the street. I didn’t feel like hanging around and set out in search of a bar or a cafe, but I was too anxious and kept walking past each place I came across. I kept walking, but the city was more anxious than I was, and the cars and lights did little to calm my nerves. Unable to outrun the city, I ducked into a cornershop, and headed for the basement to recuperate before heading back up to the streets, and one of the last nights on my trip back home.
NowHere 