Seven Sleepers

This morning when I looked the vote was 9 to 1 that I should go to the Seven Sleepers! The one NO vote was someone here in the group who thought it wasn't worth getting up so early! Yesterday, the day of the trip the vote was 5 to 1 and so woke up early to go to the Seven Sleeper site. Ricky did too. It was a good thing to do. What I thought was going to be a quick and boring visit turned out to be pretty interesting. A specialist met us on the site and opened the lock so that we could get into the area that they don’t open to the public. He told us that the site was actually much older than they first thought it was. He showed us how the tombs were built under the ground of the church. All of them had been opened and robbed of the contents. He explained to us that this was the area that people came to see and the Seven Sleepers. We went under the floor and walked through a tunnel that visitors would have used. We also saw bushes with white rags tied to them. Pilgrims tied the rags on trees as prayers when they were visiting the site. Both Muslims and Christians know the story and think of it as a holy site.



We also visited a site called St. Luke’s Tomb. It was originally named St. Luke’s Tomb because the archaeologist who first found it in the 1800's saw a bull with a cross on it. This is St. Luke’s symbol and the shape of the site made it look like a tomb. As it turns out it had nothing at all to do with St. Luke. The archaeologist explained that when he did a thorough dig on this site in 2000-2004 and looked for things he found a water channel coming from up in the hills where there was an aqueduct. He also found other evidence that it was a fountain. He also found an area that he came to the conclusion was a closed area with a door that could be used as a refrigerator. He explained that he thought that this was a storage area that was kept cool by the water coming from the aqueduct. It could be closed up and people who came to Ephesus to sell meat could leave it in this storage area (actually a refrigerator!) temporarily. The thing that was amazing to me was that the site had a sign in front of it with totally wrong information! When the sign was put up they had realized that this was not a tomb, but the theory at the time was that it was a greco-roman ruin that was later made into a basilica. This is what the sign said. It sort of bothered me that the archaeologists knew new things, but had not changed the signs. The reason for this is that the archaeologists are not doing this work for tourists. They work really hard and after lots of time looking at the evidence they write scholarly works. They talk to each other about what they find, but rarely have the money or time to put up new signs.