And so, it seems, do a lot of other people if the growing number of archeological tours being advertised in newspapers and magazines is any indicator. I have been particularly drawn to the classical world and have searched out its monument's in the course of my travels.
Turkey alone has more Greek ruins than Greece and more Roman cities than Italy.
Trouble was, I could never figure out a way to get to such sites on my own. Prof. Robert Lindley Vann of the University of Maryland would prove an amiable and knowledgeable leader, bringing to our group his skills as a teacher and a popular lecturer on classical architecture at the Smithsonian Institution. The professor had little trouble persuading us that in Turkey, the old Anatolia of the history books, the past is everywhere. Not only, of course, was this East Greece between 750 and 130 BC, but also a province of the Roman Empire between 130 BC and AD 395. In fact, on our first day in Turkey, we found that the past lay just a stone's throw from our Istanbul hotel, the Ferhat, in the venerable Sultanahmet district.