Selge -- Koprulu Kanyon

With an early morning start, we drive to the Pamphylonian city of Selge – one oif the most isolated and dramatic of ancient cities.  The road narrows as we climb out of a narrow canyon, crossing Roman bridges.   The pine forest gives way to chestnut, thorn and olive trees.  The conglomerate rocks form lopsided towers, creating a vast, natural stone metropolis.  We arrive at the village of Zelk (modern Selge), populated by formerly nomadic people.   As we hike thru the village careful observation reveals many re-uses of Roman columns, capitals and other building materials in stables and farm houses. 

 Starting at the impressive Roman theatre, we are joined by a local guide to explore the remains of the agora, acropolis and city walls.  Then we hike down the valley, dropping almost 1000 feet.   After about 10K we emerge from the Koprulu Kanyon at the roman bridge.   We’ll stop by the river for a lunch of local fresh fish, at a restaurant overlooking a mountain spring.

 From Freya Stark:
Strabo mentions these bridges in the mountainous country which abounded with precipices and ravines and kept the Selgians from being 'at any time or on any single occasion, subject to any other people'. This one joined two cliffs with one arch across the river far below and its road, cut in the precipice continued to show itself at intervals, in slabs of stone placed end to end for miles into the hills.

.. here solitude floated up from the vertical gorges, filled with cypress or cedar as if with black spears. The silence buried the sound of its own waters, and a thin haze, spun in the blueness of air, divided one range from another, as if the heights wore haloes... Higher up the oak leaves lifted into sunlight, and their trunks, and those of a tall tree like a chestnut, stood furrowed like stone among the strange hieratic stones. These ribs of rock, symmetrically ranked, descended, one felt, into the hill's foundations, and the bare rain-washed scaffolding that shows must be a part of the hidden scaffolding of earth. ... There was a human kindness about these trees; as there was in the floor of the road whose giant stones we kept on meeting, and in a cistern scooped solid through the rock at the rim of the cliff.. The symmetrical, natural rocks encircled this place and must have made it religious long before the days of known history or the knowledge of the Greeks. Small pointed hillocks were framed in these formal borders, and ... we reached a cemetery of stones and marble fragments scattered under high oak trees and saw the village now called Zerk .. scattered among prostrate columns under a Roman theatre in a hollow.

It was shallow as a saucer and the ploughed fields filled it and small pinnacles surrounded it, where temples had stood on easy slopes. Beyond them, the high peaks rose with unseen valleys intervening.

 

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