An Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara flies west, then crosses the sea to a Greek island. This route walks Ephesus on day one, sleeps in Kusadasi, then sails to Samos. For island trips, open Greece Tours on the homepage.
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How do the flight and the sea crossing run on an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara?
Two short legs carry an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara out of Turkey and into Greece. A morning flight covers over 500 kilometres from Ankara to Izmir. On day two, a ferry leaves Kusadasi for Samos. The island lies only 1.6 kilometres off the Turkish coast at the closest point.
Day one of this route starts at Ankara Esenboga Airport. The airport stands in the Cubuk district, northeast of the capital, and 28 kilometres separate it from the city centre. Its name comes from the village of Esenboga. From this terminal, an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara takes the morning flight to Izmir.
For a longer trip, Turkey tours on the homepage add Cappadocia, Konya and the Gallipoli battlefields.
Direct flights join Esenboga with Adnan Menderes Airport at Izmir, and each airport lists the other city as a destination. Inside an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara, the air route spans over 500 kilometres. The flight lasts a little over one hour. After landing, this route continues by road to Selcuk and spends the day at Ephesus.
The night stop is Kusadasi, a short drive from Selcuk. The road is under 25 kilometres long and takes under half an hour by car. Selcuk is the neighbouring district to the north. After the day at Ephesus, the group sleeps in the town where the ferry sails from.
Kusadasi sits where a gulf of the same name meets the Aegean Sea. From Izmir, the town is 95 kilometres to the south. Its port stands in the middle of town, and cruise ships call there. Within an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara, this port marks where the road ends and the sea leg begins.
Pigeon Island lies very close to the port. A causeway 350 metres long joins it to the mainland. A castle stands on the island, and a tower at its highest point served the guards who watched the surroundings. The island also has a cafeteria and a restaurant.
Samos is separated from the Turkish mainland by a narrow strait in the eastern Aegean Sea. Maps call it the Mycale Strait or the Samos Strait, and in Turkish it is Dilek Gecidi. It takes its name from Mount Mycale on the mainland. At the narrowest point the water is only 1.6 kilometres wide.
The Dilek Peninsula-Buyuk Menderes Delta National Park lies along that strait, in the Kusadasi district. Mount Mycale, the highest peak of the peninsula, is about 1,237 metres high. On day two, the morning ferry leaves the port for Samos. Ferry services link the town with the Greek island.
The return ferry brings the group of an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara back to Kusadasi. Samos belongs to Greece, so the crossing passes a national border in each direction. At the Kusadasi port, passengers go through passport control. Entry rules depend on nationality.
The Turkish foreign ministry lists its visa rules by country and runs an online e-Visa system. The European Commission lists the nationals who need a Schengen visa and, separately, those who do not. Greece follows Schengen rules. Read both sets of rules for your passport before booking an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara.
What do the harbour and the tunnel of Pythagoreion show during an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara?
On the island leg of an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara, Pythagoreion is the ancient town on the south coast. Its harbour stands on the ancient port, and its tunnel was cut through a mountain in the sixth century BC.
For an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara, the ancient town of Samos is the site called Pythagoreion. It lies in the area of the modern town of Pythagoreio, on the south side of the island. The modern town was renamed in honour of Pythagoras.
The harbour of Pythagoreion stands on the site of the ancient harbour. The port in use was built in the nineteenth century over the older one. The ancient town was a fortified port. The harbour is considered the oldest man-made port of the Mediterranean Sea.
The historian Herodotus describes a vast mole at the ancient harbour. A mole is a massive structure that works as a pier or breakwater. Archaeologists have found only traces of it. A marina lies beside the port, and the harbour claims a leading place for yacht arrivals in the Aegean.
Ancient fortification walls surround the old town. Roman buildings stand on the site, among them an agora, public baths, a stadium and town houses. The theatre was altered in the Roman period. It has been renovated, and local cultural festivals use it.
The Roman baths date to the second century AD. They joined the athletic area of the ancient city, which held a gymnasium, a stadium and a palaestra. Marble and mosaic once decorated the walls and floors. The hot-bath hall still has its hypocausts, the underfloor heating. Later, the sauna room became a Christian baptistery.
Ephesus Samos Tour From Izmir covers Samos too.
The Tunnel of Eupalinos runs through Mount Kastro and is more than one kilometre long. Herodotus names the builder as a man from Megara called Eupalinos. Historians date the work to the middle of the sixth century BC. Among the sights of an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara, it is the one cut through a mountain.
Two crews dug the tunnel at the same time, one from the north end and one from the south end. They met inside the mountain. Near the centre the shafts zigzag slightly, so a join worked even if the cuts began out of line. The passage is 1.8 metres high and wide on average.
Samos also features in Ephesus Samos Tour From Istanbul.
The tunnel served as an aqueduct for the ancient capital of Samos, which had outgrown its wells and cisterns. Water came from an inland spring near the village of Ayiades. The supply ran underground, which hid the spring from enemies. For an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara, this tunnel shows how an ancient town secured its water.
The tunnel floor lay about three metres above the water level at the spring. Builders therefore dug a separate channel below the east half of the tunnel to carry the water itself. Scholars began to search for the lost tunnel in the nineteenth century, drawn by the account of Herodotus.
UNESCO lists Pythagoreion together with the Heraion of Samos as one World Heritage Site. The listing describes an ancient fortified port with Greek and Roman monuments, and the Tunnel of Eupalinos belongs to it. Travellers on an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara thus see a site that UNESCO treats as a whole.
A related page on Ankara: Ephesus Pergamon Tour From Ankara.
Which temple and which museum anchor Samos in an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara?
The Heraion, the sanctuary of Hera, and the Archaeological Museum in Samos Town anchor the island. The temple left one standing column. The museum keeps its finds, among them a giant kouros. Together, the two places give an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara its early Greek story.
The Heraion was a large sanctuary of Hera. It lay in the low, marshy basin of the Imbrasos river, close to the sea. Local tradition says the goddess was born under a lygos tree, also called the chaste tree. Each year, her cult image was tied with lygos branches and carried down to the sea to be washed.
The Sacred Way joined the city of Samos to the sanctuary. Builders first laid it out around 600 BC. Before then, visitors reached the sanctuary by sea. Religious processions used the road, and votive offerings lined its sides. In the third century AD it was repaved with costly stone slabs, still visible at the site.
Between the town and the temple ground lie about 6 kilometres, the gap an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara covers. The sanctuary lies southwest of ancient Samos, which is modern Pythagoreion. Once the Sacred Way existed, the main entrance of the sanctuary moved to the northern side.
For more on Ankara, see Ephesus Pamukkale Tour From Ankara.
The Samian architects Rhoikos and Theodoros built an early giant temple on the site. Its design showed early Ionic features. In that order, a column ends in a capital with spiral scrolls, called volutes. It was the first of the massive Ionian temples built in western Asia Minor and the Aegean.
A larger temple, called the Great Temple, rose about 40 metres west of that one. It was about 55 metres wide and had one of the largest floor plans of any Greek temple. The historian Herodotus called it the largest temple he knew of. Builders never wholly finished it.
Readers interested in Ankara can open Ephesus Aphrodisias Tour From Ankara.
In Byzantine times the site served as a quarry. Only the foundations and one column shaft remained. The shaft seems to have been kept as a mark for ships. At the site, an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara meets one upright column among the foundations.
The Archaeological Museum stands in Samos Town, also called Vathy, by the town hall square. It has two buildings. The older one holds smaller works, and the second holds the Archaic sculpture and larger pieces. The exhibits are largely finds from the Heraion. That ties the museum to the ruins that an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara reaches.
The giant kouros dates to the early sixth century BC. It stands more than four metres tall, about three times life size. German archaeologists found it on the Sacred Way, and its head turned up later. An inscription on the left thigh says that Isches, son of Rhesis, dedicated it.
More about Ankara: Ephesus Sirince Tour by Flight From Ankara.
Votive offerings are gifts made to the goddess. A draped marble female figure came from Cheramyes, who gave it to Hera. The Geneleos group, six family figures on one base, once stood on the Sacred Way. Wet soil at the sanctuary preserved wooden gifts, a rare survival from the early Greek period.
Gifts reached Hera from far beyond Samos. Excavators found ivories from Egypt and the Near East, and skull fragments from an Egyptian crocodile. Other gifts came from Cyprus, Phoenicia, Iran and Urartu. These offerings date to the late seventh and sixth centuries BC. Through them, an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara touches Egypt and the Near East.
Another page that includes Ankara is Izmir Ephesus Tour By Flight From Ankara.
What do the wine, the honey and the mountains of Samos add to an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara?
Samos is an island of about 477 square kilometres in the eastern Aegean. Two mountains shape it, and vineyards cover a great part of it. Muscat wine, honey, olive oil and two philosophers give the Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara a living side beyond ruins.
On this route, day two of an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara is a day on Samos. The island lies in the eastern Aegean Sea, south of Chios and north of Patmos. It sits off the coast of western Turkey and belongs to the North Aegean Region of Greece. Its area is about 477 square kilometres.
Two large mountains dominate the relief of the island: Ampelos and Kerkis. Ampelos is the larger one and fills the centre. Kerkis covers less ground but stands taller, and it forms the bulk of the western end. Both mountains continue the Mycale range, which runs on the Turkish mainland.
The summit of Kerkis is the highest point on Samos and rises above 1,400 metres. Pine and cypress make up the main forests. Forest stops at about 900 to 1,000 metres, and a different plant cover takes over on the highest tops. Kerkis belongs to the protected nature sites of the European Union.
Ankara comes up again in Pamukkale and Ephesus Tour by Night Bus From Ankara.
Kerkis gives an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara a forest to set against the day of ruins. The top of the mountain bears the name Vigla. The protected area also holds stands of evergreen oak. Plants and animals live there, and a number of them are endangered.
Vineyards cover a great part of Samos, and they grow the Muscat grape. The white Muscat is so closely tied to the island that it is also called Muscat Samos. The wine carries the protected designation of origin PDO Samos. The product the island is known for is its sweet Muscat wine.
The farm side of an Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara starts with the terraces. Muscat vineyards are spread on stone terraces, mainly around the central mountain, which is also called Ambelos. Sizeable vineyards grow on the north-eastern slopes of Kerkis. For the Grand Cru style of fortified wine, the grapes come from vineyards above 400 metres.
More about Ankara: Ephesus Pergamum Biblical Tour From Ankara.
Producers make the sweet wine from sun-dried grapes, as a fortified wine, or as a vin doux. The main farm products of Samos are grapes, honey, olives, olive oil, citrus fruit, dried figs, almonds and flowers. Olive groves produce the oil.
Vathy, the capital, is a port town at the head of a deep bay on the north side. The town carries two names, Samos Town and Vathy. The name Vathy still covers the whole town in everyday speech. Pythagoras was born on Samos in the sixth century BC. He became a mathematician and philosopher.
Readers interested in Ankara can open Ephesus Aphrodisias Pamukkale Tour by Flight From Ankara.
Pythagoras later founded a community in Croton, in southern Italy. Historians debate which discoveries were truly his. Epicurus was born on Samos too, in the fourth century BC. He taught in Athens, in a school called the Garden, named for the garden he owned. He urged people to seek ataraxia, a calm state of mind.
The Potami waterfalls lie on the north-west side of Samos, in a canyon cut by a river. A dense forest of plane trees and ferns covers the canyon. An Ephesus Samos tour from Ankara spends one day on the island. The falls are a feature of Samos, not a stop.