Selçuk is a place where history doesn’t sit behind glass — it moves through daily life. We began our days the way the town does, in the cafés where the same people return each morning to the same cups, the same jokes, the same unfolding argument about the world. I learned that if I stayed quiet long enough, I could slip into the rhythm — not as a tourist observing a culture, but as a temporary participant in its habits.
From there we would walk slowly up toward St. John’s tomb and the castle, taking detours through residential lanes the mapping app didn’t intend. The houses — some weathered, some freshly renovated — spoke in layers, like the archaeology beneath them. Cats and dogs threaded through the streets with the casual authority of long-time citizens. The more I watched them be acknowledged, fed, greeted, the more I wondered what we in wealthier societies had lost in exchange for our efficiency and order — what distance we have built, not just from animals, but from one another.
Ephesus itself sits at a crossroads of history and myth, and you can feel both even if you don’t believe in either in a literal way. This was once the city of Artemis, protector of women and wild things, whose temple — one of the wonders of the ancient world — drew pilgrims, traders, and power. Later, it became a city of empire, of Roman administration, of wealth and spectacle. Then, in the Christian imagination, Ephesus became a place of apostolic presence — of John, of Mary, of a community wrestling with its own new story about time, purpose, and salvation.
I am not a believer in those myths in any doctrinal sense. And yet, walking there, I realized that disbelief does not grant immunity. My imagination was formed in the cultural echo of these stories — resurrection, exile, revelation, the fall of cities, the endurance of faith. Even when I doubt them, they continue to shape the metaphors that shape me. Skepticism doesn’t dissolve inheritance; it only makes me more aware of it.
The immersive exhibition in the Ephesus museum - the closest holodeck experience I have had - made that tension visceral. In darkened rooms, through sound, fog, and sweeping 360 degree images, the past did not simply inform — it performed itself. Not as nostalgia, but as a reminder that every civilization wraps its power in stories about destiny, virtue, and cosmic meaning. I felt moved, and at the same time wary — conscious that even beautiful narratives are technologies of belonging. My reaction wasn’t belief — it was recognition.
Later, at the site of the Temple of Artemis, the ruins were quieter — a scattering of carved fragments, the labor of thousands now scattered along a perimeter of grass. And there, where the statue might once have stood, a female dog sat — calm, dignified, keeping a kind of watch. I sat beside her for nearly an hour. I offered her a bit of cheese; she sniffed and refused, as if to say she needed nothing from us. The temple was gone, the goddess gone, the empire gone — and yet a living creature remained, present in a way no monument can be.
It felt like a reversal of the ancient order. Once, humans placed animals at the margins of sacred space. Now the sacred was rubble, and the animal sat at the center. Empires rise under mythic banners; life persists without permission.
That same tension — between myth, power, and ordinary care — surfaced in our conversations around town. A bar owner who had lived in Belgium told me, almost matter-of-factly, “This country is a dictatorship,” and then added, “First you must teach people what a constitution is.” He wasn’t complaining; he was diagnosing structure — the gap between authority and civic understanding.
An ex-English teacher spoke of how much is taken from ordinary people “to support the upper classes and the government,” yet also described how few people sleep on the streets — because families step in, neighbors intervene, communities improvise safety nets the state does not provide. While we were talking, a well-dressed man with a cognitive disability passed by. My companion rose without hesitation, fetched him water, returned, and resumed our conversation as though this small act of care was not separate from the politics we were discussing — but part of it.
Extraction from above. Obligation from below.
There was nothing sentimental in it, nor heroic — just the quiet ethics of people who refuse to let others fall all the way through the cracks.
Elsewhere we heard different philosophies of safety: a British expat who trusted harsh punishment and authority, a goat herder whose life remained precarious despite that authority, a family sharing tea and stories in a cramped apartment. Each person held a theory of how the world should work — shaped by class, experience, fear, hope. None of them fit neatly into the myths we tell about nations.
Ephesus made that complexity harder to ignore. It is a place where stories about gods and apostles coexist with the evidence of empires, labor, and inequality — and where contemporary life continues in their shadow, improvising dignity from below while power speaks from above.
What I carried away from Selçuk was not certainty about which story is true — mythic, historical, or political — but a sense that human life is always lived in the space between them. We inherit narratives we no longer fully believe, yet they still form our moral grammar. We live under systems we may not endorse, yet we craft small solidarities anyway. Stones crumble; stories persist; people keep caring for one another.
The temple is gone.
The dog keeps watch.
And somewhere between skepticism and reverence, between analysis and compassion, we continue to make meaning out of what remains.
John Matylonek writes on democratic reform, civic ethics, and the future of constitutional balance. The think tank, a southtown Corvallis pub called Beer30, is the test-bed for these ideas. Where — besides needing a drive home — the person next to you may be a professor at OSU, the mayor, school-teacher, opening an AI start-up, running a genetics lab in his basement or head the local food pantry. His essays appear on Medium, DailyKos, and future archives where he develops the framework of Constitutional Civic Realism (CCR).
