Our last full day in Turkey was very full indeed. The planned itinerary had this as mostly a long bus ride back to Istanbul, with a visit to Troy to break things up a bit. But, an unfortunate circumstance led to the happy consequence that we got to visit an olive oil museum in addition.
In the area of Troya we stayed at a new and fancy spa hotel called Rezone. It billed itself as an oxygen hotel...the amount of oxygen in the town is supposed to be higher? It had an interesting spa treatment menu that included leech treatment (along with a very long list of all the conditions that leech treatments help to alleviate.) Because of the hiking I did not try a spa treatment of any sort, so I did not have to make the decision to be daring about the leeches. It did occur to me that I have traveled to places where the leeches were free-- and sometimes even obligingly fell of out tropical rainforest trees to "treat" me.
The rooms were lovely:
Olives on trees.
The proud owners had artifacts from old methods of oil pressing. My mind's eye had always wondered about the olive pits: How were they dealt with during pressing? They are not removed, it turns out. The olives are mashed up, and the mash is spread on mats which give a enough space to allow the oil to leak out while not crushing the pits. You can see the mats on the right side of the photo:
In the afternoon we made our brief trip to Troy. The thought of going to Troy has romanced me for months. When I learned about Troy in school, I didn't picture is as a location that one visited. It seemed ancient to the ancients. I'd always pictured Troy as being a beachside city; it may have been, but we were not right on the water. There are many layers of Troy and it can be hard to orient to which part of time one is looking at.
walls
the ramp to the city
And then we really were back on the road, across the Dardanelles again and arriving in Istanbul long after dark.
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