Wordless Wednesday: The Oldest Library I've Ever Been To

This is a part of Create-With-Joy's Wordless Wednesday, which is a blog hop of photographs.

3 1/2 years ago, I went on my first family vacation with my in-laws and we took a cruise of the Mediterranean.  We left from Rome's port, Civitavecchia, stopped in Messina, Sicilly, cruised on over to Athens, Greece, (Side bar1: I ran into a college ex-boyfriend on this cruise.  He was on his honeymoon. True story.) stopped in the port of Kushadasi, Turkey and lastly, hit up Heraklion, Crete.

It was while in Kushadasi (Side bar2: it's actually spelled Kusadasi, but the first s is pronounced sh. I also learned that Turkey is pronounced tour-key-yay.) that we took an excursion to the ruined city of Ephesus (EFF-eh-suss).  Ephesus was originally a port city.  It now lies several kilometers from the coast, thanks to plate tectonics.  It was an active city for the Greeks and Romans, but its claim to fame is that John of biblical/disciple fame lived there and the Virgin Mary died there.  The city was buried and abandoned, but archeologists are working to excavate it.  They predict that only 10% of the city has been excavated so far and it seems like a LOT, so this must have been a huge city.

Main road in Ephesus

We saw baths, a brothel, an amphitheater, wagon tracks, columns, Greek and Roman god statuary.  But the thing that wowed me most was a two-story library.  A library!  In that era!  It was beautiful and amazing.  So, without further ado, here is the Ephesus library:

and 

*hint: click on the images to make them bigger