A wonderful museum and some very odd notices

I have just been stunned by the new museum at Ephesus, which I think only opened a few months ago, funded largely by the Austrians.  I hadn���t been to Ephesus for about thirty years, and it was a flying visit back then, which certainly didn���t include the museum. I got the impression that most people going to the site now don���t take in the museum too: a big mistake. Go there if you get the chance.

It���s not simply that it is ���state-of-the-art��� in terms of modern museum display (though it is that, for sure). The objects found in the ancient city rank with anything anywhere in the Roman world.

If you ask me for the highlights, I would pick out first the colossal statue of a gloriously overblown emperor Domitian ��� presumably an ���acrolithic��� statue, with marble extremities fixed onto a wooden or metal frame. The head looks grimly misformed, but would have looked far less silly from twenty feet below (as I tried to capture in the photo below). It���s a great reminder that the kind of vast, superhuman creations famous from the statue of Constantine that has long been admired in the courtyard of the Capitoline Museum in Rome were not innovations of late antiquity. There had been colossal statues in Rome as long has there had been autocrats.

Something that was quite new to me, however, was a substantial piece of ivory carving, originally made to decorate some very grand piece of furniture, or perhaps to go on a wall or lintel.

It dates from the reign of Trajan or Hadrian. Or that at least is what the very close stylistic match with Trajan���s column would suggest. The miniature military scenes on this ��� whatever exactly it was ��� are the spitting image of the much bigger scenes on the column. Underneath are some more puzzling civilian scenes, even smaller. I haven���t been able to work out, or look up, what they are yet. Any ideas?

And in one corner was a superb phallic creature, which it took me a long time to spot without my glasses; but I now see tat this headless creature is balancing a very large basket of fruit on his erect penis (shades of the famous painting at the entrance to the House of the Vettii at Pompeii, where the man is weighing his penis against a bag of money ��� a pun on penis and pendere, to weigh, maybe?

So a great place to spend a couple of hours. There were however a few rather odd notices, which both enlivened and puzzled. By the main front door of the museum was what looked like a ���leave your comments here��� box. But it was designated in English, a ���human rights application box���. Either there was another role and purpose to the museum that I had not spotted, or this was an odd translation of the Turkish (which others may be able to explain better than I can).

Even more unexpected was the notice on the site itself, which advertised a rather lengthy taxi trip to the in fact relatively easily walkable ���house of the Virgin Mary��� (she came to Ephesus in retirement). The place, as you see, now seems to be actually sponsored by McDonald���s.

But none of this beat the notice on the entry to Izmir airport. There seemed to be an odd set of priorities here. Smoking strongly forbidden (well I understand that). But just please take the guns you might happen to be carrying, as you do, to the "delivery desk���? It was carefully repeated at check-in.