I glanced down Curetes Way, which sloped downhill toward the huge Library of Celsus, wishing I could strip away my flannel shirt and heavy L.L Bean trousers and substitute them for something cooler, something white, flowing, that would catch whatever breeze was coming from the sea a few miles to the west. My feet, clad in leather Reebok hikers, ached to be set free. Sandals would be nice.

The water from the bottle was warm. How to cool it. A clay jug would work. The guide book I held in my hand told me that the Gymnasium of Vedius, which I had just passed, once held baths, latrines, exercise rooms and a swimming pool.

I got here about 2,000 years too late.

And as I sat and squinted toward some huge yellow mechanical cranes placed on a hillside by Austrian archeologists who were painstakingly removing layers of history from Ephesus, it occurred that this is no museum and I am no ordinary visitor. My need to sit and rest, my need to quench a thirst, my wish for a cooling plunge in a bath grabbed my inner soul and flung it back to 100 B.C. I would have been one of about 250,000 subjects then living in what was the grandest Roman city in Asia Minor, and one that had been around 1,000 years before that.

It was late March when we visited. In April in Caesar's time, this rich and beautiful metropolis would have swelled to a million tourists from as far away as Athens to the west and Jerusalem to the south, coming to celebrate the gifts of the goddess the Greeks called Artemis, and the Romans renamed Diana, queen of the hunt, goddess of fertility, a multi-breasted wonder woman. Her grandest temple, one of many built on the same site, was once one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Taking about 100 years to build, it lay in ruins in a wetlands just down the road, watched over by a gawky stork from his nest upon a tall column.

Behind me was an amphitheater for 25,000 spectators, to the right, the Agora, or marketplace once offering silks, carpets, jewels from the East; at the far end of the street the vast library, although roofless, was restored to near grandeur in an ongoing recovery project begun in 1863. All about me, huge chunks of Ionian and Corinthian columns lay strewn about, mere pieces to the puzzle. Our group was made up of two dozen tourists, mostly seniors, who sometimes stood open-mouthed at the astonishing sights we saw on our Turkish Adventure trip hosted by Go Ahead Vacations of Cambridge, MA.; we marveled not just at the beauty and grandeur of Ephesus, but its size. Though buried in sand for centuries and encircled by five miles of ancient wall, the temples, baths, homes, brothels and theaters covered a quarter-mile in each direction and only one-third of the city of more than 1,000 acres has been unearthed.

Ephesus, which ceased to be after its harbor filled with silt about 600 A.D., was once mighty, wealthy and pagan, visited by such diverse giants of history as Alexander the Great and St. John, who died there, and St. Paul, whose presence caused a near riot and who later wrote his eloquently moving Letters to the Ephesians. They are about love and behavior.

High upon a windy mountain top less than four miles north of Ephesus stands a small, stone cottage-like dwelling surrounded by shade trees. Today, pilgrims know it as the last home of Mary, the mother of Jesus. She was brought there by John, as fulfilled by Christ's dying request (John 20, 25-27): "When Jesus therefore saw His mother, and the disciple standing by, whom He loved, He saith unto his mother, "Woman, Behold Thy Son!"

"Then saith He to the disciple, Behold Thy Mother! from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home."

Mereyama, as the Turks call the shrine, was visited by both Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II, who in 1967 held a mass there and declared the House of Mary as a place of worship.

As we ducked to enter the low front door of Mary's house on Bulbul Mountain, Suleyman Karaz, our Turkish guide, touched his lips in a silent gesture of respect to the Christian visitors kneeling and praying inside. A Muslim, as are 99 percent of the Turkish people, Karaz's concern for a faith not his own would have been most atypical of other nations of Islam. But Turkey is unlike other Moslem countries; it is the only one that's secular.

On the map, Turkey straddles the Middle East like a jaunty cap on a troubled brow. Democratic reforms began in the 1920s, when Mustafa Kemal, called Attaturk by the 57 million who inhabit his land. Turkey began turning away from the narrow constraints of fundamentalism that so strongly identified Iran and Iraq, for instance, driving a wedge between East and West.

Certainly, the hauntingly beautiful call to worship by the muezzin from loudspeakers atop minarets can be heard five times a day throughout Turkey. And you will still see many, but certainly not the majority, of Turkish women enrobed in the hooded, full-length carsaf that smothers female identities as well as their freedom. Women were allowed to vote in 1934, and it was only in 1992 that Turkish women won the legal right to work without a husband's permission. Attaturk's message that "The Republic of Turkey cannot be the land of sheiks, dervishes, disciples and lay brothers" has endured.

As a tourist destination, Turkey has fallen victim to the ongoing fears among western countries that the Middle East is one dangerous hot spot, despite Turkey's strong alliance to NATO throughout the Cold War and its refusal to permit Iraqi oil to flow past its borders during the Gulf War in 1991. The Turkish government, which in the 1980s invested heavily in new highways and hotels, especially on the sunny Aegean coast, lost billions of dollars because of the Iraqi conflict. It is striving mightily to recoup through tourism. The 19 days spent in Turkey by the Go Ahead group can hardly be called a lend-lease program, though, because most of us feel we got the better of the bargain. We were astonished to learn that Turkey has more ancient cities and classical ruins than fabled Greece, with Ephesus being the best preserved of them all.

--John J. Hilferty is a free-lance writer based in Vermont.

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