ISTANBUL-I love a good ruin. And so, it seems, do a lot of other peopleif the growing number of archeological tours being advertised in newspapersand magazines is any indicator. I have been particularly drawn to the classicalworld and have searched out its monument's in the course of my travels.One day, however, I realized that I was visiting only the wonderful clichesof history--the Parthenon, the Coliseum, the Roman Forum--and not the lesstrammeled but equally exciting remains of Greek and Roman imperial greatnessthat lie tumbled all around the edges of the Aegean and Mediterranean seas.Turkey alone has more Greek ruins than Greece and more Roman cities thanItaly. Trouble was, I could never figure out a way to get to such siteson my own.

Then came the opportunity to go on a bus tour of Turkey led by an archeologist/architecturalhistorian. His itinerary--which offered more than a dozen centers of ancientGreek and Roman culture--might have been lure enough, but the price lastyear was irresistible: $900 per person (without air fare) for 14 days,including hotels, most dinners and breakfasts and a Turkish guide.

Prof. Robert Lindley Vann of the University of Maryland would provean amiable and knowledgeable leader, bringing to our group his skills asa teacher and a popular lecturer on classical architecture at the SmithsonianInstitution. Gray- haired, trim and relaxed, he is the kind of telegeniccommunicator who would make a fine host on an educational TV show.

The professor had little trouble persuading us that in Turkey, the oldAnatolia of the history books, the past is everywhere. Not only, of course,was this East Greece between 750 and 130 BC, but also a province of theRoman Empire between 130 BC and AD 395. Here strode Aristotle and Alexanderthe Great; the Roman emperors Trajan, Hadrian and Constantine; St. Johnthe Evangelist and the Virgin Mary, and a host of other awesome figures.

In fact, on our first day in Turkey, we found that the past lay justa stone's throw from our Istanbul hotel, the Ferhat, in the venerable Sultanahmetdistrict. Down the street was the site of the hippodrome, the Roman racecourse,now a park, where a 3,500-year-old obelisk removed from Egypt by the Byzantineemperor Theodosius still stands, close by the remnant of the bronze monumenterected by the Greeks at Delphi in 478 BC to commemorate their victoryover the Persians. And farther on lay the cistern, an enormous undergroundreservoir constructed between AD 527 and 565. Its high ceiling is heldup by a forest of 336 giant, often mismatched, columns removed from Romantemples and monuments. It is an eerie space of dripping water, long slipperywalkways and deep shadows that puts in mind the moody etchings of the 18th-Centurymaster engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

However much my wife, Liet, and I wanted to linger in this city that

straddles both the European and Asian continents, we were eager forour tour to begin. The names of some of the places we would be visiting--Chryse,Assos, Erythrae, Clarus, Priene, Miletus--called out like Odysseus' Sirens.And so, on the third day. we enthusiastically boarded our bus, in the companyof 20 congenial adults and architecture students. One of the advantagesof such a specialized tour, we would soon find out, is a commonality ofinterest that guarantees that everyone will stop and listen as the leaderholds forth and that conversations afterward will be spirited.

Our first stop was Troy, scene of Homer's "Iliad." Now an oversize woodenTrojan horse guards the gate, a hokey modern tourist attraction that canbe entered via a steep flight of steps. But it is Homer's ghost that reallyhovers over the place, imbuing its stones and dust (and it is dusty ) withspecial meaning.

There were, all told, nine Troys, each new city built over the ruinsof the other in an ever-growing mound through which archeologists havecut to reveal walls of houses, palaces and defenses. The top layer is Romanand the bottom dates all the way back to 3000 BC. In his zeal to find theTroy of the "Iliad," the renowned German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann,who began his excavations here in the 1870s, dug right past the level hewas looking for, mistaking a burned layer underneath for the city of Homer'sdescription. The scene of Schliemann's labors survives today, a broad,deep gulch, where red poppies were blooming among the stone foundationsof houses when we lingered there.

Soon we were to discover the second advantage of a specialized tour,the opportunity it presents to get off the beaten track. This was trueof our second site, the small town of Chryse. There, the ruins of the GreekSanctuary of Apollo Smintheus, the Mouse God, lay in weedy disarray, tuckedbehind sleepy whitewashed houses and pomegranate trees in full, fiery orangebloom. Our challenge was to divorce the temple from its 20th-Century contextand in our minds re-erect its fallen columns to envision it In all it'ss former glory.

A romantic imagination. I could see, is a prerequisite of archeologicaltouring. And mine was beginning to be fired up with thoughts of the ancientswho had called this sun-struck land home. Wherever our Turkish driver Haluktook us, we found Kodachrome-blue skies, silvery olive trees and ripe wheat.To me it was a wonder that these hills and valleys, farmed almost sinceagriculture began, are still productive.

With my imaginative juices now flowing, I was primed for our third site,Assos, where ruins of a Greek city dating from the 7th Century BC lie atopa mountain. "Spoiled" said one guidebook of the surroundings, but perhapsbecause we were traveling in June, in advance of tourist hordes, we foundthe place practically deserted and very charming. We were let out of thebus halfway down the steep slope, so that we might walk to Assos' ancientharbor, where the stone buildings of a little fishing village have beenconverted into accommodations for foreign visitors. It was noon, the sunwas hot and our thirst sticky--but we were quickly diverted by the sightof the large Greek island of Lesbos rising from the azure Aegean off tothe left and of pink hollyhocks, which grow wild in Turkey, thrusting upon either side of the narrow road.

At the water's turquoise edge, our group was invited by members of thehotel staff to seat ourselves at a row of tables lined up on the stonewharf. There, protected from the sun by a slatted canopy of bamboo, wewere brought bottles of mineral water, wine, and delicious mixed appetizersand grilled fish. Not the least pleasant aspect of our three-course lunchwas its price The bill came to barely $7 a head. In Turkey, the beleaguereddollar has value.

After a nap, our group reassembled and we hiked back up to the bus,which took us to the modern village situated below the site of the ancientcity. A scramble to the top brought us to the Temple of Athena ( 6th CenturyBC ), its surviving Doric columns starkly silhouetted against miles I andmiles of sea and sky. The Greeks, said

Vann admiringly, loved a good view.

After wandering in and around the temple, we followed our leader downthrough brush and thistles to the remnants of the city's imposing, 1thCentury BC defensive wall. The most complete surviving fortification ofthe (Greek world, it once ran three miles .round the settlement. Wherethe slope broadened into a kind of platform, enormous sarcophagi yawnedopen, their lids topsy turvy or overturned. The road they lined lay partiallyexcavated below us, some six feet down in the earth, an eerie reminderthat I was standing on accumulated layers of time and that one day ourown thin layer would be covered over by the future.

The street led straight to the city's gate, through which we passedto reach the agora, the public assembly spot where Aristotle--who livedin Assos for three years--had walked. Today, this once-grand space is littlemore than a rumpled field, with stray bits of rubble poking up here andthere. But it :s pure in that apparently nothing was built over it afterAssos' decline. Where Aristotle's footsteps fell, so now did mine.

Our next big site, on the fourth day of our journey, was Pergamum, thecity that invented parchment, or pergamena in Latin, and hence the book.In its Hellenistic heyday it had had more than 100,000 inhabitants. Wespent a morning poking around its lower portion. the Asclepion, the medicalcenter named for the god who was so skilled at healing he could revivethe dead. The ill came to this spa from all over the ancient world.

Treatments included mud baths, massages, herbal medicines, colonic irrigations,drinks from the sacred spring, and abstinence from wine and rich food.But a bit of hocus-pocus seems to have been part of the regimen, too, withclients obliged to run around barefoot in cold weather and to sleep insnake-filled rooms. For those with mental problems (and who wouldn't developthem with snakes slithering about? ), dream interpreters were at hand toadminister an early form of psychotherapy.

And to entertain the patients, actors performed regularly at a littletheater still in use today. When we wandered into its marble embrace. wediscovered that sound gear and electric cords incongruously filled partof the stage and, that numbers had been chalked on the seats for the convenienceof ticket-holders who the night before had attended an international festivalfeaturing a Polish choir.

Pergamum's acropolis floats high above broad valleys and must have rivaledAthens' in the beauty of its columned marble building. The ruin-rich summitoffers splendid vistas, but none so moving I thought as the view that opensup directly in front of the platform on WhiCh the Altar ef Zeus, one ofthe masterpieces of the hellenistic period, used to stand. (The greaterpart of this building-size monument now resides in Berlin's Pergamon Museum.

Germans are excavating at Pergamum today, and they have done much torestore the 'Trajaneum, a Corinthian temple completed by the great Hadrianin honor of his mentor and patron Trajan. Its gleaming sugar-white marblecan bleach color from the eye, if stared at too long.

Thanks to such reminders of a long vanished time. the ancients themselvesseemed to draw us with each passing day. At Clarus, I felt them particularlynear at hand. This was once a much-revered, much-famed cult center, knownthroughout the Mediterranean region for its oracle, who delivered her prophesiesin a dark room 1 under the Temple of Apollo. Above ground, neat rows ofnames of the countless ancient visitors are carved on columns, steps andeven on a curving marble bench. I sat in an elegant marble chair with serpentarms, spotting a snake slithering into the reeds as I did so--and spenta few moments reflecting on the past. What, I wondered, had the peoplewho flocked to this temple from all over learned about themselves and theirfutures after paying the price of admission and listening to the crypticmessages of the oracle? Did they go away happy, or wary? I was jostledback to reality by the odor of 20th- Century resins floating on the air;a group of French archeologists were busy making molds of parts of colossalstatues--an arm and a torso, among them--that remain at the site.

Soon we were off to our next destination, the Temple of Artemis, a powerfulearth goddess and friend to women in a male-dominated society. Once oneof the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World the temple ranked as the largestedifice of the Hellenistic period, and the first monumental' structureever to have been built entirely; of marble. Now, sad to say, it's no morethan a hole in the ground, with only a single column standing. But we hadnot come to the town of Selcuk to see this alone; rather, it was to visitnearby Ephesus, the great Roman city where tradition says St. John theEvangelist brought Mary to live after the crucifixion of Jesus.

Ephesus was grand, with its baths, temples, theater and library, thelast almost a logo) today for Turkish tourism, so often does it appearsin ads and booklets. The familiar structure--actually nothing more thana reconstructed facade--rises three stories tall. To stand beneath itsporches and look up past the tapering columns and all the rich carvingsto the coffered ceilings is suddenly to understand that Rome conqueredthe Mediterranean not just with its might but with its architecture.

BY now an easy camaraderie had grown among the tour's participants,and after visiting Ephesus and Pergamum, we could kid Vann about some ofthe all-but invisible sites he was taking us to. These consisted of ruinsso scant I might easily have passed by them without knowing what. theywere. Two such places were the lost cities of Larissa and Erythrae. todaymarked only by a few stray walls, chipped blocks of stone and broken bitsof pottery. Yet the climb to them, the wide-angle views they offered, andthe exhilaration of being out in the Turkish countryside, to say nothingof the exquisite sic-transit- gloria-mundi melancholy they project, madethe expenditure of energy worthwhile.

These near-invisible sites stood in vivid contrast to Miletus, wherea gigantic

Greek-Roman theater dominates the terrain. and Didymi, whose Templeof Apollo (famous, like the one at Clarus, for its oracle) is so huge itsremnants put Egypt's monuments in mind. To get inside the theater We hadto pass through a vomitory--not what it might sound like, but an archedentrance---then climb stairs before coming out' into the open.

Vann loved all these sites, and could wax poetic about them, but hispersonal favorite was Priene, a Greek city that was never tainted by aroman overlay. He made sure to share it with us at the best time of dayfor viewing ruins in Turkey, the late afternoon, when a breeze is up, thelight is soft and golden, and the shadows are long. Priene's acropolissoared above a broad valley that was once an inlet of the sea; silt fromthe River Meander had gradually filled the bay, leaving the city high anddry, destroying its commerce--helping to protect the town's Greek characterfrom too many Roman architectural incursions. An enormous stone- facedmountain reared directly behind Priene forming a strong backdrop for severalIonic columns reerected in a solemn row.

Instead of the gentle breeze we expected, we encountered a wind strongenough to shake one of the columns, yank off my cap and drop it on someoneelse's head like a gift from the gods, and spread the warm perfume of pinetree needles over the ruins. In this aromatic environment we wandered aroundby ourselves, practically the only visitors, and the unadorned strength--theGreek severity--of the place took hold of us. The streets were laid outon a strict grid plan. and the facades of many of the houses faced south,so that the sitting rooms at the front would receive the warmth of thesun during winter.

The greatest archeological site of all Vann had saved for last: Aphrodisias.named for the goddess of love. Excavations began in the 1960s when an earthquakedestroyed the Turkish village that had grown up over the ruins. As a centerof Roman marble-carving and sculpture, Aphrodisias had flourished, sendingits statues and artists all over the empire. The archeologists' spadesdid not have to plunge deep before statues began appearing. Nor were thesetheir only finds. More and more of the city came to light, including muchof the Temple of Aphrodite, which, during its post-Roman history, had beenconverted into a church.

We were lucky to have the director of excavations, Chris Ratte of NewYork University, give us a quick, behind-the- scenes tour of Aphrodisias.We entered through the Tetrapylon. a gateway of beautifully twisted columns,that led to the sprawling temple, then hopped, quite literally, from excavationto excavation to see the odeon, or concert hall!, and the senate house.Next we galloped along one of the city's two long agoras to the so- calleddepot, where statuary recently retrieved from the earth is stored.

Among Aphrodisias' many thrilling sights are the stadium and the theaterThe stadium--which is 860 feet long and held 30,000 spectators--is notonly the largest to have survived from ancient times, but also one of thebest preserved. Once used for footraces, it challenged two of the youngermembers of our group to run its length under the hot sun. And since myimagination was by now working over time. I populated the seats with theghosts of all those cheering individuals who had sat on them centuriesago. little did I know that in moments, I would meet one of them.

Leaving the stadium behind, we strolled into the 7,000- seat theaterand climbed to-its highest level, there to sit in the shade o. a wall andtake in the view of the distant mountains. I turned around to look behindme, where at some point part of the wall had given way. I spotted a bonepoking up from the earth. l pulled at it and it came away easily. ThenI saw a tooth. I picked it out and showed it to Vann on the palm of myhand. Was it human? Yes, he said matter-of-factly. Tooth and bone, he suggested,might well have belonged to, a Roman killed in an early earthquake. GentlyI poked both back into their resting places Never did the ancients seemcloser--or time more fragile.

*****

Brown, Based in Virginia, is editor of Time-Life Books'archeological adventure series, "Lost Civilizations."