Pamukkale, Turkey · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

Everyone climbs to Pamukkale for the same photograph, those blinding white travertine terraces stepping down the hillside like a frozen waterfall, warm turquoise water pooling on every shelf. What almost nobody pauses at is a small arched doorway a few steps away, tucked into the ruins of the ancient city of Hierapolis that shares the hill. The Romans called it the Ploutonion, the gate to hell, and they were not being poetic. Behind that doorway the ground breathes.
A deep fracture in the rock leaks volcanic carbon dioxide, and it seeps out as a faint visible mist that pools along the floor. The geographer Strabo watched priests lead bulls up to the opening in front of the pilgrims and the priests walked out untouched, and everyone called it a miracle. It was physics. Carbon dioxide is heavier than air, so it settles into an invisible lake barely knee high, thick enough near the vent to reach ninety per cent. A priest standing tall kept his nose and mouth in clean air just above it, then stepped back into the sunlight to be believed. The vent was lost for centuries and only found again in 2013, still deadly! Here is the part I love, the terraces are the miracle everyone photographs. Nobody needs to prove miracles now, science has stopped this!

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.