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He’s fat and lazy, orange and indifferent.
He’s Garfield of Ephesus, the stray short-haired ginger tabby cat who hangs out in front of the amphitheatre at the 2,000-year-old ruins in Ephesus, Turkey.
He’s named after the famous comic strip feline Garfield, who’s also a notoriously curmudgeonly laggard.
My wife, Kerry, and I come across the ancient-ruins version of Garfield on a Ephesus tour off a Windstar cruise that glided into the nearby port city of Kusadasi on Turkey’s west Mediterranean coast.
We find him elegantly prone on a piece of broken column, holding court like he owns this UNESCO World Heritage site of Roman Empire-era ruins.
Our group is immediately enamoured.
We coo and pat and scratch the dozy mini-tiger. His eyes are half-closed in passivity and there’s only a slight purr and tail flick.
His apathy makes us even more intrigued.
Our guide, Amit, tells us some workers at the archeological site befriended him because he’s regal and unafraid when many of the other resident feral cats are skittish.
Of course, they feed and give water to Garfield and all the other cats.
And one of the enterprising workers even set up the @garfield_of_ephesus Instagram account to keep the world updated on the dilatory feline and provide a place for tourists to contribute photos of their interactions with him.
So far, 6,003 people follow his Instagram account.
The account was inspired by the @hagiasophiacat Instagram, which has 106,000 followers and chronicles what’s going on with the feral cats at the famous mosque in Istanbul.
Quite honestly, Garfield is a highlight of our Ephesus stop and the first anecdote relayed to friends and fellow cruisers.
However, we also can’t help but be wowed by Ephesus, which is considered one of the greatest outdoor museums on the planet.
Many intact ruins have been unearthed and put back together to give visitors an idea of what this beautiful, sophisticated and advanced port city of 250,000 would have looked like in the first century AD.
The marble roads and sidewalks lead to the Roman baths, Celsus Library facade, the Temple of Hadrian, Odeon Theatre, courthouse, senate, hospital and terrace houses of the wealthy.
And, the Grand Amphitheatre (Garfield’s stopping grounds) is so well put together that it’s used as a concert venue where Elton John, the Three Tenors, Frank Sinatra, Sting and many classical acts have performed.
In fact, the 148 passengers aboard the Wind Star all return to Ephesus that evening for an exclusive, candlelit, white-tablecloth dinner of stuffed grape leaves and Turkish veal and wine on the main marble road as a string quintet from the Aegean Chamber Orchestra plays between two columns.
Being a small cruise line with small ships, Windstar has been chosen as the only one to bring guests to Ephesus after it closes to the public for these magical dinners.
It indeed is atmospheric, like we’ve been transported back in time to dine like Romans under the stars at the edge of the Mediterranean.
The rest of this Treasures of the Greek Isles, seven-day cruise on the Wind Star will also be magical, sailing Athens round-trip with other stops on the islands of Mykonos, Santorini and Patmos and the Peloponnese Peninsula ports of Monemvasia and Nefplio.
With only four decks, 73 staterooms and a capacity of 148 passengers, it is small and intimate by cruise ship standards.
The Wind Star also has the romance of being a four-mast ship that resembles a private yacht. Being yacht-like also means staterooms don’t have balconies like the mega cruise ships, but well-laid-out cabins with two porthole windows.
Also being yacht-like means the back of the ship can be opened up to the ocean to create a sports deck for swimming, paddle boarding and kayaking.
Windstar has two other sailing ships in its fleet — the 342-passenger Wind Surf and the 148-passenger Wind Spirit — and three motor yachts — the 312-passenger Star Pride, Star Breeze and Star Legend. We fly Air Canada to Europe because it has daily non-stops between both Toronto and Montreal and Athens.
Check out windstarcruises.com and aircanada.com.
The writer travelled as a guest of Windstar Cruises and Air Canada, neither of which reviewed this article before publication.