On the boat ride back from Delos to Mykonos I thought it would be fun to recall all of the other ancient sites that I have visited and assemble a near perfect virtual ancient city.
Posted in Croatia, dubrovnik, Europe, France, History, Literature, Morocco, Spain, Travel, United Kingdom, World Heritage
Tagged Arles, Athens, Colosseum, Didyma Turkey, Ephesus, Hierapolis, Mérida, Rome, Volubilis
On 4th March 2020 I was enjoying my last day of a week’s holiday to Cyprus. I was visiting the archaeological site at Paphos and I got to thinking about designing my very own ancient city…
Posted in Africa, Europe, France, History, Morocco, Spain, Travel, Turkey, World Heritage
Tagged Arles, Athens, Colosseum, Didyma Turkey, Ephesus, Hadrian's Wall, Hierapolis, Mérida, Rome, Volubilis
On 26th September 2014 I was continuing the visit to Ancient historical sites in Turkey…
The young man that sold me the tour assured me that the journey from Ephesus to Pamukkale would take two hours so I was shocked when the driver now said that it would take three and a half.
I was dreading this part of the journey with the noisy Lithuanian family and the darts team chimps but then at a short stop we had a stroke of luck and were transferred to a smaller more comfortable vehicle with two young quiet couples. This was much better and we were so pleased about that because as the car pulled away we could hear that the the other bus had broken out into a spontaneous medley of classic cockney knees-up songs!
Posted in Arts and Crafts, Europe, History, Literature, Natural Environment, Postcards, Turkey, World Heritage
Tagged Altinkum, Aydin, Culture, Ephesus, Geothermal Energy, Grand Sevgi Hotel, IMX Travel Altinkum, Life, Pamukkale
Even though travel restrictions are easing I am not yet minded to risk it so I still have no new stories to post so I continue to go through my picture archives and see where I was on this day at any time in the last few travelling years.
On 25th September 2014 I was on a coach excursion visiting Ancient historical sites in Turkey…
The problem with bus trips is that you cannot choose your travelling companions – it is a game of chance!
I imagined that we would be accompanied on this trip by middle aged historians in crumpled linen suits and battered panama hats, archaeologists carrying trowels and leather bound notebooks and the entire cast of a Merchant Ivory film but at the first pick up we were joined by a Geordie and boisterous Lithuanian family and then horror of horrors by a noisy bunch of women who looked as though they should really be going to a market rather than one of the World’s finest archaeological sites.
Posted in Arts and Crafts, Cathedrals, Europe, History, Hotels, Natural Environment, Postcards, Turkey, World Heritage
Tagged Cathedrals, Culture, Darts Team on Tour, Didim Turkey, Ephesus, Europe, Food, Greece, History, Hotels, Life, Literature, Natural Environment, Roman Empire, Travel, Turkey, World Heritage and tagged Altinkum Turkey
It is claimed by some to be the finest single ancient monument in this part of Turkey and this is a part of Turkey which has an awful lot of ancient monuments.
I can confirm that it is very impressive indeed although little of the original structure remains standing; it was destroyed by the Persians in 494 BC, ravaged by time, rearranged by earthquakes and plundered over the centuries for convenient building material, but regardless of the damage I found this to be a stimulating place with history literally oozing out of the cracks and fissures in the columns and the stones.
Posted in Athens, Europe, Food, History, Natural Environment, Travel, Turkey, World Heritage
Tagged Altinkum Turkey, Ancient Greece, British Museum, Culture, Didim Turkey, Didyma Turkey, Elgin Marbles, Ephesus, Life, Temple of Apollo Didyma
It was a long tedious drive from Ephesus to Pamukkale and thinking about the Ephesus experience I thought it would be fun to recall all of the other ancient sites that I have visited and assemble a near perfect virtual ancient city.
Approaching the city the first thing to be seen would be the aqueduct bringing fresh water to the citizens. The finest aqueduct must surely be that in Segovia in central Spain. It was built at the end of first to early second century AD by the Romans to bring water from the Río Frío about eighteen kilometres away and requiring an elevated section in its final kilometre from the Sierra de Guadarrama to the walls of the old town.
This is supported by an engineering achievement of one hundred and sixty-six arches and one hundred and twenty pillars constructed on two levels. It is twenty eight metres high and constructed with over twenty thousand large granite blocks, which are joined without mortar or clamps and have remained in place for two thousand years.
After passing through the arches of the aqueduct the road would lead to a Palace – Diocletian’s Palace from Split in Croatia. The palace was built as a Roman military fortress with walls two hundred metres long and twenty metres high, enclosing an area of thirty-eight thousand square metres and it is one of the best preserved Roman palaces in existence because after the fall of the Romans within the defensive walls it effectively became the city of Spalatum which eventually evolved and became the modern city of Split.
Inside the city walls there would be the houses of the people who lived in the city, the houses of Herculaneum near Pompeii in Italy that was destroyed in the same Vesuvius eruption. But in a different way because where Pompeii was buried in ash, Herculaneum was destroyed by a pyroclastic flow which is a ground-hugging avalanche of hot ash, pumice, rock fragments, and volcanic gas that rushes down the side of a volcano. Although it killed all of the inhabitants this flow did little damage to the structures, instead slowly filling them from the bottom up and preserving them perfectly without destroying them altogether.
After passing through the residential area there would be a magnificent triumphal arch marking the entrance to the civic and public areas. I think it would be very much like the arch at Voloubilis in Morocco.
Volubilis was the Roman capital of the Province of Mauritania and was founded in the third century B.C., it became an important outpost of the Roman Empire and was graced with many fine buildings. Extensive remains of these survive in the archaeological site, located in the middle of this fertile agricultural area. The city continued to be occupied long after the Romans had gone and at some point converted to Islam and Volubilis was later briefly to become the capital of Idris I, founder of the Idrisid dynasty, who is buried at nearby Moulay Idris. It is now of course a UNESCO World Heritage Site, admitted to the list in 1997.
Once through the Arch into the Forum which for the Romans was the centre of political, commercial and judicial life. This has to be the Forum in Rome.
According to the playwright Plautus the area ‘teemed with lawyers and litigants, bankers and brokers, shopkeepers and strumpets’. As the city grew successive Emperors increasingly extended the Forum and in turn built bigger temples, larger basilicas, higher triumphal columns and more lavish commemorative arches. Here is the Temple of Romulus and the house of the Vestal Virgins and then the Temple of Julius Caesar erected on the very spot that he was cremated following his assassination in 44 BC.
Every ancient city needs a theatre and at the end of the forum in this virtual city is the theatre of Hierapolis at Pamukkale in Turkey, a restored ancient theatre that surely has to be amongst the best that I have ever seen and that includes Segesta in Sicily and Merida in Spain and also (again in my opinion) the ruins that we had visited at Ephesus.
Next to the Theatre is the Temple and I am happy to include in this virtual city the Temple of Apollo in Didyma just down the road from Ephesus. This place would have been huge, one hundred and twenty columns, fifteen metres high and each taking an estimated twenty thousand man days to cut and erect. It was never completely finished because during the construction process the money kept running out but if it had been then it is said that this would have been one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World in precedence over the Temple of Artemis at nearby Ephesus.
Finally there would be an Amphitheatre and whilst it may seem like madness not to include the Colosseum in Rome I am going to overlook it and include instead the Amphitheatre at Arles in Southern France. It could also have been the the Amphitheatre in Pula in Croatia or,Mérida in Spain but there is something majestic about about Arles which just fascinates me.
No one can be absolutely sure about which was the largest in terms of capacity and it is generally agreed that this was the Colosseum but we can be more certain about physical size and there was a plaque nearby that claimed that this was the twelfth largest in the Roman Empire. Interestingly using this criteria the plaque only listed the Colosseum as second largest but it’s like I have always said size isn’t the most important thing!
Finally when my city is put together, I will need a wall to protect it and what better choice could I make than Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England
So there it is, my virtual Ancient City, just my personal choices and I would be more than happy to consider any alternative suggestions for inclusion.
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My blogging pal Will sent me this in an email and I am delighted to add it to my city…
… thought I would share this picture of the colonnaded street and forum at Jerash. It would definitely be in my fantasy Roman city!
Check out Will’s blog here … Wilbur’s Travels
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Related Posts:
The Roman Amphitheatre at Pula
The Greek and Roman Ruins at Empuria, Catalonia
The Palace of Knossos in Crete
The Acropolis Museum in Athens
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Posted in Africa, Croatia, Europe, France, Greece, Greek islands, History, Italy, Spain, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Arles, Athens, Colosseum, Didyma Turkey, Ephesus, Hierapolis, Mérida, Rome, Volubilis
“I am not a great one for ruins. Generally it requires an enormous outlay of imagination and patience for scant reward but the site at Ephesus is so rich that I can walk on 2000 year old flagstones with recognisable buildings on either side…” – Michael Palin – ‘Pole to Pole’
Historically inspired by the visit to the Temple of Apollo at Didyma we were looking forward now to our bus trip to Ephesus and to Heirapolis (Pamukkale) to visit more ancient Hellenistic and Roman sites.
The bus was to collect us at eight o’clock so we woke early and after a modest breakfast made our way down to the appointed rendezvous point outside the apartment and then being the first to be collected began the tedious job of picking up our fellow travellers.
The problem with bus trips is that you cannot choose your travelling companions – it is a game of chance! I imagined that we would be accompanied on this trip by middle aged historians in crumpled linen suits and battered panama hats, ladies in pencil-pleat skirts, archaeologists carrying trowels and leather bound notebooks and the entire cast of a Merchant Ivory film but at the first pick up we were joined by a Geordie and a noisy Lithuanian family and then horror of horrors by a misbehaving bunch of women who looked as though they should really be going to a market rather than one of the World’s finest archaeological sites.
You can call me a snob if you like but I couldn’t for the life of me understand why they were going on this trip.
It got worse. It turned out that they were a darts team from Dagenham. We were on a bus with an octet of middle aged women with inappropriate tattoos and piercings who were loud and embarrassing and behaved like escapees from a medical research centre. I was horrified – we were going to spend two days with these people and as the journey started I looked out of the window and tried to block it from my mind. I would rather have been travelling with a bus load of people suffering from an incurable tropical disease!
It took around about an hour to reach Ephesus and we passed through interesting countryside of agriculture, forests, villages, medieval castles and ancient temples but mostly through acres and acres of cotton fields which started at the side of the road and disappeared towards the horizon on all sides. There was an awful lot of cotton out there and it turns out that Turkey is actually one of top world producers even though the product is of inferior quality to that of Egypt for example.
Eventually we arrived at Ephesus and ran the wallet robbing gauntlet of the hawkers and the unofficial guide book sellers and after a short break made our way inside the excavation site. It was busy of course but I expected that because this is one of the most visited tourist attraction sites in all of Turkey and we competed with bus tours and cruise ship day trippers from Kusadasi as we elbowed our way through the entrance and into the beginning of the tour.
We started at the top of the excavations and over the next two hours made our way down the ancient streets to the lowest point of the city which in previous times was the harbour which was difficult to imagine today because Ephesus is now a considerable distance from the shore of the Mediterranean.
We passed through hundreds of years of history, Greek theatres, Roman baths, ancient houses and even the public latrines and made slow progress towards the finest building on the whole site, the library of Celsus, which archaeologists have discovered doubled up bizarrely as a brothel!
Ephesus was once one of the most important cities in Asia Minor, a natural trading crossroads between east and west and for a while enjoyed a status second only to Rome. There is a lot of reconstruction of course but I am not averse to a bit of sympathetic reconstruction because without it it is difficult to imagine what it might have looked like.
After considering the issue I think I agree with Henry Miller who (writing about Knossos on the island of Crete) wrote in the ‘Colossus of Rhodes: “There has been much controversy about the aesthetics of Sir Arthur Evans’s work of restoration. I find myself unable to come to any conclusion about it; I accepted it as a fact. However Knossos may have looked in the past, however it may look in the future, this one which Evans has created is the only one I shall ever know. I am grateful to him for what he did…”
The guided tour through Ephesus was concluded by a visit to the Greek Theatre, which was later used as a Roman gladiator fighting venue and then we were out of the southern gate and heading back to the bus. I could have spent longer at the site but our itinerary was determined by the restrictions of the tour bus timetable and it whisked us off now for an instantly forgettable lunch, which would have been alright in an emergency but not out of choice, at a tourist dining treadmill.
Lunch over we now drove to the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, although you would have to have a very good imagination to be able to understand how wonderful it was but could do no better than rely on the description by Antipater of Sidon, a Greek poet of the 2nd century BC:
“I have gazed on the walls of impregnable Babylon and on the Zeus by the banks of the Alpheus, I have seen the hanging gardens, and the Colossus of the Helios, the lofty pyramids, and the gigantic tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the sacred house of Artemis that towers to the clouds, the others were placed in the shade, for the sun himself has never looked upon its equal outside Olympus”
So it must have looked quite magnificent I imagine but except for one solitary column there is nothing there today and it turns out that if you want to see more, guess where you have to go, yes, the British Museum. This was a staggering disappointment, it really needed some Arthur Miller approved reconstruction and interpretation and I for one was glad when it was all over and we were back on the bus and we could continue the drive to Pamukkale about three hours away to the east.
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Related Posts:
The Roman Amphitheatre at Pula
The Greek and Roman Ruins at Empuria, Catalonia
The Palace of Knossos in Crete
The Acropolis Museum in Athens
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Posted in Cathedrals, Europe, Greece, History, Italy, Literature, Natural Environment, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Altinkum Turkey, Ar, Arthur Miller, Culture, Darts Team on Tour, Didim Turkey, Ephesus, Knossos, Life, Roman Empire
It’s nice to feel useful (7) …
Every now and again I like to look back over my posts to review what has been going on. One of the things that I like to do is to take a look at the search questions that seem to bring web-surfers by the site and take a look at some of the more bizarre and unusual.
Last year my favourite was is “Why did Shakespeare bring starlings to Australia?” and I was obliged to point out here that William Shakespeare died in 1616 and Australia wasn’t settled by Europeans for another couple of hundred years or so after that and although there is much literary speculation concerning possible visits by the Bard to Italy I think it is safe to say that he never went as far as Australia!
Being a student of geography I am going to begin with a couple of wildly inaccurate searches: Firstly “Vesuvius Turkey” and secondly “Wales Cantabria”. When I was a boy I had a book called “The Boys’ Book of Heroes” which had a chapter about great explorers and I am fairly certain that if they republish it that these two enquirers are really most unlikely to get a mention.
Sex always rears its ugly head so let’s deal with that one straight away. Someone asked about “Getting laid in Germany” and believe me if I had the answer to that one then I would keep it to myself.
I like this one even better – “Medieval brothels images” and I am completely unable to help with that one because most of the illuminated manuscripts in my collection have images of Jesus and the Saints and as Monks didn’t have digital cameras they probably didn’t have a great deal of spare time to draw pictures of brothels. Perhaps the enquirers were thinking about the red light district in Amsterdam or perhaps they found their way to my post on the Grand Tour of Europe?
The best that I can do is show this picture of a ‘walk this way‘ brothel sign in the ancient city of Ephesus in Turkey …
There are always some bizarre questions about low cost airline Ryanair and this year these are my favourites: firstly “Can I take tea bags on a Ryanair flight?” and as far as I am aware tea has not been declared an illegal substance so I am certain that the answer is yes but I don’t think you will be allowed to take a kettle and brew up! Next – “Is agarbatti allowed in flights?” and I have to say that with Ryanair being a no smoking airline probably not and lighting up an incense stick is likely to lead to Argy Bargy. I did provide some advice for flying with Ryanair in a post called Travel Tips When Flying Budget Airlines.
Some of the daftest search enquiries seem to crop up every year but here are some new ones from the last twelve months:
“What were gunfighters actually called” and my answer to that one is that although some of them had real names of course like Jesse James, Billy The Kid, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid I think mostly they were just called gunfighters!
The meanest gunfighter in the West however was…
Next up – “Which state are Johnny Cash and June Carter talking about when they say we been talking about Jackson ever since the fire went out?- I am of course tempted to say just try Jackson USA and you will get the answer – it is that simple!
We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout,
We’ve been talkin’ ’bout Jackson, ever since the fire went out.
I’m goin’ to Jackson, I’m gonna mess around,
Yeah, I’m goin’ to Jackson,
Look out Jackson town.
To finish two more searches that caught my attention this year – “Jesus give thanks to feed four thousand men” and I can only assume that in an era of cutbacks and austerity that this enquirer works for the Government because the size of the crowd has been reduced by 20%. I wrote about the feeding of the five thousand quite recently.
And finally for this time – “is there a weight limit for the Cresta Run” but I am afraid that I cannot help with that one at all.
What is the strangest search engine enquiry that has brought someone to one of your blog posts? (This is not a quiz!)
A look back at previous silly search questions:
Posted in Childhood, Europe, Grand Canyon, History, Italy, Natural Environment, Spain, Travel, USA
Tagged Amsterdam, Cantabria, Ephesus, Grand Tour, Gunfighters of the West, Jackson Wyoming, Ryanair, Vesuvius, William Shakespeare
We didn’t go directly to Pamukkula however because now we had to endure two totally pointless factory visits. Pointless for everyone that is except for the tour organisers who clearly get paid a commission for delivering vulnerable and unsuspecting people to these places.
The first was a ceramics factory and shop and after a ten minute demonstration on the potter’s wheel we were ushered into the show room. I hate places like this, I don’t intend to buy anything and I always feel guilty about that and I am always concerned that Kim is going to let guilty feelings get the better of her and buy something expensive that we don’t really need. I prefer to plan my purchases – usually about three months in advance!
Another annoying thing always happens in these shops and I can guarantee that within seconds a sales assistant will have attached themselves to me like a burr and I just cannot get away from them. I have concluded that I either have the suspicious demeanour of a shoplifter or the face of a shopping mug and these people follow me round endlessly and I am like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid who cannot shake off that posse that is chasing them across the whole of Wyoming.
After the ceramics factory there was a visit to a Turkish Delight shop where I was even less inclined to anything because I don’t like Turkish Delight. On reflection I should not have signed up for the IMX Travel excursion and should just have hired a car instead.
The young man that sold me the tour assured me that the journey from Ephesus to Pamukkale would take two hours so I was shocked when the driver now said that it would take three and a half. I was dreading this part of the journey with the noisy Lithuanian family and the darts team chimps but then at a short stop we had a stroke of luck and were transferred to a smaller more comfortable vehicle with two young quiet couples. This was much better and we were so pleased about that because as the car pulled away we could hear that the the other bus had broken out into a spontaneous medley of classic cockney knees-up songs!
The bus now started to head east along a wide fertile valley on the way to the Provincial capital of Aydin along one of western Turkey’s most important travel and communication routes. To the north were the mountains of Aydin Dağs and to the south the mountains of Menteşe Dağs and in between in the valley were fields of olives, figs, cotton, grain and fruit but the progress was slow because of speed limits, frequent traffic lights and a very cautious driver.
At about mid distance he pulled into a service station and there was an unnecessary twenty minute break and during that time a team of men washed the car and the windscreen and then for some obscure reason opened the bonnet and poured water over the engine which sizzled with a fizz of surprise and which I thought was a rather strange thing to do – more about this later!
We left Aydin and carried on relentlessly east and soon we came across some thermal power energy generators similar to those that we had seen in Iceland. Turkey, it turns out, is located on the Mediterranean volcanic belt and has one eighth of the world’s geothermal potential – I didn’t know that! We passed close by the Denizli-Kizildere geothermal field which has nine production wells and an integrated liquid carbon dioxide and dry ice production factory that can produce a combined total of forty thousand metric tons a year.
Soon after this Haji, the driver, pointed out a white scar running alongside the side of the hills in front of us as though someone had poured a tin of paint down the side of the mountain – this was Pamukkale, our destination.
It took another forty minutes or so to reach the village and when we left the car we were looking forward to checking in to our four star accommodation at the Grand Sevgi Hotel.
Four Star – No Way! This turned out to be one of the worst hotels that I have ever stayed in ever (2 0ut of 5 on TripAdvisor and only 6.2 out of 10 on Booking.com, which is pretty bad). The room was like prison cell from Midnight Express, the public areas were worn out and shabby and the food at the all-inclusive buffet was just appalling. We struggled through a plate of inedible, tasteless mush and then spent the rest of the night worrying about food poisoning. On the up-side it did have free Wi-Fi!
After dinner we walked through the village, bought some wine from a nearby shop and went back to the room to drink it. The next problem was that our room was next to that of the darts team and with zero soundproofing I was worried in case they had brought a dart board along with them and put it up on the adjoining wall and for an hour or so there would be a steady rhythmic thump, thump, thump of the arrows hitting the cork and the regular celebration of “One Hundred and Eighty!” Fortunately we heard nothing, slept surprisingly well and woke early in the morning.
If evening meal had been bad then breakfast was several times worse. The hot food was cold, the bread was stale and the tea and coffee machine was a whole six weeks uninterrupted work for an environmental health officer and we were just glad to get the awful experience behind us, check out and rejoin the tour bus…
… which wouldn’t start! Little wonder really given the surprise dousing down it had had with water at the service station stop over the day before and now there was clearly an electrical problem to be dealt with. Haji assured us that it wasn’t a big problem, got it jump-started and we set off for Pamukkale and the ancient city of Heirapolis.
We were two hundred kilometres from our apartment in Altinkum and passengers in a dodgy vehicle but as I said before – more about this later!
Posted in Europe, Food, History, Hotels, Natural Environment, Postcards, Travel, Turkey, World Heritage
Tagged Altinkum, Aydin, Culture, Ephesus, Geothermal Energy, Grand Sevgi Hotel, IMX Travel Altinkum, Life, Pamukkale
It was a long tedious drive from Ephesus to Pamukkale and thinking about the Ephesus experience I thought it would be fun to recall all of the other ancient sites that I have visited and assemble a near perfect virtual ancient city.
Approaching the city the first thing to be seen would be the aqueduct bringing fresh water to the citizens. The finest aqueduct must surely be that in Segovia in central Spain. It was built at the end of first to early second century AD by the Romans to bring water from the Río Frío about eighteen kilometres away and requiring an elevated section in its final kilometre from the Sierra de Guadarrama to the walls of the old town.
This is supported by an engineering achievement of one hundred and sixty-six arches and one hundred and twenty pillars constructed on two levels. It is twenty eight metres high and constructed with over twenty thousand large granite blocks, which are joined without mortar or clamps and have remained in place for two thousand years.
After passing through the arches of the aqueduct the road would lead to a Palace – Diocletian’s Palace from Split in Croatia. The palace was built as a Roman military fortress with walls two hundred metres long and twenty metres high, enclosing an area of thirty-eight thousand square metres and it is one of the best preserved Roman palaces in existence because after the fall of the Romans within the defensive walls it effectively became the city of Spalatum which eventually evolved and became the modern city of Split.
Inside the city walls there would be the houses of the people who lived in the city, the houses of Herculaneum near Pompeii in Italy that was destroyed in the same Vesuvius eruption. But in a different way because where Pompeii was buried in ash, Herculaneum was destroyed by a pyroclastic flow which is a ground-hugging avalanche of hot ash, pumice, rock fragments, and volcanic gas that rushes down the side of a volcano. Although it killed all of the inhabitants this flow did little damage to the structures, instead slowly filling them from the bottom up and preserving them perfectly without destroying them altogether.
After passing through the residential area there would be a magnificent triumphal arch marking the entrance to the civic and public areas. I think it would be very much like the arch at Voloubilis in Morocco.
Volubilis was the Roman capital of the Province of Mauritania and was founded in the third century B.C., it became an important outpost of the Roman Empire and was graced with many fine buildings. Extensive remains of these survive in the archaeological site, located in the middle of this fertile agricultural area. The city continued to be occupied long after the Romans had gone and at some point converted to Islam and Volubilis was later briefly to become the capital of Idris I, founder of the Idrisid dynasty, who is buried at nearby Moulay Idris. It is now of course a UNESCO World Heritage Site, admitted to the list in 1997.
Once through the Arch into the Forum which for the Romans was the centre of political, commercial and judicial life. This has to be the Forum in Rome.
According to the playwright Plautus the area ‘teemed with lawyers and litigants, bankers and brokers, shopkeepers and strumpets’. As the city grew successive Emperors increasingly extended the Forum and in turn built bigger temples, larger basilicas, higher triumphal columns and more lavish commemorative arches. Here is the Temple of Romulus and the house of the Vestal Virgins and then the Temple of Julius Caesar erected on the very spot that he was cremated following his assassination in 44 BC.
Every ancient city needs a theatre and at the end of the forum in this virtual city is the theatre of Hierapolis at Pamukkale in Turkey, a restored ancient theatre that surely has to be amongst the best that I have ever seen and that includes Segesta in Sicily and Merida in Spain and also (again in my opinion) the ruins that we had visited yesterday at Ephesus.
Next to the Theatre is the Temple and I am happy to include in this virtual city the Temple of Apollo in Didyma just down the road from Ephesus. This place would have been huge, one hundred and twenty columns, fifteen metres high and each taking an estimated twenty thousand man days to cut and erect. It was never completely finished because during the construction process the money kept running out but if it had been then it is said that this would have been one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World in precedence over the Temple of Artemis at nearby Ephesus.
Finally there would be an Amphitheatre and whilst it may seem like madness not to include the Colosseum in Rome I am going to overlook it and include instead the Amphitheatre at Arles in Southern France. It could also have been the the Amphitheatre in Pula in Croatia or,Mérida in Spain but there is something majestic about about Arles which just fascinates me. No one can be absolutely sure about which was the largest in terms of capacity and it is generally agreed that this was the Colosseum but we can be more certain about physical size and there was a plaque nearby that claimed that this was the twelfth largest in the Roman Empire. Interestingly using this criteria the plaque only listed the Colosseum as second largest but it’s like I have always said size isn’t the most important thing!
So there it is, my virtual Ancient City, just my personal choices and I would be more than happy to consider any alternative suggestions for inclusion.
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Related Posts:
The Roman Amphitheatre at Pula
The Greek and Roman Ruins at Empuria, Catalonia
The Palace of Knossos in Crete
The Acropolis Museum in Athens
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Have Bag, Will Travel 