Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Priene, Miletus, and Didyma

When touring the area, the stops of Priene, Miletus, and Didyma and are usually lumped together in one day -- a "PMD" tour.

Priene:

The scattered column pieces of the Temple of Athena lie all over the place and piled down the slope where they fell during an earthquake.



'Look at the size of those columns!' is what we said when we saw this place. Our tour guide replied, 'just wait until the end of the day.'


The lion-footed seat in the front of this theater was for VIPs. Naturally, we sat it in (surprisingly comfortable!) and took pictures:



Miletus:

The thing to see in Miletus (once a pretty important city and the archeology museum in Istanbul is full of statues from here) is the theater:



Gladiators fighting:


Griffins:


Here's a graffiti death threat to the builder of the theater for stiffing the workers.




Didyma:

The Temple of Apollo was the second largest temple in the ancient world (just a bit smaller than the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus). A modern town was built right around the temple -- we had lunch across the street. This is what the site would look like from the air (yes, we took a picture of a picture):




The inside of the roof of the temple was once covered with these griffin decorations:







And for scale:



We flew out of Izmir the following morning. Just in time, it seems, since this is what we saw when we woke up: a cruise ship in port.

6 comments:

DY said...

Thanks for sharing these photos.

Turkey looks amazing.

I am so impressed that mankind could build such complicated and large-scale structures back that long ago when the technology back then must have been way less than is available now.

Jackie said...

DY - Unbelievably, there's still a whole 1/3 of the trip I haven't blogged yet. I'll try to get on it this weekend.

Unknown said...

I really enjoyed the posts posted here, congratulations for posting. I hope to have their visits on my blog too, with some Brazilian exotic places.

Ignacio Azpiazu said...

I would like to include two of your Didyma pictures in a textbook (the cella DSCN0910.jpg, and the column base DSCN0921.jpg). They would show at about 2 inches high, so that the blog resolution is enough. They would be credited to your name and any other location/blog/whatever information you would like to add.
Not sure if you get a return address with this --just in case, I can be contacted at thechabon a*t hotmail d*o*t com.

Sri said...

Hi,
I enjoyed reading your blog and the pictures look beautiful. My husband and I are planning to do PMD during the last week of December,2013 and would appreciate your feed back on visiting these places during the winter. Have you visited PMD during December? If so, what were your experiences? Can you please guide us.

Jackie said...

Hi Sri - Unfortunately I have no knowledge of what PMD is like during December. I hope you have a fantastic time though!