Priene, Miletus, and Didyma

On Monday we spent the day at three ancient site aroudn the city of Kusadasi. First was Priene, which is a little known site on top of a big hill. This site was destroyed by the Persians in the 4th century, and thus they had to start from scratch. For this reason we get a great glimpse of the Greek grid city, developed in the 5th century. Only problem is, that this site is on a giant hill, so we see the grid pattern modified to fit the site, with the streets being replaced by ramps and stairways. From Priene we moved to Miletus, a city that was on the sea, but now is about 10km inland. Notable at Miletus is the enormous theater, which has an inscription that reads “Place for the Jews and those that fear God” etched on one section of seats- Reserved Seating for Jews! Most of Miletus is actually underwater during the winter, so we couldn’t see much more. From Miletus we traveled to Didyma, which was the cult center of ancient Miletus and is dominated by the Temple of Artemis, which is enormous. This temple was the headquarters of the oracle at Didyma, which was surpassed only by Delphi in notoriety. This temple is very well preserved, and you get some sense of how incredibly large these temples were. Also, the temple was never completed, so we see some columns standing that don’t have the flutes etched in.

We are now in a new hotel in Pamukkale, which is fantastic. More on this later.

Here you see the theater at Priene, complete with the altar to Dionysius at the center. You can also see at the top some goats that have intruded upon our tour of the ancient ruins!










Here you see a major thoroughfare of Priene, and you get a sense of what I'm talking about with the streets. You can see the drainage pipe at the center of the street.










As we turned the corner of the street to leave Priene we were greeted by two horses in the road. This country has more stray animals than I have ever seen. In the foreground you can see Prof. Carl Holladay and in front of him our Turkish guide Tosun.








Here is the temple of Artemis at Didyma. You really can't understand how enormous this place is. If you look at the bottom you can see a human figure, providing some sense of scale. The columns are 60 feet high. The building is more than twice the size of the US Supreme Court building. You can see the back column has not been fluted, as the temple was not completed.






And now you can see what happens when one of those columns falls down. This is on the back of the temple, and the archaeologists have left this fallen column in place. The Romans built these things in sections, erected them, and then carved them. You can also see the yellow lab that followed us around for most of the day; again, lots of stray animals.