Today we finally made it to the dig site of Ancient Ephesus!! (But only after a morning lecture, of course. James nearly suffered a revolt...)
The site was amazing. I will try to offer more reflections later, but wanted to post some pics.
It started out raining a lot, evidenced by Courtney (my roomie) with her camera in its bathing suit :)
But after a little while at the site, it stopped raining, the sun came out, and it warmed up a lot!
We got to spend a lot of time roaming through the different areas, starting to imagine the implications of the architecture, the city grid, the height of buildings, the intermingling of sacred and secular. We will be going back several more times, devoting more efforts to really digging in to the different buildings. But it was a great first day with the city.
Some of the most prominent impressions from visiting the city included its situation between two mountains and what that would have meant for processions to the Temple of Artemis (on the other side of the mountain), the prominent positioning of the Temple of the Sebastoi (Courtney's presentation site) in respect to the rest of the city, the amount of inscriptions throughout the entire city, and the beautiful marble that was everywhere (indicating a lot of benefaction and maybe investment by the emperor).
I've also included a picture of me with the Celsus Library in the background (a site whose front facade has been reconstructed by the Austrian archaeologists. It helps one to get perspective on how big the structures of the city were, and their grandeur.
Tomorrow, we go to Didyma!!.. :)
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