Adventures in Antalya

The Kestros Nymphaeum. The figure of the statue is a river nymph.

At 6:30am our whole group of Oles, volunteers, and Turkish students piled sleepily onto the busses and started making our way to Antalya for a day of ancient site-seeing! After napping for the three and a half hour drive, we woke up refreshed and ready to explore the Roman city of Perge. The city is known for its nymphaeums, which are fountain monuments dedicated to the nymphs of the springs. The Kestros Nymhpaeum at Perge connects to a long channel that runs all the way down the main colonnaded street and would have kept pedestrians cool as they walked the length of the city. As the sun beat down without relent, I think we all were wishing that the water system still worked! We also visited the large bath and got to see the subfloor which would have heated the water in the caldarium, just like the being excavated by the Nebraska team at Antiochia.

Clara and the columns.

Our professors allowed us to just wander the site freely without stopping for lectures, which is my favorite way to experience a site like Perge. While it's interesting to get more detail about some of the features, I prefer to just follow my own curiosity through the space. I spent the morning with Clara and Leah trying our best to read inscriptions and identify column details, although we definitely would have needed Tim to get an actual translation.

Next we visited the Antalya Museum, which houses most of the significant finds from Perge. Seeing the finds directly after visiting Perge made each artifact seem so much more significant since I could easily picture where in the city they would have been found. Bedri, one of our Turkish friends, showed us his favorite statues and told us some of the more obscure mythology behind various statues. We also got to see some of the same pottery types we're finding in Antiochia. Some of the volunteers are biological anthropologists, and we found them laughing at the tomb exhibit - apparently the museum had mixed up arm and leg bones and put them on display.

Leah amongst an example of pottery in situ at the Antalya Museum.

After a delicious lunch of küfta (Turkish meatballs) we made our way to Aspendos, a Greco-Roman city with one of the best reconstructed theatres in Turkey! Walking into the enormous space filled my former theater-kid heart with absolute awe. The theatre was built as part of a competition to win the heart of the daughter of the ruler at the time. Her two suitors were both architects, so her father challenged each of them to build the most impressive building in order to win her hand. One man built an aqueduct, and the other built the theater. Although the aqueduct was taller, the theater boy won (honestly, are we surprised?)!

We didn't have time to see the rest of the city, but we did have time for a bit of an archaeologists' photoshoot! I'm not able to put captions on slideshows for some reason, but if you click through you'll see 1) The view from of the theatre from the back row. 2) Me, Leah, Caroline, and Hilal. Hilal (in white) and Caroline (in orange) are my roommates this summer! 3) A golden hour archaeologist headshot. 4) Me, Leah, John, Clara, and Caroline at the top of the theatre. 5) Me and Caroline sitting on the steps behind the stage. 6) Me and Hilal sitting in the audience.

Our day ended with a one last site: the Temple of Apollo at Side, a popular seaside town. One of the long term goals for Antiochia is to eventually reconstruct our temple in the hopes of making it more of a tourist attraction for Gazipasa, so the Nebraska engineers were particularly interested in the construction at Side. We arrived just before sunset, so we caught the temple with a nearly perfect blue sky showing through. The Temple of Apollo is supposedly a popular location for wedding photos, but we didn't see any couples this time.

We returned to the dig house at 11:30pm tired and sweaty, but the day of exploration was unforgettable. It's

incredible to become aware of the sheer mass of archaeological treasures in Turkey, and even more incredible to realize that the ones we have visited are just a small fraction of the bigger picture. There are so many sites that have yet to be excavated, and even Antiochia has years worth of work to do if we hope to learn as much as we can about our own ancient city. It definitely makes the thought of becoming an archaeologist seem less scary - we won't be running out of things to excavate any time soon.

-GMH