Troas to Assos - Ruins

At three points along this way, we stopped at ruins. The first day, we started the hike at a collection of ruins at the top of the hill.

Here are a few pictures:

Here is what is left of a wall and I think another building

This was cool - it's the carving held up against the plant it was imitating. 

If memory serves correctly, those holes in the white stone are filled with hot metal and then a spike, and the spike is used to connect two pieces of stone together.

All those pieces of artwork are inside a locked caged, which has a guard there to protect it. On another piece of art, one I'm not showing here, there was a deep gouge in the stone right alongside the sculpture, from where someone tried to cut out the artwork to steal it. Hence, the age and the guard.

Anyway, one more picture of the ruins:

These ruins were from the beginning. 

The next "ruin" we visited was an ancient bridge near the Tuzla River. The bridge itself is gone, but the arches that supported the bridge are still there, in the middle of a wheat field. Good pictures of the bridge can be found here, but below are a few of my own pictures:

The arch stones up close

 

All the pretty flowers around the bridge!

For truly good pictures of that bridge, go to the link up above.

Anyway, those were all on the first day. The second day, we stopped at a temple to Apollo called the Smintheion (you may have to translate that page). The name Smintheion connects to "Lord of Mice", which is a reference to one of the names given to Apollo in the Iliad. For those who haven't read the Iliad or some other book about the Trojan War, on the way to Troy, King Agamemnon kidnapped the daughter of an Apollo priest, and in revenge Apollo sent a plague among the Greek soldiers until Agamemnon gave her back.

Some pictures:

Those square columns marked the way worshipers would enter the temple.

This isn't Greek at all - I'm fairly sure this is Arabic. So it was from much later than Paul's time!

By the way, I remember one of the authorities on the trip saying that because this temple was so far out of the way, there would have been an inn nearby for visitors to stay overnight.