Assos - Acropolis

 The end of our three-day walk to Assos was the amazing acropolis. I'm going to include two posts, one for the ruins and one for some of the views, which are my favorite so far.

The primary attraction at the acropolis is the Temple of Athena, which I remember the guide saying is the oldest Greek building in Turkey.

Pictures below:

Here's the temple:

Troas to Assos - Scenery

I just had to. The part of western Turkey that we were in reminds me of Montana (long stretches of mountainous country with virtually no one there), and some of the scenery is just gorgeous.

Day 1:

I remember I took this picture as the wind was blowing through the wheat. It makes a rattling sound.

This was the river near the bridge

Day 2

It was a lot cloudier on Day 2. Also a lot steeper:

These were right by the Smintheion!

Here was an area where we were looking for road segments

Not the problem stream - that came later. This was a different stream.

Thankfully, we did not have to try to climb down and come across to that hill, but we were considering it

Here's a side view of the killer hill we hiked down. The problem stream was at the bottom.

Looking back up at it. 

The stream is toward the right, hidden in those green trees. The short version is that the group members went across it different ways. I tried to follow one of the professors, but I was far enough behind her that I lost her, and she was across the stream before I realized it. So my roommate and I kept going parallel to the stream, looking for a good place to cross. We eventually did make it across, but it was kinda dicey for a while.

This path goes about parallel to the stream, I think.

I think this is the hill we then had to climb up.

Looking back the way we came

Here's the view from the top, or near the top, of that last hill we climbed up. 

We did some more hiking after that, but I think all my pictures have road fragments in them, so I'm not sharing them. If you want to see pictures of road fragments, go to the Anatolian Roads website. 

I'm not doing a separate post for the scenery pictures from Assos, because all the pictures I took on the morning walk there have some sort of road fragment in them, and because the scenery from Assos deserves its own post. 

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.