Troas to Assos - General Points

The book of Acts tells of a time when Paul left his companions at Troas and walked to the city of Assos, The point of this leg of the journey was to find out if any fragments of the old Roman road is still around to photograph.

The next couple of posts are going to include a very few very general pictures. I will not have a post for every day like I usually do, but I'll share some general points that were consistent over those three days here and in the next few posts. Some of the pictures I can't share because of Greco-Roman taste in art, so I'll just be describing some of them. Others, I won't share because a lot of them sort of look the same.

First, the hike was partly along the modern road, and partly cross country (including across a stream for me, although that was mostly my fault). The general consensus is that the modern road follows closely along the ancient road, so we stuck close to the modern road looking for traces of the ancient road (and yes, we found some).

Incidentally, our hike the first day (bright and sunny - I still have the tan line from my shirt) was along some dirt roads that ran right by wheat fields.

Whenever I was looking out at the wheat fields, I was reminded of one of my favorite songs, Fields of Gold, which is basically about a romantic walk through a barley field. Barley isn't wheat, but that's what I kept thinking of. Here's the song, courtesy of Celtic Woman:

Here's the thing: I don't know about barley, but wheat is sharp! Here's a picture of a piece of wheat that, in its entirety, went through my jeans and my pants pocket:

Yeah, that hurt! Like I said, I don't know about barley, but I'm thinking there aren't too many romantic walks happening in the middle of wheat fields. (It grows so close together you can't walk through it very well anyway.) 

Second, the area was full of pieces of ancient stonework, or spolia, in modern buildings. Essentially, what happens with spolia is that the modern Turkish builder comes across a piece of Greek or Roman marble with an inscription or a design on it. They don't know what it says because the average person can't read classical Greek or Latin, but they know it's pretty and old, so they put it into the wall or garden for decoration. (This happens in a lot of places, by the way. Remember those old pots on posts in Mytilene?) Now, at first I was so excited that I snapped pictures of every piece of spolia we saw, but before lunch on the first day, I got bored with that and quit taking pictures. There are so many pieces of spolia all over where we walked, it was mind-blowing. (And keep in mind that some of these may be older than any modern entity in Europe, including the Catholic Church. I won't even bother discussing America.)

Anyway, that's all for now. I'll have more later.