Byzantium!

Also Constantinople. Also Istanbul. For Spring Break, I went with six other students to Turkey. Here is a brief series of photos recounting some of our exploits: Our first visit was to an underground Roman cistern. It was quite extensive and reached under even much of the modern city.

Here you can see the sun setting over the city. You can't quite see it here, but minarets cover the horizon, in much the same way steeples cover some European cities. The call to prayer was much the same as it was in Jordan. It is simultaneously quite haunting and beautiful. Maybe "weird" is the best way to describe it. I guess it is sort of like church bells as far as function goes.

This is some apple tea. It tasted really good, sort of like an apple jolly rancher.

The Hagia Sophia, a Byzantine church converted into a mosque converted into a museum.

The Omphalion, or site on which the Byzantine emperor was coronated.

We then took a long trip to Troy. The journey was about 5 hours each way. We rode in 3 cars, 2 ferries, and had 4 different drivers at different parts of the journey. It was an exciting experience. When we finally got to Troy, we almost felt like the Achaeans who had travelled so far from home for the war.

We read selections from Homer while standing on the walls of Troy IX. I can't read Greek, but I did my best and butchered through a line or two.

Here are the walls of Troy as it would have been if/when the Trojan war happened.

On the way to Troy, we saw a CAT. Woohoo!

The Spice Bazaar. While there I bought some honey.

Sicilian Expedition - Palermo, Saluntum, and the Voyage Home

We closed our Sicilian Expedition with a final stop in Palermo and nearby Saluntum. Above is pictured the Duomo di Monreale, built between 1174 and 1182. This was the last great Norman church built in Sicily. The walls are lined with over 5,000 pounds of gold, and the columns are spoliated from older Roman structures.

Here, I am standing on the top of the Cathedral, overlooking Palermo.

We then went a short distance to visit the site of Saluntum, a Phoenician and Greco-Roman settlement that was occupied until the early 3rd century AD.

Adam and several students examine what remains of a theater.

The site overlooked a large bay. Since it was exposed on the peak of a mountain, it was quite windy and cold. I can't imagine living on the mountain during the winter. It was cold enough in the spring. Perhaps that is why the settlement was eventually abandoned.

After that final site visit we went back to Palermo, had some free time in which I bought dinner, and embarked on our return home.

Sicilian Expedition - Segesta

After Motya, we went to Segesta, a site settled by the Elymi (their origins are obscure; either Trojans or Ligurians) in the second millenium BC. Segesta had a long standing conflict with Selinus, and it was Segesta who ultimately convinced Athens to get involved in Sicily (415 BC) during the Peloponnesian war. The city also enlisted the aid of Carthage several years later to have its rivals (Selinus and Agrigentum) destroyed. Later on, in the first Punic war, Segesta left the Carthaginians and joined Rome, which ultimately proved to be a wise choice since Rome won all three Punic Wars. They experienced limited prosperity under Rome but began to decline in the 1st century AD. The theater at Segesta overlooking a valley. The view was gorgeous.In this photo, Professor Smith, Dan, and Kirsten skip down the hill to get to the Doric Temple (pictured below).

This unfinished Doric Temple was possibly built to impress the Athenian ambassadors who came to the city. The Segestans wanted to appear wealthier than they actually were. The story goes that, when the Athenian legates arrived, they went from house to house and dined with their hosts. The Segestans collected all the silverware they had and passed it around so the Athenians would think that every house in the city was very wealthy.

Sicilian Expedition - Motya

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip, that started from this Sicilian port aboard this tiny ship.

The mate was a mighty professor man, the philologist brave and sure.

36 passengers set sail that day, a 10 minute tour, a 10 minute tour...

Anyway, we did actually ride a boat on that day in Sicily, because our next site was the small island of Motya, about a kilometer from shore. The island was initially settled in the 8th century BC by Phoenicians. It was an important trade outpost for the Carthaginians (a Phoenician colony in north Africa which began to dominate the western Mediterranean) and was involved in many of the military and political struggles of the 5th and 4th centuries in Sicily. Carthage used Motya as a staging ground to attack Greek colonies on the island. Finally, in 397 Syracuse razed Motya to the ground.

This enigmatic statue was found on the island and now sits in Motya's museum. Scholars are unable to agree upon what the "Motya Ephebe" (Motyan Youth) is and when he was made. The face has some very archaic looking elements (stylized hair, almond shaped eyes, etc), but the body's extreme contraposto and wet drapery looks Hellenistic. This makes dating the statue very difficult, anywhere from the early 5th to the late 4th century BC. This lecture confirmed some of my skepticism about dating works of art on purely stylistic grounds. Unless a work of art is accompanied by other evidence, art historians should be flexible in their estimates.

The next site we visited was a Carthaginian tophet, or infant burial ground. Tophets lie at the center of a large controversy over whether or not the Phoenicians practiced child sacrifice. Sources like Plutarch (De Superstitione XIII), Jeremiah (7:31-33), and Dionysus of Halicarnassus all attest to the practice. However, we don't know whether tophets were actually sacrificial burial grounds or merely infant burial grounds. Some students and I did some quick math which suggests the former rather than the latter. The tophet was in continual use from the 7th to the 3rd century BC, and around 1000 child burials (ages 0-2) were found there. That means that on average only 2 or 3 babies were buried there every year. If the burial ground was a general cemetary for all dead infants, and not just sacrifices, one would expect a far greater number buried over the course of 400 years, given the high incidence of child mortality in antiquity. The relatively small number of burials suggests one of two things: either this was a burial ground for only certain infants (say, those of the local elite), or it was associated with a horrific practice of child sacrifice. Given the literary evidence, I'm inclined to believe the latter.

Sicilian Expedition - Selinus

After spending the better part of a day at Agrigentum, we travelled to Selinus another Greek colony founded in around 651, the site of at least 8 Doric temples. They are named such creative things as "Temple E" and "Temple G." There is even one mysterious "Temple Y" which we know existed but do not know where. Here you can see students hugging a Doric column at temple E. After each lecture, which lasts for around 20 minutes, we are given fifteen minutes or so to walk around the site and take photographs. As you can see we enjoy photo opportunities!

Here are the remains of Temple G, a temple to Apollo. Never completed, the temple would have been massive. After our lecture we got to wander around the rubble like a giant playground.

Professor Smith speaks to some students below him. You may not be able to tell the scale from this picture. You can look at this other student's blog to get an idea.

Here are the eastern temples at Selinus.

This is a view from some of the fortifications on the acropolis.

The next day we visited a quarry and considered just how these massive stones were carried. I would really have hated to have been a slave who had to move column drums equal to me in height.

Sicilian Expedition - Agrigentum (continued)

We continued our time at Agrigentum with a visit to the temple ridge where we saw a host of Doric Temples (5). Sakura! Or at least the Italian equivalent. Here are our professors. From left to right: Scott Smith, Dora Venarucci (not actually a professor but a grad student instructor), Chris Gregg, and Adam Serfass.

Here are some students standing inside part of the substructure of the temple of Zeus Olympios. The structure, although never completed, would have been gigantic. It would have spanned an area larger than a football field.

This is what remains of a votive pit. Is Molly a votive?

Here I am peering out of a modern statue.

Sicilian Expedition - Morgantina and Agrigentum

The next day we vizited Morgantina, a city in the mountains of Sicily originally populated by native Sicels but Hellenized by the 5th century BC. We had a site project to complete where we went around the ruins and identified different structures. Above you can see the remains of a house with an ekklesiasterion (an assembly meeting area) and a macellum (a commercial area) in the background.

During our site visits Franco happily wanders around, takes pictures, listens to music on his ipod, and sings Italian music. I'm always amazed that after more than 20 years of going to the same sites, Franco still enjoys our trips.

This is a picture of the landscape as we drove from Morgantina to Agrigentum. You can see Mount Etna in the background, dominating the landscape. You're supposed to be able to see smoke billowing from the volcano's peak on clear days.

We then went to a museum where we saw such treasures as this Telemon, a giant statue built into a temple to hold up part of the structure.

After that we visited the Hellenistic quarter, a domestic area with a number of atrium and peristyle homes. The houses were organized into blocks. One cannot help but imagine, as one student commented, that ancient Greeks held block parties and other meetings in their neighborhoods.

Sicilian Expedition - Syracuse

Our next stop on our trip to Sicily was Syracuse, the most important Greek colony on the island. Founded in 733, the colony went through various phases of democracy and tyranny over the course of its history. Finally, at the end of the 3rd century BC, the city fell to the Romans. Marcellus, the Roman general, reportedly wept as watched the fallen city burn. Due to its important location along the coast of Sicily, holding Syracuse was key to holding Sicily, just as Sicily was the key to holding the Mediterranean. A common joke among us students is that, unless you hold Sicily, you're not a real empire. I guess Athens was aware of this fact, and, in 415, during a brief respite from the Peloponnesian war, they sent an expedition over to Sicily. The campaign ended in disaster. Above you can see the Great Harbor of Syracuse. Just off to the left, some 50,000 Athenians were killed or captured and sold into slavery.

We had a "Franco Surprise," a welcome break from a morning of lectures. Franco, the large Italian man in the black hat, led us through a Sicilian market. I bought some cherry tomatoes from one vendor.

We then went to see a number of sites in another part of the city. This theater could seat 15,000 spectators and would have been the site of Greek dramatic performances and, possibly later on in the Roman period, gladiatorial spectacles.

This geological feature, possibly the result of quarrying activity, is where thousands of captured Athenians perished from disease or starvation. It also had some interesting acoustics.

We ended our day with a trip to the Euryalus fort, part of the defensive works guarding the approach to the city. We got to climb all over the walls, which was fun. The fort never was taken by force, though, because some Syracusans betrayed the city to the Romans, and the city fell without much of a fight.

Sicilian Expedition - Cefalu and Taormina

The journey continued as we boarded the ferry and spent the night crossing the Tyrrhenian Sea. Some snacks kept me company: Then we arrived at Palermo where Fabio valiantly resumed our journey.

We stopped in Cefalu, the site of a Norman church built in the 12th and 13th centuries. It was a fine example of a fusion of Byzantine, Romanesque, and Islamic architecture.

Here's the interior of the church. Notice the Byzantine-style mosaics.

Here is the Theater at Taormina. Situated atop a mountain, we had a superb view. Curiously, the backdrop of the theater (scaenae frons) would have obstructed the spectators' sight of the beautiful landscape.

Here we are standing in the center of the the Theater (the orchestra). The acoustics were amazing, the product of painstaking calculations by ancient architects.

At the end of the day, we went to Syracuse and checked into our hotel.