I know I said yesterday that we are done with museums for a while, but when we were at the Antakya Archeological Museum we had bought the combined ticket which included access to the Museum Hotel and St. Pierre Church along with the Archeological Museum.
Max is parked right behind the Museum Hotel, so that was the first place we headed Wednesday morning.
And actually, I'm glad we bought the combined ticket. Certainly, the Archeological Museum is the highlight of the three attractions, but the Museum Hotel is definitely interesting as well. St. Pierre Church, not so much... but more about that later.
The Museum Hotel in Antakya.
As you might have gathered, the Museum Hotel is both a museum... and a hotel. They were planning a five star hotel, but construction excavations discovered archeological treasures that were worth saving. So they redesigned the hotel to be built above the ruins.
Heading down below the very modern hotel.
Roman era water pipes.
The floor of this Roman house was discover 8.5 meters (28 feet) below ground level.
The Pegasus Mosaic.
It's hard to get a decent photo, but it's interesting to see it in it's original location.
You can click on the photo to see it full screen, and click again to zoom in.
The Roman Bath House.
Underneath the modern hotel.
The remains of a 2,000 year old road.
Another mosaic floor.
The highlight of the Museum Hotel is the world's largest single mosaic floor. Found during hotel construction excavations in 2010...
The picture doesn't show perspective of how big it is.
The floor is 9,000 sq ft, making it the largest intact Roman mosaic floor ever excavated.
From there, we walked over to St. Pierre Church. The facia of the church was built in front of a cave in the 11th century, however there are Roman floor mosaics inside the church from the 4th or 5th century. The cave itself is said to be the first ever Christian church. St. Peter was one of the 12 apostles and apparently he held his first religious meeting in this cave. St. Peter was also the first pope.
Unfortunately, there's not really that much to see. It's included in the combined ticket with the museums, but if you enter separately it's 65 lira which is way overpriced compared to the 40 lira individual cost of each museum. The combined ticket was 105 lira for all three.
Easy walk up to the St. Pierre Church.
The entrance.
It's really small inside, and there's not much to see.
In and out in less than five minutes.
Roman era floor.
The entrance section was built in the 11th century.
View looking back at Antakya.
From there, we went back to Max and had some lunch, and then walked downtown just to have a look around. Other than the museums, its not really a tourist city.
The old market section.
Old fountain.
The Orontes River flows through Antakya.
The Orontes River.
We went into a big modern shopping mall in downtown Antakya. I'm looking for a hooded sweater, but it seems most of the winter stuff has been put away. Couldn't find what I was looking for, but did see this saying written on a sweatshirt...
Yep!
We bought a whole roast chicken for dinner.
Cost was 60 lira ($5.00 CAD, $4.00 USD).
We had planned on driving outside of town to a campground, but we decided to stay put one more night. This morning, we will drive to the campground for a night or two. Today is a bit of a rain day, but after today the forecast for the next week looks really good.
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Fantastic deal on a 13.3" laptop. Great for travel.
And in Canada...
Wow!
ReplyDeleteThat was the same reaction that we had, just WOW!
DeleteThat floor with all the different birds seems really unusual for the time.
ReplyDeleteWe have seen a few other mosaics depicting bird, there were a few at the archaeological museum the day before, Kevin just didn't post them. Mosaics that are pictures rather than geometric designs usually tell a story, whether is be real or from mythology. I tried to find info on this particular one but all I could find out was that is was probably in the house of a wealthy citizen and that the bust of Megalopsyche (greatness of soul) is the centrepiece and is surrounded by the birds, which most are associated with being regal.
DeleteThe floors are incredible. One would be an ornithologist's dream!
ReplyDeleteThe floors really were! The huge one was impressive because it was all hills and valleys at the top due to earthquake damage but the mosaic itself was still intact and moved with the movement of the floor and seemed undisturbed. Yes, I am sure bird lovers would love that one.
DeleteWOW. Cannot figure out how they build a hotel over ruins with it getting RUINED? The pounding, drilling, etc. 💙💛
ReplyDeleteI know you asked us to remove this comment because of a typo but we know that you meant to say "without it getting ruined" so we left the comment.
DeleteThey had several information boards up in the museum explaining how they did this. The only thing that might have disturbed the ruins was the sinking of the 66 pylons on which the hotel is built on. They were very careful to find the proper places in which they would sink them, that had the least effects to the ruins themselves and several times they had to go back to the drawing board to find a new spot in which sink a pylon because the original spot turned out to be place where they didn't want to disturb an underlying ruin. It took them more than a year and a half to find all the right places, once the pylons we sunk the hotel was all built above so that the ruins protected protect below.
Here is a link to the story of how they had to reconfigure their design plans in order to protect the ruins below. http://www.themuseumhotelantakya.com/the-hotel/index-more.php
The name of the river Orontes, it's the name of the ship which I went to Australia on way back in 1949. I would never have guessed it was the name of an ancient river in Turkey.
ReplyDeleteVery neat! It is interesting how we always seem to learn something new every day. :-)
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