Akropolis

This morning I went to the gym. Unfortunately it was built in the 2nd century BC. Hard to get a workout (tho the walk there was a workout) in the gym when the floor is so covered with monumental fragments.



The younger men's gym, just down from the upper one, had less fuss in terms of domed enclosures for cult statues, but still no one was around to work out with.



I walked around the hill, passing temples to Demeter, to Hera, to the emperors themselves, passing restored houses of "the middle class" fronting on the original streets. I walked over to the theatre...for 10,000 people...the stone postals still in the ground that supported the wooden stages on which the actors postured.





Found myself getting the best exercise of the day walking up those stairs to the upper Akropolis...



I spent two mornings on this site...stopping when the heat of the day became too much for me...and I would have to retire to the Zeus cafe by the teleferik that carries people to the site as if it were Vail (but always poor snow conditions here). Homer says that Zeus came to Pergamon to watch the battle of Troy from its summit. I wonder who brought him his tea...but, then, probably no tea then, just wine mixed with water.




The ruins, particularly of the Roman period (before that were the Persians, Alexander the Great, Attaloian...that last king "willed" his kingdom to Rome as he had no children and wished to avoid a civil war...then after the Romans (who morphed into the Byzantines)...the Seljuk Turks, then the Ottomans, then the current guys in Ankara)...so the ruins are a complex...sometimes temples being converted into defensive structures...sometimes, especially under Rome, the city spilling down onto the plain because there was no fear of war.

But having spent these two mornings, I came to know something of the layout...and had some favorite spots...the temple of Dionysus, off to the side of the theatre and the gym, of course. And when, going to supper, I looked up at the Akropolis, instead of a bunch of generic ruins, I could pick out the theatre, the temple of Demeter, the Byzantine walls....








And, then, something moves and brings me back to earth...to the present...to people living now, much like people living then (which ever "then" one might choose)...and brings me back into a moment of the vibrant culture that this is.




And so, where are they off to?

Location:Bergama/Pergamon