Pictures: The Weekend Near Izmir pt1

In an area near Izmir, the most secular city in Turkey we got to visit some ruins, museums, and other relics of eras in which the power of the world was located firmly in Constantinople.

 These first 5 are all from the same area.  An old ruin used as a market an burial ground for the surrounding area.  It had an underground water supply.  Which is nifty.

This was a museum of Turkish culture, it was vastly smaller than most places we went to, and is the most forgettable.  Most of what was inside was just manikins posing in scenes from the day to day lives of the common people who lived in the area of Turkey in centuries past.

The rest of the pictures are from a much larger museum which had a huge number of statues.

A partially reconstructed floor mural.  I took this from about 20ft above it.

One of my classmates provides a helpful source of scale for this torso.

Map of Ancient Turkey.

This is a creepy statue of the Roman goddess of fertility, it was supposed to hang over a bed to help lovers conceive.  By modern standards this is not the best way to set the mood.

Bronze statue of a nude runner.  If this was life size then people in ancient times were shorter even more than I typically picture.