What's in Your Basement?

via HurriyetDailyNews.com

First of all, I wish I HAD a basement. Here in the south, we're on a crawlspace because the frostline isn't very deep. (I really miss the storage space.)

My old house had one. It was an 1875 Victorian gothic farmhouse and while we were restoring it, I was always on the lookout for neat old stuff left behind by previous owners. All I found was a small silver letter opener and a couple of rusty nails.

In Turkey, a basement can hide more interesting things....like wellheads attached to a network of secret underground cisterns, teaming with carp. Not unusual for Istanbul, but even cisterns don't take the top spot of amazing basement artifacts.

I was reading my Hurriyet Daily News the other day and I came across this:

"The Roman-era city of Germenicia was unearthed by chance during an illegal excavation in the basement of a house."

Double-take!!!

OK. So what they really mean is someone noticed mosaics in their basement and they wanted to see what the rest of the pretty pictures looked like. A few eminent domain rulings later, and Turkey has another historic site to visit.

Related Articles

Mosaics found in SE Turkey lead to unearthing of ancient Roman city (hurriyetdailynews.com)
Germanicia Found? (rogueclassicism.com)

Memorable Mosaics

via Telegraph.co.uk

The most magnificent mosaics I've ever seen were in Italy. St. Peter's in Rome, Ravenna, the Basilica San Marco of Venice....

Water from the infamous Venetian floods is wreaking havoc on Basilica San Marco though, so the floors are a treacherous proposition for anyone to navigate. It's a shame because you want to look up, but then you really need to look down or you'll be making a less-than-graceful swan dive.

Turkey has it's fair share of mosaics too. In fact, experts were busy uncovering some more in the Hagia Sophia recently. The latest find was the seraphim pictured here and there are plans to uncover matching ones in three other corners of the building. But while some historians revel in this piece of news, many are lamenting the flooding of Allianoi.

Mosaics of the Roman baths at Allianoi, near Bergama, suffered from years of disuse and disrepair because of flooding by the nearby Ilya river. When the site was slated to be flooded permanently by a state dam building project however, world heritage organizations finally woke up and said something. Too little, too late, I'm afraid. 

via Mersin.edu.tr

In my MS, the Narlikuyu mosaic depicting the three graces makes a cameo appearance. The Roman bath it's located in is probably Turkey's smallest museum and it could use a dusting!

The moral of my story - go visit some of these places! They're more than worth our time and some of them, unfortunately, won't be around forever.

Related articles

• Sacred Mysteries: An appointment with an angel at Hagia Sophia (telegraph.co.uk)
• Turkish dam plan threatens 'remarkable' Roman ruins (cnn.com)

• Turkish officials bury ancient city of Allianoi under sand (hurriyetdailynews.com)