This Saturday's Excursion

Yesterday, I did another exploring trip with some of the guys here in Izmir.  This week we went to some off the beaten path ancient cities.  These ones are not as well know and not as well kept up as some of the other bigger sites.  Nevertheless, it was a fun time and one of the cities Nysa (Nisa) was actually pretty interesting and had some pretty good ruins.  It was a really nice day out and a lot of the wild flowers were blooming.  In some of the parts of the city the ground was covered in wild daisies.  It was kind of neat to because we were roaming around in the proverbial forest, olive tree forest, and you would run into some more ruins covered in flowers.  

The other two sites we went to was called the Trellais, which was a huge gate for a city.  The only part that remains is what you see in the pictures.  It is kind of hard to get the scale of these things but they were over 100' feet tall.  There wasn't much there for us to see so we took our photos and left and we drove to the middle of nowhere Turkey.  This place was really out in the boondocks and the ancient city was in really poor condition.  In fact there wasn't much there but you could tell where the city was only due to some of the columns that stuck out of the ground about 2' or so.  We hiked up the auditorium and it had a pretty good view of the valley below. This city was called Alabanda.  We spent about an hour there and then started the long trek home.  All in all it was another good Saturday exploring the old piles of rocks here in Turkey.  

The Library at Nyse.  It was in the middle of several wild olive tree fields.

Same library with the focus on the daisy.

Field of wild flowers in the mix of wild olive trees next to the library at Nyse, Turkey.

I caught a bee on this really red flower.  I thought I would take a photo of it.  I guess I took a lot of pictures of flowers.  It was a nice day out and the wild flowers were all over the place.

Stadium at Nyse, Turkey.  It wasn't the biggest or the nicest but it was neat to see nonetheless.

The Agora (shopping area) at Nyse, Turkey.  There was fairly large fields of daisies around the agora.

One of the field of daisies that I was speaking of.

I thought the contrast was interesting. 

The Trellais in Aydin, Turkey.  This was at least 100' tall and the center opening was about 30' across.  It was pretty big.

The stadium at Alabanda.  It was the most run down stadium of all of the ruins that I have seen.  You can kind of see the view in the background.  The other neat thing about this place is that you can see the village below has intertwined into the ruins.  There were homes, and pastures mixed in with the ruins.

Abandoned home at the top of the stadium.  This is actually the upstairs of the house.  There was no floor as it was gone.  I'm on the stairs taking this photo.  I just thought it was somewhat interesting. 

The view at the top of the mountain that the stadium was built in.  Nice view, and this wasn't a very clear day out due to the cold air there was a lot of coal in the air from everyone trying to stay warm.  Just below the water in the center of the photo is where the majority of the ruins lay, with the ancient city extending quit some distance.

Flower overlooking the view on the top of the mountain in Alabanda.  You can kind of see the water in the background.