Thursday, July 18, 2013

The Temple of Who???

After leaving the Acropolis, we visited the Temple of Zeus. Funny thing was when we were up at the Acropolis Georgia kept referring to this huge structure we could see and it kept sounding like she was saying the Temple of Juice. I knew that wasn’t right of course. It never occurred to me that she meant Zeus until I had this blank look on my face and Alex caught it and looked at me and says “ZEUS mom, Zeus…not Juice!” 

He’s pretty into mythology and was following right along with everything, even though the look on his face in most of the pictures is pretty grim. It was if he was playing a game as to how grumpy he could look in a picture. Just wait until you see some of his expressions in Ephesus! Agh! But even though I was taking him away from his friends and computer for about a third of the summer, I’m pretty sure he was nearly as fascinated with all of the ancient history as I was! Anyway…after he read my mind and clarified that there is no god of Juice…we moved along to the Temple of Olympian Zeus. 





In its day, back in 131 AD it was one of the largest in the ancient world and the fact that it stood in an open space made it even more impressive. There were a total of 104 columns, of which only 16 are preserved today.



One fell in 1852 during a storm and still lies on the ground. Can you imagine the sound it must have made?





From here you can also see Hadrian’s Arch, on one side was notated the City of Athens, the other side, the City of Hadrian.



After leaving the Temple of Zeus, we drove to the Panatheniac Stadium – this is the original stadium built for the first modern Olympic games. It was built in 1863 for the games in 1896. We had a quick picture stop here.





Our day was just getting started...next up, the changing of the guards at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier!

No comments:

Post a Comment