The ancient city of Iasos in the Turkish Aegean is famed for its distinctive marble buildings, which have impressed guests for 1000’s of years.
The city, whose oldest sections date again to across the third century B.C., is a veritable open-air museum with giant walls, aqueducts, agora, theater, tombstones, Roman tombs and a fish market.
Excavations proceed on the ancient website, located in the Milas district of the southwestern Muğla province, the place the Aegean meets the Mediterranean.
Asuman Baldıran, who heads excavations on the website, instructed Anadolu Agency that guests can see traces from a staggering timespan, from Neolithic, Archaic, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, early Byzantine, Medieval, Seljuk and Ottoman eras.
Noting that 5 marble quarries used throughout antiquity had been discovered in the city, Baldıran mentioned that the marble was extracted utilizing a hydraulic system through the Roman Empire.
She mentioned quarries of marble with crimson, pink, and white veins had been normally positioned close to waterfronts.
“In the quarries that operated through the Roman Imperial period, we all know the marble was minimize utilizing a hydraulic system,”
“Unique marbles in crimson, dug out proper in Iasos utilizing an early kind of hydraulic system, are used in a panel on the walls of Hagia Sophia,” Istanbul’s just lately reopened historic mosque, she mentioned.
Baldıran, who can also be a professor of archeology at Selçuk University in Konya, central Turkey, mentioned that the city’s crimson marble was used in the tomb of Italian poet Dante in Ravenna, northern Italy in addition to at some administrative buildings in Greece and Israel.
She defined that Iasos marble was exported to many nations by sea.
“Iasos was an vital city. It was essential particularly commercially and we all know that marble extracted from right here was despatched to many nations, together with Italy, Israel, Africa and throughout our area – in Istanbul.”
Iasos marble was used in many church buildings and non secular facilities, she added.
