home Chapter one . two . three . four . five . six
I finally visited Constantinople, and it truly was a wonder. Even more than Rome, it was an old city, and it had been prosperous for a long, long time, so there were amazing old wonders to see, and amazing modern ones, too. I spent a month there, and visited as far away as Ankara, high in the mountains to the east. As I readied for me return, one of the people I met in Constantinople suggested that on my return trip I should visit some temples in Thrace. "But," he warned, "be careful when you travel in that region. The Turks and the locals do not get along well, so it is a haven for bandits."
Few travelers went that way in November, so I had to travel solo, but I did so with care. At the top of a pass, I visited the ruins of an ancient marble temple. I spent the day doing sketches of the ruins and rubbings of the ancient inscriptions that were on the lower walls. The temple was new for a classical temple. It had been built by the Romans and dedicated to Mercury, and the highlight of the temple was a huge statue of him on a large pedestal in the center room of the temple. I wandered the grounds and enjoyed the peaceful stillness of that gray near winter day. The temple columns and the statue gave me a great sense of awe.
It was a quiet, productive day, and as the sun prepared to set, I was ready to continue my journey home. The day had been mostly cloudy, but the sun shone out from under the clouds as I took one last look at the temple... at first I thought it was my eyes! There was a secret door in the huge pedestal that held the Mercury statue in the center of the temple! It was only the peculiar angle of the sunlight, on that day of the year, at that time of day, that revealed it to me-- I could see it's faint outline in the aging marble of the center pedestal. It was locked, but that was nothing a wizard's knock spell couldn't fix. The door opened on to a very small stairway -- I thought of dwarfs. After five steps, there was a small landing, and beyond that, inky blackness. Inky blackness... but not complete inky blackness. At what was probably the center of the room, the sun shown on a bright, gold statue. The being portrayed by that statue was definitely not a Roman god. The sun was moving, the light wouldn't last long, but I moved down the stairs carefully to the landing... whoever built this exquisite room and door could have built equally exquisite traps to protect what was here, and I didn't have any trap-finding gear with me. I stayed on the landing, just out of the light, and as the light faded, I quickly sketched what I saw. I sketched the statue, and the floor around it. The light that reflected from the statue fell on a parquet around the statue that looked like knives with curly blades. I had seen one or two knives like that in the bazaar in Ankara, very distinctive.
What a neat surprise! It made my day. It made my whole trip, in fact! I had found a secret door and a mysterious statue! My guess is that the Romans used conquered slaves to build the temple, and built it on the site of an older temple dedicated to some non-Roman god. It was a common practice, it was another way of showing the conquered people who was in charge now. But in this case, it seems, those slaves working on the new temple cleverly kept a bit of their old worship in the new building.
I came out and closed the door behind me. It locked, and once again it was an invisible part of a marble wall. It was now just after sunset, and a cold evening wind started to blow up. It was definitely time to find shelter for the night!
home Chapter one . two . three . four . five . six