Today I shall take you on a new trip, we shall go to visit a temple with a lot of history. A temple where people used to worship Goddesses. I tell you in this way because people forgot to worship women figures in modern times. Grab my hand, and let’s go to visit this temple full of history. So we shall go to Turkey, to Pergamon, to see the so-called Red Basilica. It is an old temple, probably built by Hadrian( it seems he liked to adore Egyptian Gods). It is one of the largest temples that still survived today. Let’s have a walk inside. First, the thing that you can see is red bricks. All the temple is made of red bricks, from here has the name of Red Basilica. This style was unique in Asia minor but was pretty standard at that time in the part that is today Italy.
You can see we are welcomed by a beautiful white statue that most probably represents the Goddess Isis. We will see also another statue that represents the Goddess Serapis.
So like I said, it was a place where women deities were worshiped. That’s why I find this place exciting and because it was made by Romans, and they did tolerate the worship of other gods than the Roman ones. The temple was part of a bigger complex. It was situated o the Selinus river. There is also a bridge that was nice engineering for that time. The bridge still stands even today, as you can see. Under the temple are some chambers connected to other rotundas, giving access to different complex areas.
While we go deeper into the temple, we can take a look inside, here we can see parts of what used to be, from little parts of statues to decorations of the walls.
Now let’s admire the big walls that remained to witness what happened to this place. It seems this temple was transformed later into a church dedicated to Saint John. A church will have a not too lovely faith as it will be systematically destroyed. Now are still standing two rotundas, one that we can visit and the other that is still used as a mosque. Because in 1336, it was conquered by ottomans, and it became a mosque.
In the 20 century, there will be archaeological investigations that will uncover the lost parts over the years.
I have told now that just a little part of the history that goes through these high walls. As you can imagine, these walls saw many things. If they had a mouth to talk probably, they would say many stories. But until they can be charmed by God to speak, we can admire them, enjoy the walk, and imagine what things happened over the years here.
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