When temples were dedicated to Goddess

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 Goddess.  I tell you in this way because in modern times people forgot to worship also women figure.  Grab my hand and let’s go to visit this temple full of history. So we shall go to Turkey, to Pergamon to visit the so-called  Red Basilica.  It is an old temple, most probably was built by Hadrian( it seems he liked to adore Egyptians Gods), it is one of the largest temples that still survived until 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 common at that time in the part that is today Italy.

You can see we are welcomed by a beautiful white statue, that most probably represent the Goddess Isis, we will see also another statue that represents the Goddess Serapis.

So like I said it was a place where women deity were worshiped. That’s why I find this place interesting and also because it was made by Romans, and they did tolerate at that time 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 that are connected to other rotundas giving access to different areas of the complex.

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.  As a church will have a not to nice 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 parts that were lost over the years.

What I have told now is 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 Gods to speak we can admire them and enjoy the walk and imagine what sort of things happened over the years here.

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