Temple of Apollo, Didyma

Our next stop, on what turned out to be a three-site day, was the Temple of Apollo, in the coastal city of Didyma. Didyma had been an important site from the sixth century BCE, with an oracle second only to the one at Delphi. Didyma was second-fiddle in another way, too. Originally planned to have 122 columns, it was to be the largest temple of the ancient world. But Ephesus, up the road, built its Temple of Artemis with 127 columns, and thus made the Seven Wonders of the World list. Didyma didn't. Nonetheless, a couple millennia later, Didyma's temple ruins are the more impressive. See a later post on the Temple of Artemis, tentatively entitled "The bigger they are, the harder they fall."

Although only three of the columns still stand, including the one in the 
foreground that was never completed, you really can get a sense of the 
size of the thing, absolutely colossal

Colossal Medusa, representations of which supposedly scared off the evil spirits

Another view

Toppled columns; earthquakes did most of the damage

Closer-up, including some insight as to how these puppies

were put together

The two remaining, finished columns

Carving at base



The unfinished, that is, un-fluted, column; I conjecture, when 
the  developers heard about the larger temple up in Ephesus, 
and figured out they were not going to make the Guinness 
Book, they just sort of gave up...

View from within the sanctum sanctorum

Nice griffins all around

Sacred spring; kind of a dry hole now, but at least there was no trash at the bottom

Construction markings are all around (although this one probably says "3 slices 
pepperoni, 2 sausage and mushroom, and 3 all the way (hold the anchovies)"

You can see the marks where the flutes were to begin...