This MARBLE city was lost for centuries.

This city knew how to work with marble. Just look at these blocks. They originally sat atop a colonnade, at one of the main public spaces of the city. There's literally a mountain of fine marble just next to the place. No, not like that. There's literally a mountain of very fine marble just next to the city. The city flourished under the Roman Empire, in the first and second centuries especially. The works from here were exported across the empire, reaching Rome itself. Such fascination with marble carving probably tells us something about how the citizens viewed themselves. I can imagine some of the portraits were based on real well-known inhabitants. They are so realistic and full of personality. Now let's head to the structure that really takes showing off someone's craftsmanship to the next level, the tetrapylon. It didn't serve any specific functional purpose. There was no temple or market hall or a house. But rather it marked a very specific point, a place where from the main colonnaded street of the city, you could take a turn left to go to the temple of Aphrodite. So this structure both marks the turn and at the same time shows off what local stone carvers were capable of. It's kind of like a buffet breakfast. You've got a bit of everything. Some of columns are fluted, some are plain and some are even spiraled. You've got all kinds of ornamentation at the architraves and even the abakai have carvings on them. Normally they would be plain here. This is one of the most spectacular buildings of the ancient world. Built simply to impress and it still does. Now imagine most of this all was lying under the ground. Because right here around you can see the original level of soil before the excavations. What you're looking at was reassembled by restorators with the missing fragments replaced in mortar. For example, here is an original marble shaft and a base of a column and this in the middle is a replacement. That way you can tell what's ancient and what's modern but it all blends together harmoniously. And I must express my huge gratitude and respect to Professor Kanan Erim who dedicated his life to excavating this city and who is now buried just beside this masterpiece. This stadium must have shined for it is built of pure white marble. Imagine that. It was a venue for athletic competitions and could hold up to 30 000 people. In the later years during the decline of the empire we see that one end of the stadium was sectioned off to create a small arena for combat games. Look how this later stonework is of poorer quality compared to the older one. I wonder what someone sitting there in the 6th century might have thought. He saw the huge full-scale stadium that aphrodisias of his days couldn't even have filled. We used to build things back in the days, he must have thought. Around 4th century AD they also had to build a protective wall around the city which was not even needed before. They have used some fragments of ruins of the previous buildings to construct it. I wonder how it felt in those troubled times to disassemble the beauty of your once flourishing city. If you want to understand architecture better I'm creating a course for you to enhance your travels and help you enjoy your city more. Check out the link in the description for early access. As for the residential houses they're all there under the ground. I'm now in a vast space between the stadium and the central temple and almost nothing here has been excavated. Most of the city is still under the ground and remains a mystery so I'll make another video in 25 years and it should be twice more interesting so subscribe. Just several residential houses have been excavated around the city like this one, a luxurious home just next to the temple. The left half is organized around a courtyard with living quarters arranged around it. The rooms had no windows to the street so they were lit from the roofless courtyard. You can find a similar type of building today in Morocco for example. The right half is completely different. There is a huge reception and dining hall with an entrance lobby in front of it. Notice how even when the hall was in use guests entered through the lobby and never passed to the living area. The private side of the house stays private. The temple of Aphrodite was rebuilt into a Byzantine Christian church and then it went through a fire, hence the scorched marble, and an earthquake. But the columns that we see here around are not a result of a restoration. They have been standing for the last 2,000 years. The baths complex was a building of very high statues. It was a place to socialize, exercise and relax. Something between a spa and a community center. We can see some fragments of the main façade and it was astonishing. We can see some huge gray marble columns over here and there are fragments of just splendid marble carving. Just check it out. Imagine something of this quality stretching up along the whole height of the façade. The Trajan bath stood adjacent to the main city square forming its architectural conclusion. Inside there is a lot of interesting artifacts preserved as well. Here is the original Roman flooring and even the water pipes and marble cladding are preserved somewhere. The marble cladding is mostly gone but we can understand its thickness looking at those profiles. And there is even some of the ancient Roman iron preserved here that reinforced the cladding. In the baths they often used this white marble inside so that the cleanliness would be obvious. The pool can be seen clearly. In this case it is the cold water one. Every proper Roman bath had three different zones with cold, warm and hot water and if we have a peek at the warm zone we can see something amazing. The underfloor heating system is preserved fairly well. And there was a huge amount of work done so that I could walk on the original Roman tiles. Imagine these all were excavated, they were in shatters so they had to reinforce and reassemble everything here. Sadly the last part of the project hasn't been fulfilled. There was supposed to be a huge roof atop the whole complex to preserve everything but today it's all overgrown with grass and the results of the meticulous work are slowly vanishing. That's a reminder that ancient architecture needs to be preserved even if it stood for 2,000 years. This is a vast colonnaded square behind me. Most of the columns are down but it used to be colonnaded. And there is a giant pool that is 170 meters long. According to recent excavations this space functioned as a kind of a city park and it seems palm trees were actually planted here. It was a lively and bustling part of town. The marble paving around the pool is covered with hundreds of graffiti, scratched drawings, board game grids and casual inscriptions. This here is the basilica. It was a large public hall, a place for legal matters and business and public gatherings. Here on the facade of the basilica an important text was inscribed in the early 4th century Emperor Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices. It is really fascinating to see what was being bought and sold back then and at what prices. For example here is the cost of a lion and here's a cool one. A math teacher earned three times less than a geometry teacher. Priorities I guess. The coolest part about all this is I haven't shown you even a half of the excavated surface and most of the city area is unexcavated so who knows which discoveries await us next.