Thursday, May 10, 2018

2018 Eastern Mediterranean Trip - Day 16, Caesarea

LAST DAY IN ISRAEL! Tomorrow we fly to Jordan for part two of four of the Great Eastern Mediterranean Trip.

Today we went to Caesarea, renowned as the incredible feat of engineering motivated by Herod to build a port where none existed. Former capital of the Roman Province of Judea from which Pontius Pilate ruled during the time of Christ. Former capital of a Byzantine province and then a harbor and stronghold for the Crusaders.

Caesarea is given a huge write-up in our guide book. So we were looking forward to ruins on the scale of what we saw yesterday at Bet She'An. Big disappointment. Caesarea is no where near as well preserved and yet it gets all the hype. It certainly benefits from being much closer to Jerusalem and it does have a much more significant history.

Since the ruins themselves are in my opinion bland and not terribly photogenic. So I made the decision to show you the artists rendition of various buildings and then the pictures of what they are today.

As the Roman Legions went forth under Titus to defeat the Jewish rebellion
So to do the Tour Groups march out under the gaze of Wife to get the hell out of our way

We start with the Great Harbor
The entire outer portion, the breakwaters were artificial




This is a minaret from when Bosnian Muslims were resettled here by the Ottomans in the 19th century

The Hippodrome or Circus






Herod's Great Palace which became the Roman Prefect's Palace







Other stuff


If this be Roman, there must be mosaics


Scenes from Caesarea today


Lunch
A great white bass
A pile of bones disguised as red mullet
BUT three great salads - Tomato, onion flavored with lemon - a cucumber salad with a yogurt, tahini dressing - carrots with a lemon and chile dressing

You again forced to look at my photographic experiments
The sea coast was about 25 feet below where we were in the restaurant. I wanted to see if I could capture the movement of the water. I used the full zoom with a slow shutter. This required underexposing the shots so editing was required




Finally
SIGNS OF THE WORLD

This is at the entrance of the local nude beach




1 comment:

alexis said...

is it coincidence that at the nude beach they show in some detail that the man should be buff as well as naked?