When we reached Sagalassos-the forgotten city-high in altitude, on a sunny and mildly breezy morning, up in the Taurus mountains range, in the south of Turkey, I was, as well as my fellow-travellers, almost immediately impressed by the serenity and elegance of the place, wondering why it had been inhabited by several waves of civilization: Hittite, Phrygian, Lydian, then Roman and Hellenistic in such a wild and austere environment. It had a population of a few thousand when Alexander the Great conquered it in 333 BCE on his way to Persia....Sagalassos was then devastated by an earthquake in 518 A.D. and abandoned by its inhabitants, then hidden by centuries of erosion and forgotten from historical records, because of its isolated location,

To cut a long story short, from 1990 onwards, Sagalassos has become a major excavation project led by Marc Waelkens of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. My photo features the Antoninus Nymphaeum in which the water from the original spring captured by the ancient inhabitants flows again, clear, clean and fresh as ever from the top of the façade...To the left, there is drunken Dyonisos helped by a satyre and closer to the fountain spring , the goddess Nemesis.

For those who understand French, please go to this address for a fabulous report on Sagalassos with a digital reconstruction of the 'forgotten city' , in 3D... Thank you very much for your comments on my last photo. Please, click on the photo to get a full-size view of this part of the city.