Ephesus- Terrace Houses

Inside the giant covered section (someone there said the covering is Kevlar) are houses built for wealthy families called terrace houses. You can kind of see from the pictures that they are built on terraces, sort of stacked on top of each other.

I have trouble telling where one house ends and the other begins, so I'm just going to point out a few interesting aspects. 

This was a triclinium, or the dining room (I was the first in the tour to remember the Latin word!)

This was a fountain at the entrance

According to the guide, it's cheaper in Turkey to build with marble than it is to build with wood. The grayish marble in the middle is very commonplace, but the green is much more expensive (I think he said fifty times more expensive), so whoever used so much for their floor is very wealthy!

This, according to the guide, was the audience hall where the wealthy man's business people would  come to see him with anything that needed doing.

These are frescoes, which are made by painting on the plaster while the plaster is still wet.

The guide pointed this out - these look like marble, but they are also frescoes painted to look like marble. I guess the guy wasn't as rich as he wanted to be!

That table in the center has a game board carved on it.

These are mosaics

Okay, Dad - what kinds of birds are these?

A floor mosaic

This was the private bathroom

If I remember correctly, this is the part of one house that was built on top of the previous house's audience hall - the terrace.

And now for some views looking out from the top:

Can you see the area that's a different shade of green in these pictures? It's just beyond the trees in the left of the pictures. That green color is made by reeds, which are in the swamp that used to be Ephesus' harbor. As per the experts there, the city was abandoned after the river that flowed into the harbor silted the harbor in, leaving a swamp and no place for ships. 

This is the best picture to see it.