Sun. 9. [9 March 1902] Pouring wet morning. Had breakfast in the
Station Master's office, Mr Hatton cooking bacon and eggs. Then
retired to my sleeping carriage, finished Adam Bede and wrote letters
till 12 when it held up a little. Lunched hastily and set off for Suleimanli
(Blaundos) across bare hill tops where nothing grew but the prickly
wild oak scrub and starch hyacinths. Put up a hare and some
partridges. After an hour and a quarter's smart walking in the rain we
came to the Acropolis, magnificently situated with a steep valley on
all sides and a narrow isthmus where the entrance was. First the
remains of the aqueduct from Inai with the ruins of a temple to the E of
it; then a magnificent gateway of dressed stone wh. the Yuruks are
destroying. Inside on the left an arched place in the wall where some
Yuruk shepherds had made a fire. Further on ruins of 2 temples with
much elaborately carved marble, cornices and the corner of a
pediment and a very bad draped figure headless. The 2nd[?] temple
had some very poor columns standing, some of them (and many of
the ruined blocks) of sort of double or engaged columns. Then a
corps de batiment of very big stones. All round the rocky valley was
a vast rock cut necropolis, Phrygian they say. The biggest tombs
had 2 or 3 chambers stretching into the rock with arches cut out of the
rock and traces of plaster work on them. Loculi all round. Further on
(but I had not time to go and see them) there is some fresco on the
plaster in this pattern [sketch] leaves and fruit. The doorways are
sometimes an arch, sometimes a rough moulding [sketch] in the solid
rock. In the valley a Yuruk village of good houses. The men said if I
wd come and stay I shd be put up in the Musafa's Odasi. So home,
the rain holding off. We dined with the Station master and had a
concert after.