[TRADITIONAL GREEK MUSIC]
Here I am in the south necropolis of Olympos in Lycia.
It's the city of the dead, literally "Necro" "Polis"
and this would not be a morbid or scary place, this is like one of the streets of the town
along which are loads and loads - 354 just in this section alone, in the west section - 354 identified tombs so far found.
And one great frustration I always have when going round ancient cities is,
where did the people live? Where are the actual houses of the people, the houses of the living,
where's the "living-polis"?
Well, a lot of the houses would have been built out of wood and they would, of course, have rotted or burned.
Many more of them would have been built out of quite modest stones,
stones that were very easy for later people to reuse when they were building their homes.
and this place was lived in throughout the Middle Ages, the Byzantine period as well,
in fact this whole necropolis was turned into a housing area in the Byzantine period.
And the Byzantines weren't above reusing tombs either, so a lot of bodies got removed or added to in these tombs.
So yes, you may get the impression that there's no city here at all perhaps walking around it
because, where are the actual houses? Well, they've all gone.
But the tombs of the dead were made out of stone and made to last.
So everywhere you go you see temples and tombs,
it's true that Olympos does have the remains of one house,
but it's a posh stone house and so probably not typical.
Generally, it's the major public works that survive,
such as bath houses, forts, aqueducts, and theatres.
Theatres, for I think fairly obvious reasons, tend to survive very well.
But this one in Olympos is I believe what modern estate agents would call: "In Need of Some Attention".
Ephesus is a rare exception.
Here, an entire city block of houses has been preserved
But again, these are uncommonly well built, expensive houses
with mosaic floors and walls covered in paintings and huge, thin slices of marble
So, we're not seeing the homes of the common masses.
"BEIGE!"
So, what did a Lycian house look like?
Well, we don't actually know because none survives,
But I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that they looked something like this.
This is a funeral monument in which some remains were actually found dating back to the 6th Century BC
so they haven't all been robbed of everything.
You can see at the top there, it definitely looks like a wooden house with beams and little windows above the doors.
You can see more little telltale woodworker's details here.
You can see there's a little line just there where this would have been in a wooden house, an upright piece of timber,
and here, this lintel here would have been a horizontal,
and they've even bothered to suggest a crack between the two bits of timber which, of course, doesn't exist here at all because it's all stone.
[DIAMUIRD:] "And then you've got the representation of the logs on the top here as well."
[DIARMUID:] "Which came out, which were circular timber poles put on and then a flat roof was put on the top of that with the earth"
[DIARMUID:] "Which they still use today, and it's called "Dama"(?) in Turkish"
[DIARMUID:] "and there are examples locally where they use this,"
[DIARMUID:] "and then the earth would have been a foot to eighteen-inches deep"
[DIARMUID:] "and then they grew corn on top, or wheat, and then this also kept the water out, and apparently they're very very dry."
[DIARMUID:] "So this probably goes back to the Lycians, I imagine."