The Palace, Or Perhaps The
High Priest’S Habitation, Is Not Remarkable Either For Its Size Or
Elegance.
I could not enter it because it was occupied by the Harem of
Mursa Aga.
A colonnade led from the palace to the church gate; the
broken fragments only of the columns remain. Of the church most of the
side walls are still standing, ornamented with pillars and arches worked
in the walls; it is divided into two circular apartments [p.645] of
which the inner may have been the sanctuary. On the eastern side of the
church is a dark vaulted room, which receives the daylight only from the
door, and which appears to have been a sepulchre. A number of niches (if
I recollect right, nine), not perpendicular like the Egyptian sepulchral
niches, but horizontal, have been built around the wall. Into this
chamber opens a subterraneous passage, which is said by the Kurds, to
continue a long way under ground, in the direction of Antakia. I could
not persuade any body to enter it with me. Adjacent to this sepulchre is
another vaulted, open hall, which has been changed by its present
proprietors into stables, and an apartment for receiving strangers in
the heat of summer. The softness of the calcareous stone from the
adjacent hills, with which the buildings are constructed, has caused all
the ornaments of the arches and columns and even the shafts themselves
to decay; enough remains however, of their clumsy and overcharged
ornaments, to shew that the edifices are of an advanced period of the
Greek empire.
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