I'm happy to say that Marni and I are back from Prague in one piece. It was a good and relaxing trip. We purposely chose to take it easy because Kraków had been so intense.
The drive from Prague back to Berlin was really pretty. We had been driving at night on the way there, so we hadn't been able to see the river or the little towns with cottages and church spires or the green forested hills. It was a very scenic part of the road. We even saw an old building that looked like a monastery or an abbey on top of this big mound of rock a couple hundred feet above the river! It was cool.
We got to Berlin around 1:30 and went back to the little Mediterranean shop to get food for lunch/dinner. I had a few kinds of rolls from the store in Prague as well as a few whole carrots, so I just bought some dipping sauces to go with them: one with eggplant, one with basil and Balkan cheese, and a little bit of pesto. From there we took the train downtown to the Pergamonmuseum to make another attempt at getting in. We had more time today between buses, but we still didn't want to wait in a big line. When we got to the "Museum Island," we had a short food party with our Mediterranean deliciousness (sitting under the colonnade so we wouldn't get wet from the rain that was randomly sprinkling down) and then went to look at the ticket situation for the Pergamonmuseum. Thankfully there was no big line, and we got in without a hassle. We walked into the main door for the exhibit, and boom, there was the Ishtar Gate, just like that, in this huge room with a super high ceiling! It was really beautiful, and so huge! As it turns out, this wasn't even the whole thing, just the front part of it. There was an even bigger and taller part immediately behind it when it was in the wall in Babylon. I imagined the prophet Daniel and the other Jewish captives being taken into the city and wondered if they passed through this gate . . .
The next room was slightly bigger and had a partially reconstructed version of the marketplace in Miletus, which is mentioned in the apostle Paul's letters and which was located in Asia Minor (now Turkey). There were some really neat marble carvings, including larger-than-life heads of Hadrian and Trajan, and a two-story columned façade that had been part of the main market square. That was really cool too. Then we went into the third room, which was probably three times the size of the Miletus room, and there it was--the Pergamon Altar! It is SO huge! The museum doesn't even have the whole thing--Russia owns some of the statues, and a lot of pieces are missing (as is the case with most ancient structures and statues). But with a lot of careful planning, the front part of the altar was reconstructed in the museum in Berlin, and the relief-carving frieze that ran around the outside of it is now on the walls of the display room. The frieze depicts the mythical battle of the gods and giants, and it has Zeus, Herakles, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, and all the other ancient Greek/Roman gods and heroes featured in it. There are all kinds of mythical beasts in the carvings too. It's really cool because you are allowed to climb the steps and actually interact with it. The altar has maybe 20 steps leading up to the top and is probably 25 feet high. It's hard to describe--I'll post pictures tomorrow--but it was originally a big square platform with the steps going up the front side, and a colonnade around the top making a courtyard where sacrifices could be offered. This altar was only one small part of the city-center complex in Pergamon, which also had a marketplace, a treasury, a temple, an amphitheater, and more. The complex was built on the side of a very steep hill. Pergamon was also in Asia Minor (Turkey) and is one of the seven churches mentioned at the beginning of the book of Revelation. Needless to say, Marni and I spent a while just soaking it all in.
We also wandered through the other rooms. There weren't many of them, but they held some other interesting and beautiful things. One room had wall carvings from Nineveh; another room had two Assyrian sphinxes that would have originally guarded each side of a door in a palace; another had things from the Assyrian city of Ashur; and another had pieces of walls with cone mosaics. It was neat! I saw cylinder seals and document cylinders with teeny-tiny cuneiform letters on them, and a big square water basin from Ashur during the reign of Sennacherib. The best surprise was the basalt pillar in the corner of the Ishtar Gate room that had the Code of Hammurabi on it! I recognized it from my history book. Mom and Dad, you would like this museum a lot!
Anyway, we were both tired after that (how can sitting on a bus all day make you so tired?), so we went to a restaurant café where Marni could get coffee and sat and drew until 6, when we took the train back to the bus station. Our bus was the same one again, with the same driver. I wonder how many times he does the loop from Berlin through Hamburg to Kiel and back in one day?
Photos coming tomorrow . . . it's late and I have class in the morning. But praise the Lord! We made it back in one piece without incident, we had fun, and we got to see the Pergamonmuseum! I'd say it was an excellent weekend.
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