Het archeologisch museum van Izmir

Hallo allemaal,

dit reisverhaal is even een beetje anders als normaal. Ik ben gisteren naar het archeologisch museum in Izmir geweest. Helaas stelde het niet zo veel voor maar ik heb er toch wel wat van geleerd. Ik heb er in het engels een verslag over geschreven voor mijn professor van de Ege universiteit. Dit verslag staat nu hieronder voor de geïnteresseerde. Ik mocht van het aardewerk, de sieraden en de juwelen helaas geen foto's maken maar heb er wel een paar van de standbeelden. Ik heb ook nog wat foto's gemaakt van het centrum met de klokkentoren en de vismarkt (winkelcentrum).

Het verslag:

Arkeoloji müzesi Izmir 11-2-2015

I went to the archaeological museum to expand my knowledge about archaeology in and around Izmir. The first floor contained a small amount of statues. I noticed only a few where represented gods or heroes which slightly surprised me. I expected that in amphitheatres gods and heroes would be very well represented. But it might be because the museum doesn’t have all the statues. I will have to visit the amphitheatre to check this. I was very amazed by a statue of a priest. It wasn’t as damaged as most other statues and the details were very interesting. He was missing one hand but on the other there was a big ring. There was some kind of headgear which I haven’t seen before so I am curious to learn more about that.

On the second floor there was a lot of ceramics and some other small objects like flintstone tools, toys and jewellery. It was interesting to see how the pottery changed from proto-geometric to Hellenistic. There were a few things I noticed that somewhat surprised me. First of all there is still a lot of pottery form the prehistoric ages, very different from the way it is in the Netherlands. Secondly the paint was still very well visible on the pottery, something that I’m not used to. It might be because it’s black paint and in the Netherlands the paint we find on pottery is usually red. Thirdly the pottery is very thin already from before the Roman empire, which is roughly the time during which the quality of the pottery in the Netherlands got a lot better. So from this I conclude that the techniques they used to make pottery were already very advanced since they would need a good clay mixture and ovens that could reach a high enough temperature, to make such good quality pottery. But it seems that the technique didn’t change much over time.

I was also amazed by the great detail in the decorations. Even in the proto-geometric period there were no small mistakes or quickly drawn circles. They seemed to have put great care into the painting of the pottery. And of course the decorations only became more realistic and detailed. I noticed that from the Hellenistic period the decorations would be in 3D and from the Byzantine period the pottery was decorated with glaze, there seems to have been more glass and metal and you can see Christianity was the main religion in the decorations and small objects. There wasn’t much glass from the other time periods accept for jewellery.

Since most of the findings are grave gifts it doesn’t give me a very complete image of how life was at those times. This also shows in the large jewellery and coins collection they have. I will have to find some books or another museum to see how the poor, average and wealthy differ from each other and how this reflects in archaeological findings. Even though the museum wasn’t that big, I did learn a lot about archaeology in this region.