Historically Responsible Decision of the Day: the Antakya Museum-Hotel

Citylab ^ | August 6, 2012 | Henry Grabar

[SunkenCiv]

When life gives you a giant mosaic, build a museum-hotel.

Digging in the soil of Antakya, a small city near Turkey's Syrian border known to the Greeks as Antioch, Nehmi Asfuroglu discovered one of the world's largest and best-preserved ancient mosaics. It was an archaeologist's dream, but Asfuroglu is a developer, and he was hoping to build a hotel on the site.

He could have abandoned the project or concealed the discovery, but instead, he funded a seven-month excavation, abandoning the power tools of hotel construction for the manpower of historians from the local university. He hired architect Emre Arolat to design a museum-hotel complex on the site, preserving the floor beneath and creating a space to exhibit artifacts...

In Arolat's renderings for the Antakya Museum-Hotel, pre-fab room modules sit in a grid of steel girders, minimizing on-site construction and joining the space of the hotel with the historical site below. Columns rise from the riverbed to minimize interference in the ruins, supporting a canopy that shelters the entire structure. The mosaic is currently covered by a layer of gravel to protect it from construction, but it probably looks similar to the photo above, which shows the mosaic of Oceanus and Tethys at the Antakya Archaeological Museum.

The cost of the project, meanwhile, has risen from about $30 million to closer to $100 million.

[SunkenCiv]

APHarris/Flickr

[SunkenCiv]

[sauropod]

.

[bgill]

The mosaic is currently covered by a layer of gravel to protect it from construction, but it probably looks similar to the photo above

Or it may look completely different.

[colorado tanker]

Lucky that after WWI Antioch ended up in Turkey instead of Syria.

[SunkenCiv]

As much as I like ancient stuff, I'd prefer the 1919 nitwits had carved out Kurdistan while they were playing around with new maps.

[colorado tanker]

IIRC, the British made the Kurds promises as they put together their anti-Turkey coalition. There was even a push to create a Kurdistan after WWI, but the Brits double-crossed the Kurds among many groups in cutting their Sykes-Picot deal with France.

The nitwits sure effed up the Middle East.

[SunkenCiv]

It’s been four years, I forgot. The photos you found are too nice not to share though. :^)

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1811814632522207350.html