Andriake Mermerleri: Lykia-Andriake’deki bir tepe üzerinde bulunmakta olup erken 19. yüzyılda kaybolan, İ.S. 1.-2. yüzyıla ait bir Roma anıt mezarı ve seyrüsefer işaretçisi olarak “yıkılmış, beyaz mermerden küçük bir tapınak”

Abstract

There is first hand record, pictorial, cartographic and in published texts of the presence of a small Roman square in plan temple-tomb in the Corinthian Order constructed of very white marble on a prominent coastal hilltop behind Hadrian’s horrea at Andriake, the port of Myra. It was a structure that from its location would also have served as a coastal navigational marker over the course of about 1600 years. All of the surviving primary evidence for it dates from the two decades between 1792 and 1812. Although reference continued to be made to this structure from these first hand sources into the latter part of the 19th c., this building no longer stood in this location. There is no primary evidence for the presence of this Roman structure on this hilltop at Andriake after 1812. Due to the absence of visible physical remains in this location today, in the recent literature, the record made of it, has been regarded as a inaccurate record of a nearby Hellenistic tower, a caprice introduced by the artist Luigi Mayer into his view of Hadrian’s horrea at the Port of Myra-Andriake of 1792, which, was then repeated by the British Admiralty hydrographer Captain Beaufort in his work, which seems inexplicable, or has been ignored.This article shows this building stood in this hilltop location at Andriake the port of Myra until 1812 and provides record to indicate that this structure was deliberately and methodically removed without Ottoman permission from its hilltop location in September-early October 1812, at the time that the Society of the Dilettanti Mission to Ionia led by William Gell was at Myra-Andriake. It also suggests a measured architectural record of this structure was certainly made, but note of these dra­wings was not published by the Society of Dilettanti in 1814. Suggestions are made as to the possible location of this building today and it seems most probably the case, in the absence of record of this reassembled Roman structure in Britain or elsewhere over the course of the past 200 years, that the vessel transporting the disassembled parts of this Roman building sank, was sunk, or to save the ship, this heavy cargo was cast into deep water, most probably in late 1812 or in 1813. The name of the vessel used by William Gell for transport, or perhaps, two vessels, if the Andriake Marbles were offloaded within the Mediterranean for transshipment, as was often the case, is unknown today, as the handwritten Journal of the Dilettanti Mission to Ionia of 1811 to 1813, the property of the Society of Dilettanti, which would have recorded this, and much else besides concerning this monument, has been lost.