ROMAN TEMPLE

15.3km




June 4, 2011

Today was another nice, sunny day and we decided to visit the Roman Temple at Martburg. We rode our bikes over the bridge and up the mountain on good trails. When we got to the top it was like a plateau, with grassy fields as far as could be seen.

The temple was built in 50ad and was actively in use until about 400ad. Before the Romans built the temple there was an old Celtic temple on this site, which was in use from about 300bc until the Romans took over.
This temple is dedicated to Mars and has been fully restored to it’s original style. The archeological digs are finished now, but this site was studied extensively for 20 years. The temple building looks very modern and I found it distracting because it does not look ancient.

The happy, helpful docent showed us many photos of the dig project and artifacts discovered at the site. We enjoyed his dissertation and then went for a visit to the temple building and other parts of the display.
In the temple building we saw colorful murals and a carved wooden statue of Mars, hand held out for tribute.

After our visit we returned to the little café where we bought a couple of beers and a piece of homemade cherry kuchen. We ate our lunch at the picnic tables and enjoyed the cake very much.

Then we went over to an overlook and we could see that although the plateau looked as if it went for miles, it is actually split by river canyons. We looked down on the village from the overlook .

We rode down the hard packed dirt road into the town, passing by Saint Castor’s Church. We stopped at the little museum there to see the artifacts found at the Mars Temple and also some very old hymnals which were hand printed and illustrated by monks in the 14th century.