Dust of Time
They call it the bishop’s palace. But among the overgrowth, where unseen beasts scream in the night, there is no bishop, no kingdom, no God. Only stone—too stubborn to vanish. Only shadows etched into limestone.
You step inside, and the air thickens. Not because choirs once sang here (though maybe other worshippers did, long before), but because here—there was silence. The rooms are too narrow for power and too empty for faith. This is no palace of splendor. It’s a citadel of impotence, frozen between god and emperor.
Archaeologists in Olympos call it the episcopal residence, a Byzantine complex that once held ecclesiastical authority in Lycia. You call it a capsule of lost purpose.
There were baths, mosaic halls, cross-vaulted arches, monastic cells, storerooms. You walk across the surviving floor, where a drainage duct remains. But it’s not a drain—it’s the artery of a dead idea.
Stone, brick, hypocaust. A church fused into a residential block. Everything blends: ritual and routine, prayer and logistics. A chapel that smells of storage. A house built on the convergence of heaven and the tax system.
Within these walls, the bishop was not a saint. He was an administrator. A bureaucrat of belief.
Looking at the remains of columns and niches, it doesn’t feel like ruins—it feels like an architectural joke. As if someone stitched liturgy into the pantry wing and walked away. And now you’ve arrived.
And you stand. Amid silence that doesn’t echo—it crushes. Somewhere beneath this grass — tile. Somewhere in this shadow — the print of a sandal.
But the real archaeology here is in the clicks inside your head, when you suddenly realize: we’re still building such palaces.
Only now without the crosses. Now with logos.
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