Buses drive visitors to the top of the mesa, and the tour of the church, cemetery and surrounding homes and cisterns takes about an hour.
Worries about cistern neglect aside, and after I'd meticulously timed the first seven minutes of the flight – apparently that's the most likely period for a plane to crash – I began to enjoy the idea of a holiday.
Basilica CisternLearn about the Basilica Cistern that was built by the Byzantine emperor Justinian in 532 ce to store fresh water for Constantinople (now Instanbul).
I first heard about the Basilica Cistern while reading Inferno by Dan Brown.
My friend and I put one system with a cistern up at her house using about $1,000 out of our own pockets.
Also at Grosvenor House, Vanderven & Vanderven Oriental Art, a porcelain gallery in the southern Netherlands, was selling a 28-inch-tall Qianlong porcelain cistern and cover decorated in blue and white from about 1740.
Who else could begin a commentary about a picture of a cottage cistern by noting, "We now have pumps so deep-reaching and powerful that we can draw down even the Oglala aquifer, the ocean of fresh water underneath the Great Plains, which once seemed inexhaustible"?
But by the time it rumbled up the hill to their narrow street at midafternoon, it could fill only about a foot of the family's cistern.
Undergraduate participants viewed a two-stage diagram depicting a flushing cistern (with or without numbered arrows) and answered questions about its function, step-by-step.
We started thinking about what just happened and we realize the Cistern did cost $20, but we paid with a 50-lira note and received 10-lira back.
