Fiery furnace? Temple of Apollo had secret death chamber

[icymist]

As the devout among the ancients knew well, nothing spices up a boring sermon like having your own sacrifice pit parked in front of your church. Throw in a secret tunnel to the death chamber, and you've got a churchgoing experience that no suburban mega-church, no matter how many good parking spots it offers, could ever match.
An ancient Temple of Apollo located amid the ruins of Hierapolis, the "sacred city," in Western Turkey suggests such attractions may have been something of a franchise among temples during the Roman era. Hierapolis was a Greek city famed for its hot springs that the Romans took over in 133 B.C. Apollo, the Sun god, was the chief deity of the city, and Italian researchers from the University of Lecce reveal some of the inner workings of the temple there in the current Journal of Archaeological Science.

The temple's ruins rest on a plateau running along the eastern side of the Menderes River, which itself runs along a geological fault. The fault produced Hierapolis' hot springs, popular with the bath-loving Romans, and also poisonous gases. Those poisonous gases, in this case it seems suffocating quantities of carbon dioxide, appear to be one of the secrets of the Temple of Apollo.

The temple, dating to the 3rd Century A.D, sat atop a monumental staircase and "near it there is an underground cavity called the Plutonion," says the study. A hole nearly 30 feet wide, surrounded by a fence, the Plutonion was "covered by a thick mist, making it impossible to see inside," study co-author Giovanni Leucci said by email. "The air outside the fence is quite clear, and when no wind is blowing there is no danger in approaching it, but any living creature that enters the hole dies instantly."

Read the article