Madaba Archaeological Park

The Archaeological Park is a covered complex a few minutes' walk south of St George's, built over a cluster of Byzantine ruins to protect them from weather and traffic. Walkways thread above and around mosaic floors so spectacular that any of them would be the centrepiece of a larger museum.

The two highlights are the Hippolytus Hall, with its mythological scenes of Aphrodite, Adonis, and the doomed Phaedra and her stepson Hippolytus, and the adjoining Church of the Virgin, with a circular floor mosaic showing a geometric medallion surrounded by intricate floral and animal motifs. Many of the smaller fragments come from churches and houses across town and were brought here for preservation.

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The mosaics here were buried for centuries under earthquake rubble and only excavated in the 1960s. The Hippolytus Hall mosaic — a sixth-century floor depicting scenes from the Greek tragedy of Phaedra and Hippolytus — has nothing Christian about it. It seems to have been the floor of a wealthy private house, and shows how alive classical pagan culture still was in early Byzantine Madaba.