The interior of the temple, with the sanctuary in the background.
The small front courtyard of the temple.
Ruins of the town Dionysias.
Qasr Qarun is a a temple dedicated to the Fayoumi god Sobek, built during Ptolemaic times. It appears immediately as strangely simple and square from the outside, since it is like a complete rectangular box with slightly tilted walls. Its interior is distinguished by a maze of rooms, and stair cases, all ending on th roof. And this is part of the attraction, since only few of Egypt's temples have roofs and only few of these have access allowed. There is not much to see inside the temple, since all decorations are gone, all but the ones above the doors. But for early European travellers, Qasr Qarun was a destination motiving quite active travelling. There was for long a theory that the maze of the temple, as well as the city near it, was the famous ancient Labyrinth described by Herodotus and Strabo. Of the city Dionysias, little of interest remains. The foundations and sometimes even walls of many houses peek through the sand, but no systematic excavations have been conducted here and you get no feeling of how the ancient city must have looked like.
