The Treasury, Petra · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

It isn't a treasury at all, it's a tomb, carved by the Nabataeans over two thousand years ago. The name comes from a local legend that an Egyptian pharaoh, fleeing Moses, hid his gold inside the stone urn carved at the very top of the facade. For generations, people took the story seriously enough to shoot at the urn with rifles, hoping to crack it open. You can still see the bullet marks today. There was never any gold in there, only solid sandstone, the same stone as everything else. The whole city was lost to the Western world for hundreds of years too, rediscovered in 1812 by a Swiss traveller who talked his way in by pretending to be a pilgrim looking for a different tomb entirely.

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.