Termessos Audio Guide

High in the Taurus Mountains, about thirty kilometres north-west of Antalya, a whole ancient city sits on a natural platform roughly a thousand metres above the sea. The mountain above it, Güllük Dağı, climbs to sixteen hundred and sixty-five metres, and the city clings to its south-western slopes. Its founders were the Solymi, an indigenous Pisidian people, and they took their name from Solymeus, an Anatolian god later identified with Zeus. So the city worshipped Zeus Solymeus, and his name appears on its coins. The Solymi are old enough to appear in Homer's Iliad, in the legend of Bellerophon. This was a stronghold first and a city second, and few enemies ever managed to storm it. Alexander the Great himself gave up on it. Rome later recognised the city's independence by law. Today formal excavation has begun here, inside the national park that carries its name, one of the best preserved ancient cities in Turkey.

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Among the remains of Termessos stands a monumental Roman gateway carrying Hadrian's name. It belongs to a family of grand entrances the Romans built across their provinces, ceremonial arches raised to mark the passage from the open road into a city. Here it served as the majestic entry to the lower city, with a broad stairway leading up to it. It ranks among the city's known monuments alongside the walls, the cisterns, the theatre, the gymnasium, the agora, the odeon and the heroon. The gate is often called a triumphal arch, and gateways of this kind were usually built to honour an emperor, whether or not he ever came. Scattered blocks lie all around it, tumbled from the structure above. What stands now gives only a hint of how imposing the full monument once was, framed against the bare rock of the mountain.

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A single rectangular door frame still stands upright here, rising from a sea of fallen masonry. The blocks around it lie where they fell, lichen-grey and weathered. That standing frame is the best measure of the scale the finished gate had. Each jamb is a towering slab of dressed stone, and the whole portal once rose far above it. Set against the slope and the scattered ruins, the lone doorway shows how much of the monument has vanished, and how much still holds.

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Over the gateway runs a carved entablature, the horizontal band of stone that carried the gate's decoration. Its surface is worked with repeating moulded patterns, the kind of ornament Roman masons used to give ceremonial buildings their richness. The fluted columns flanking the opening are cut with the same care. All of this has stood exposed to mountain weather for centuries, through frost, sun and rain, and the carving is still legible. It is a reminder of how skilled the stonemasons of a Roman provincial city were, working hard local limestone with chisels and no machinery. The blocks were shaped to interlock precisely, and the ones that stayed joined have outlasted the ones that fell.

Photo: Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0

A woman named Aurelia Armasta built a temple here, and made sure everyone knew it. An inscription on the entrance, which survives complete, records that the temple was dedicated to Artemis, and that both the building and the cult statue inside were paid for by Aurelia and her husband, using their own money. Private wealth funding a public cult was a familiar act of generosity in Roman cities, and a costly one. The temple is small and elegant, of the prostylos type, with columns across its front, and its inner chamber measures about five and a half metres on each side. Stylistically it belongs to the end of the second century AD. Beside the entrance, on the other side, a statue of Aurelia's uncle stands on an inscribed base, keeping the family's name attached to the gift. The temple now stands roofless and overgrown, but the inscription that tells her story is still in place.

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Through the great doorway blocks of the Artemis temple, the view is of trees and tangled scrub growing where the goddess's statue once stood. The stone walls are thick with pale lichen, and fallen blocks lie among the bushes inside. Little here has been cleared or tidied. This is the normal state of Termessos, a city that was never fully excavated, where ancient structures and wild vegetation have grown into each other over centuries. The temple's mass is still easy to make out, the walls and the entrance framing the hillside beyond. It is a ruin that the mountain has been quietly reclaiming.

Photo: Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0

In the walls east of the city gate, inscriptions offer a strange service to anyone arriving: answers from the gods, by dice. Each inscription runs about four or five lines. It gives the numbers to be thrown, the name of the god being consulted, such as Zeus or Apollo, and the counsel that god gives for that throw. A traveller would roll, match the numbers to the text, and read the prediction waiting for them. Beliefs of this kind, in sorcery, magic and superstition, were widespread across the Roman Empire, and the Termessians were probably keen on fortune-telling. What makes this place remarkable is that the oracle was carved into the city's own defences, at the very point where every traveller passed in. The gods, apparently, were consulted on the way in.

Photo: Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0

The city gate stands high on the steep climb where the ancient approach road finally reaches the walls. From this road, the famous Yenice pass can be seen, the gap in the mountains through which the old highway wound. The climb itself was part of the city's design. Along the way up stand Hellenistic fortification walls, cisterns hollowed to hold water, and many other remains, so an arriving traveller met the city's defences long before meeting its gate. The road climbs through bare rock and sparse trees, and the views open out over the lower mountains behind. It is a hard, high approach, exactly what you would expect for a city that lived behind its ramparts.

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In 333 BC, Alexander the Great marched to force the pass that runs by Termessos, the route between Pamphylia and Phrygia. The Termessians closed it against him. He wasted much time and effort trying to break through, then turned on the city in anger and surrounded it. He likened it to an eagle's nest. But knowing he could not take it, he never assaulted it, and instead marched north to unleash his fury on Sagalassos. Why he chose the steep Yenice pass at all, when much lower and easier passes existed, is still disputed. It is even said that his hosts in Perge sent him up the wrong path. The road the Termessians called King Street came later, built in the second century AD by contributions from the people of Termessos. It passes through the city walls higher up and runs in a straight line all the way to the centre of the city.

Photo: Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0

Beside the old main street stands a single monument of richly worked stone, its panels carved with mouldings and bearing inscriptions. Monuments like this lined the great streets of Roman-era cities, honouring individuals whose names the carvings recorded, a public form of civic display where generosity to the city was rewarded with stone. Termessos was a thriving provincial city by the turn of the second and third centuries AD, and its citizens marked their main road accordingly. What this particular monument originally held, and whom its inscriptions praised, cannot be said for certain now. Its craftsmanship, though, is intact enough to show the standard the street was built to.

Photo: Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0