Hierapolis Audio Guide

A family tomb built in the shape of a house, with window-like openings punched into its stone facade. Tomb 176 went up in the second or third century AD, when wealthy families here raised burial monuments that copied the homes they had lived in. The message was about standing: this family owned a house in life and expected one after death. Poorer families simply cut their graves into the rock. Around the finer tombs, low walls enclosed small gardens planted with flowers and cypress. A long Greek inscription preserves the name of the man this tomb was built for: Tiberius Claudius Talamos.

Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany · CC BY-SA 2.0

Few graves in this necropolis have kept their shape as completely as this one. Tomb 170 was raised in the second or third century AD as a closed stone chamber, its blocks squared and fitted in the classical Roman manner. The masons worked chiefly in local limestone, though marble appears on some tombs here as well. The doorway stands framed and whole, with a plain carved panel set above it. No name survives on the stone to say who was buried inside.

Photo: Mach · CC BY-SA 3.0

The oldest graves at Hierapolis are the round mounds on the eastern slope of the foothill. They belong to the Hellenistic period, the first and second centuries BC, long before the Roman spa town. Each tumulus is a circle of carefully cut stone forming a drum over the burial chamber, with the mound rising above it. A narrow passageway, the dromos, runs through to the vaulted chamber where the dead were laid. Most of the tombs here date from the late Hellenistic age onwards, which makes these mounds the burial ground's founding layer. From a distance they read as gentle hills, easy to mistake for the landscape itself.

Photo: Sailko · CC BY-SA 3.0

Death here had a catalogue. The tombs of Hierapolis fall into four main types, and this round tholos shows how far the variety went. There were circular mounds of earth and stone. There were sarcophagi, some raised on substructures, others hollowed out of the rock, many covered with a double-pitched roof like a little gabled lid. Larger family graves took the shape of small temples, and others copied houses, sometimes stacking two or more sarcophagus lids one above the other. A family chose its form by tradition and by means, so the necropolis reads like a survey of how people wished to be remembered.

Photo: Sailko · CC BY-SA 3.0

A burial ground stretches for more than two kilometres along the roads leading out of the city, towards Phrygian Tripolis and Sardis. It runs from the northern edge of Hierapolis around to the east and south, and most of its tombs have been excavated. Counts differ, but well over a thousand tombs have been recorded, and the necropolis ranks among the best preserved in Turkey. Locals were buried here alongside people who had travelled to Hierapolis for medical treatment at the hot springs. Some of those visitors recovered and went home. Others retired here, or died here, and took their place among the tombs. Each was buried according to family tradition and means, which is why the ground holds everything from plain rock-cut graves to walled garden tombs.

shankar s. from Dubai, united arab emirates · CC BY 2.0

Plenty of these travertine coffins still speak. Their lids and sides carry Greek epitaphs, some carved more than two thousand years ago, and a Greek word, Soros, turns up again and again at the end of the lines. The inscriptions name the dead, record their professions, and praise their good deeds. Read together, they tell us a great deal about who lived here and how they made their living. The monuments themselves fared worse: most of the sarcophagi were plundered over the centuries. What the robbers wanted is gone. The carved words stayed where the masons left them.

Rolf Dietrich Brecher from Germany · CC BY-SA 2.0

The hot springs made Hierapolis a place of healing, and bathing became the industry built around them. Under the Roman Empire the city was a health centre where doctors prescribed the thermal waters to their patients. Thousands of visitors came, and the city answered with more than fifteen sets of baths. The great bath complex was centred on the natural thermal pools and ranked among the biggest buildings of Hierapolis. The spring water reaches the surface at between 36 and 57 degrees Celsius, already hot enough for bathing.

shankar s. from Dubai, united arab emirates · CC BY 2.0

This building has lived two very different lives. It began as a Roman bath complex, raised in travertine blocks at the beginning of the third century AD. Its halls had vaulted ceilings coated in stucco, and their walls were faced with slabs of marble. Centuries later, in the early Christian era, the baths were converted into a basilica church, sometime in the fifth century. The conversion is visible evidence of the city's own turn, from a pagan spa town to a Christian one. The great arches still stand; the rubble of the fallen vaults lies heaped at their feet.

Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany · CC BY-SA 2.0

Three arches in carefully squared travertine, flanked by two round towers, formed the ceremonial northern entrance to the Roman city. The round towers echo older Hellenistic gate designs, such as the gate at Perge near Antalya. Through it ran the plateia, a street about fourteen metres wide that crosses the whole settlement and leaves at the far gate towards Laodicea on the Lykos and then Colossae.

shankar s. from Dubai, united arab emirates · CC BY 2.0

This triumphal arch has a known builder and a known dedication. Julius Frontinus, the proconsul governing the province of Asia, had it built in the years 84 to 86 AD. A frieze inscription on the arch dedicates the gate to the emperor Domitian, and it was carved twice over, once in Latin and once in Greek. That dedication is where the gate's name comes from: the Domitian Gate, though many call it simply the Roman Gate.

Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 3.0