Didyma

The Temple of Apollo at Didyma was built on a scale meant to rival any in the Greek world: its Ionic columns rose to nearly 20 metres, and the seven-stepped platform beneath them measures almost 60 by 120 metres. This was the seat of one of the most famous oracles of the Greek world, a sanctuary on the coast of Ionia controlled by the great city of Miletus, and the ruin is among the best-preserved temples of classical antiquity. Along the frieze, enormous carved heads of Medusa stare out over the precinct.

Ionian Greeks venerated Apollo here from at least the late eighth century BC, around a sacred spring and a laurel tree that remained the centre of the cult for more than a thousand years. A Sacred Way about 20 kilometres long, lined with statues of noblemen and noblewomen, animals and mythical beasts, linked the sanctuary with Miletus; some of those archaic figures are now in the British Museum. After the Ionian defeat at Lade in 494 BC the Persians burned the sanctuary and carried off the bronze cult statue of Apollo, and tradition held that the oracle's spring dried up. Only after Alexander the Great freed Miletus in 334 BC did work begin on a new temple, which was meant to be one of the greatest ever built; Vitruvius names its architects as Paeonius of Ephesus and Daphnis of Miletus. The returned cult statue was set up in a small shrine of its own around 300 BC, and Roman emperors from Trajan to Hadrian, who served here as prophet in 129 AD, continued to support the sanctuary until the closure of the pagan temples under Theodosius I.

The design is unlike any other Greek temple. A double ring of Ionic columns surrounds the building, but instead of a closed inner hall, visitors passed through a forest of columns in the porch to a great doorway whose threshold was too high to cross. Two narrow sloping tunnels led down inside the walls into a vast courtyard open to the sky, enclosed by walls about 25 metres high, where the spring, the laurel and the shrine of Apollo stood. Building went on for over six hundred years and was never completed: the pediments were never added, and many blocks were left unpolished. That is why, in 1979, the archaeologist Lothar Haselberger was able to find full-size construction drawings scratched into the courtyard walls — among the earliest architectural blueprints known. An earthquake in 1493 brought the temple down, and later villagers used it as a quarry. Excavations by French and then German teams have since uncovered the temple, a sanctuary of Artemis and a Greek theatre.

Getting there

The ruins lie in the Didim district of Aydın Province, on the edge of the modern town of Didim, about 16 km in a straight line from ancient Miletus. Milas–Bodrum International Airport (BJV) is about 39 km away in a straight line.