Sagalassos
Interesting facts
- The Nymphaeum of Antoninus Pius, a fountain about 9 metres high and 28 metres long, was rebuilt from its original fallen stones over 13 summers.
- Since its restoration was completed in 2010, the Antonine fountain again runs with water from the same springs that fed it in Roman times.
- A potters' quarter of about two hectares, found in 1987, mass-produced a red tableware traded across Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean.
- Sagalassos red slip ware was made from the reign of Augustus until the first half of the seventh century AD.
- The colossal Hadrian statue was carved in separate pieces fitted together on site with marble tenons, and it broke apart along those joins when the baths collapsed.
- Marble toes drilled for attachment to a long mantle, found with the Hadrian statue, hint at a matching colossal statue of his wife Sabina.
- Human activity in the surrounding area goes back to around 8000 BCE, long before the city itself was founded.
- A fortified monastery, possibly the seat of a bishop, lingered among the ruins until it was destroyed in the twelfth century.
- The Polish art historian Count Karol Lanckoroński produced the first map of the ruins in the late nineteenth century.
- After Alexander, the city passed in turn to Antigonus, the Seleucids and the Attalids of Pergamon before Rome absorbed the region.
Why it is worth it
High on the slopes of Mount Akdağ in the western Taurus, between roughly 1,400 and 1,700 metres above sea level, the stone streets, agoras and fountain houses of Sagalassos are laid out on a staircase of terraces facing a wide mountain basin. Few ancient cities in Anatolia sit in such a commanding position, and few were left so undisturbed: after the town was abandoned, soil washed down from the slopes and slowly buried it, and its remoteness spared it from large-scale stone robbing.
The place has a long memory. Hittite texts of the fourteenth century BCE already mention a mountain site called Salawassa, and by the time Alexander the Great took the city in 333 BCE on his march east it was one of the richest towns of Pisidia, home to a few thousand people. Greek culture took root quickly under the Hellenistic kingdoms that followed. Under Rome, Sagalassos flourished as never before: Hadrian made it the leading city of the province and a centre of the imperial cult, and its public buildings took on a thoroughly Roman form. Among the monuments now exposed are the upper and lower agoras, a heroön, a theatre, a macellum with a round tholos, an imperial bath complex and the monumental Nymphaeum of Antoninus Pius, its columned façade framing a once-gushing fountain. In 2007 excavators in the baths found the fragments of a colossal marble statue of Hadrian in military dress, originally some four to five metres tall, followed the next year by portrait heads of Faustina the Elder and Marcus Aurelius.
Decline came in stages. The town was fortified around 400 CE, damaged by an earthquake in 518 and hit by plague around 541–543, which is thought to have halved its population. Arab raids around 640 and a final destructive earthquake in the mid-seventh century led the inhabitants to leave for the valley below. The French traveller Paul Lucas described the ruins in 1706, and the antiquarian Francis Arundell identified the city by its inscriptions in 1824. Systematic excavation began in 1990 under Marc Waelkens of the University of Leuven, and the project has since traced ten thousand years of landscape and settlement history around the site. Sagalassos is on Turkey's tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage.
Getting there
The ruins lie about 7 km above the town of Ağlasun in Burdur Province. Isparta is about 10 km away in a straight line, though the road around the mountains is considerably longer. The nearest airport is Isparta Süleyman Demirel (ISE), about 24 km away; Antalya lies roughly 100 km to the south.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Sagalassos, also known as Selgessos and Sagallesos, is an archaeological site in southwestern Turkey, about 100 km north of Antalya and 30 km from Burdur and Isparta. The ancient ruins of Sagalassos are 7 km from Ağlasun in the province of Burdur, on Mount Akdağ, in the Western Taurus Mountains range, at an altitude of 1450–1700 metres. In Roman Imperial times, the town was known as the "first city of Pisidia", a region in the western Taurus Mountains, currently known as the Turkish Lakes Region. During the Hellenistic period it was already one of the major Pisidian towns.
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