Turkey - Pergamum - August 2004

From Ayvalik, it was easy to take a road trip to Pergamum.  We rented a car together with Rhumbline, planning a long day to make it there and back during daylight.

The modern name of Pergamum is Bergama, which is a small farming town today.  It attracts visitors who come to see the three major ruins that surround the town.

(Some of the comments below are excerpted from the Lonely Planet for Turkey.)

A town has been here since Trojan times, but the heyday was during the period between Alexander the Great and the Roman domination of Asia Minor.  At that time, Pergamum was one of the Middle East’s richest and most powerful small kingdoms. 

The three principal ruins are the Acropolis, the Asclepion and the Red Basilica.

The Acropolis sits atop the 500-metre hill adjacent to the town.  The main structures include the library and the Temple of Trajan, which is the only Roman structure surviving on the Acropolis.  The 10,000-seat theatre is extraordinarily steep.  It was built this way to conserve scarce building space on top of the hill.  Other buildings include the Temple of Dionysus and the Altar of Zeus.  While many buildings are truly ruins, the setting is magnificent, and there are some every effective restorations. 

The Asclepion (meaning medical centre) is the basis for today’s clinics.  Treatments included massage, mud baths, drinking sacred waters, and the use of herbs and ointments.  Diagnosis was often by dream analysis.  The centre came to the fore under Galen (AD 131-210), who added considerably to the knowledge of the circulatory and nervous systems, and also systematized medical theory.  His work was the basis for all Western medicine well into the 16th century.  Among the ruins at this site are the Temple to Aesculapius, the library, the Roman theatre, the Sacred Well, and the Temple of Telesphorus.  Telesphorus was another god of medicine, who had two daughters, Hygeia and Panacea, whose names are now part of medical terminology.

The Red Basilica is slightly younger (2nd century AD) built to Egyptian gods.  In the Bible, St. John the Divine wrote that this was one of the seven churches of the Apocalypse, singling it out as the throne of the devil.  The building is so big that the Christians didn’t convert it into a church, but built a basilica inside it.  One tower now houses a small mosque, proving the theory that sacred ground tends to remain sacred even though the religion many change.

Pergamum – Temple of Trajan	Asclepion – columns running beside one of the walkways	Asclepion – site plan	Pergamum – Theatre	Pergamum – Roman statue