Ancient City of Perge

One of the largest and most legible ancient cities of Pamphylia, eighteen kilometres east of Antalya. Founded, according to tradition, by Greek settlers after the Trojan War, it flourished under the Romans in the second century AD. The layout has survived almost in its entirety: from the round Hellenistic towers of the gate a colonnaded street runs for more than three hundred metres, with an open water channel with stepped cascades laid down the middle of it — the water flowed from the nymphaeum at the foot of the acropolis and cooled the street. Rows of columns and the shells of shops stretch along the sides, on the right the agora opens up with a round pavilion in the centre, and beyond that come the baths with surviving hypocaust vaults and the palaestra. Outside the city stand a stadium seating almost twelve thousand and a theatre. The Apostle Paul preached in Perge. The statues found here form the core of the collection of the Antalya Archaeological Museum, while the city itself, after excavation, turned out to be empty and for that reason particularly easy to read.

On the map