East of Antalya, on the plain that the ancients called Pamphylia, two ruined cities make an easy pair for a day. Aspendos is visited for its theatre, still standing almost whole, and for the remains of its water supply. Perge is a spread-out city of Hellenistic towers and Roman streets, baths and fountains, and the place where many of the best statues in the Antalya Museum were dug up.
Aspendos: the theatre
The ministry calls the theatre of Aspendos the best preserved not just in Anatolia but anywhere around the Mediterranean. It went up in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, between AD 161 and 180, designed by the architect Zenon, son of Theodoros. Inscriptions in Greek and Latin on both sides of the entrance name the two rich brothers of the city who paid for it, Curtius Crispinus and Curtius Auspicatus, and dedicate it to the gods and the emperors. It seats fifteen to twenty thousand.
Its survival owes a good deal to the medieval Seljuk sultans, who are thought to have turned the stage building into a caravanserai where their sultans stayed, and Seljuk repairs can still be read on the outer face: a monumental gate added at the centre and dark red zigzag plaster. In 1930 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk came here and ordered that the theatre be repaired and used again.
Aspendos: the aqueduct and the hilltop
Allow time for the aqueduct, counted by the ministry among the best preserved in the ancient world. An arched bridge roughly a kilometre long runs from north to south, with a pressure tower at either end, and the system was reworked during the second and third centuries AD to bring water more evenly into pear-shaped cisterns cut into the rock of the hill. Up on the walled hill behind the theatre are the agora, a basilica, the council house, a monumental fountain and arch, a street and a Hellenistic temple.
The city stands on a hill beside one of the largest rivers of the region, the Köprüçay, known in antiquity as the Eurymedon. The river gave it a way to the sea and the farmland around it made it rich. In the ministry's account, its wealth came above all from salt taken from the nearby Kapria lake and shipped down the river to markets around the Mediterranean, which is how so small a city came to mint the most widely accepted coins in that sea and fill itself with monuments.
Perge
Perge is in Antalya's Aksu district. Pottery from its acropolis dates the first settlement to the Early Bronze Age, and the place appears in Hittite texts under the name Parha. A planned street layout was given to it in the third century BC, and the solid Hellenistic towers you see today belong to that plan.
Its best years were the second and third centuries AD, when the long Roman peace let it make the most of its position. Most of what visitors walk through dates from that rebuilding, from the stadium and theatre to the palaestra, the market buildings of the agora and macellum, the main gate, and the baths, channels and monumental fountains through which water became part of the look of the city. Arif Müfid Mansel began excavating here in 1946, Jale İnan led the work through the 1970s and Haluk Abbasoğlu in the 1990s; since 2012 the Antalya Museum has run the excavations.
What Perge gave the Antalya Museum
Most of the marble sculpture in the Antalya Museum came out of Perge, and the excavations of 1946 onwards filled the museum garden with statues and sarcophagi until a new building was needed. Two finds from Perge stand out. The Dancing Woman, found in 1981 and two metres twenty-five tall, combines white marble for the skin with dark marble for her clothes and hair, and became the museum's emblem. The lower half of the Weary Hercules, a statue of the second century, turned up in 1980; its upper half was identified in 1990 in a Boston museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, came back in 2011, and the two halves were put on show together on 9 October that year.
Check the museum's own guide before planning around it: its building was closed on 16 July 2025 because it could not withstand an earthquake, and was demolished that September, with a new building under way on the same site.
The Kurşunlu waterfall
If the day allows one more stop, the Kurşunlu waterfall is twenty-two kilometres from Antalya, reached by a side road of seven kilometres that leaves the Antalya–Aksu highway northwards at the Soğucaksu bridge. The water drops eighteen metres, and below it seven small pools step down one into the next through a canyon two kilometres long, in a forest of Turkish red pine with plane, laurel and carob.
Each of these places has its own guide on this site with directions and visiting details.
