Didyma, Miletus and Priene are three ancient sites in Aydın province, and each does something different. Didyma, in the Didim district, was a sanctuary and not a city, the seat of an oracle of Apollo with one of the largest Ionic temples of antiquity. Miletus, also in Didim, near the village of Balat, was a port that lost its sea. Priene, in Söke, sits high on a rock on the southern slope of Samsun mountain. The three show how one province could hold a place of prophecy, a place of trade and a place built for defence.
Didyma: the oracle of Apollo
Excavation between 1906 and 1913 exposed the whole temple, and some of it was re-erected. The ministry counts it among the best preserved Ionic temples and third in size among those of the ancient world. The wall around the site belongs to the same campaign, built from architectural pieces too worn to put back.
The district governorate tells the founding story: Apollo met a shepherd named Brankhos in the country around Didim, grew fond of him and taught him divination. Brankhos raised the first temple beside the laurel grove and the spring, and his descendants, the Branchidae, ran the sanctuary for generations.
Outside, the building looks conventional, with a double ring of columns that makes it dipteros in plan. The surprise is within, where a court lies open to the sky with an unpaved floor. It held the sacred spring, whose exact place is still unknown, and a small temple, the naiskos. The plan looks odd because the temple had a job to do as an oracle. An earlier sixth-century temple was already widely famous when the Persians destroyed it early in the next century, and its foundations can still be seen in the central court. In the fifth or sixth century AD the naiskos was replaced by a Christian basilica, which an earthquake later ruined along with the temple.
Medusa guards the temple, as the only mortal among the Gorgons of Greek myth, whose gaze turned people to stone.
Miletus: the city the river took from the sea
The stories of how Miletus began are stories only, as the museum's own text admits. Pausanias offers two: in one a Cretan force led by Miletos takes over a land called Anaktoria, and in the other Neleus, a son of Kodros, leaves Athens after a quarrel over the throne.
History proper starts with a break. After the Persian invasion of 494 BC the archaic city was abandoned, and the Hellenistic city grew around the Lion Harbour and the theatre. Rome kept its outline and filled it with buildings: the Faustina baths, the Capito baths, the harbour monument and gate, the gymnasium, the western agora, a gate on the south agora and the stadium.
The Büyük Menderes then undid the city's fortune, filling the bay with silt and taking away the harbour. Miletus was a bishopric by the fifth century, and it shrank until only the area of the theatre and the castle remained. Under Byzantium it was known as Palatia.
The Miletus Museum
The museum stands within the site and shows finds from Miletus, Didyma and Priene, so it ties all three places together. It first opened in 1973, but the building became unsafe and was pulled down, and its replacement opened on the same spot in 2011. About 600 square metres of covered display are joined by a garden of large marble works, inscriptions and sarcophagi. Opposite is the Park of Philosophers, where panels explain the thinkers, architects and artists of ancient Miletus.
Priene: a city on a rock
Priene lies fifteen kilometres south-west of Söke, set on a steep rock at 370 metres that made it hard to attack and easy to see from several directions. Like Miletos it counts as an Ionian League member, and ancient sources first mention it in the middle of the seventh century BC.
The list of buildings is long for a small city: the temples of Demeter, Athena and Zeus, an Egyptian temple, the agora, the bouleuterion, upper and lower gymnasia, a Byzantine church and the residential quarters. The theatre held five thousand people and dates from 350 BC. The temple of Athena has the most commanding position, and a gold and ivory statue of the goddess once stood before it, though only part of the altar is left.
