Pamukkale is a hillside of white travertine terraces in Denizli province, laid down over thousands of years by warm, lime-laden spring water, and Hierapolis is the ancient spa city whose ruins stand among them. The two are seen on one visit, and UNESCO inscribed them together in 1988 as a mixed site, natural and cultural at once. Minibuses from the Denizli bus station cover the eighteen kilometres north from the city centre. Below: how the terraces form, what to see in Hierapolis and its museum, and the other places in Denizli worth adding, from Laodikeia to the hot springs of Karahayıt.
How the white terraces form
The water rises from karstic ground at 35.6 degrees, carrying calcium off the southern slopes of Çaldağı. Where it meets the air and cools, it leaves its lime behind as white calcareous tufa, heaped up in shapes that look like cotton. Over time this has built a series of steps, something like a waterfall frozen in mid-fall, with shallow pools held on the flatter ledges. Because the formation is so easily damaged, only certain stretches are open for walking and bathing, and the rest of the terraces are kept off limits to protect them.
Hierapolis, a city built around its springs
The ministry credits the founding of Hierapolis, probably in the second century BC, to Eumenes II of Pergamon, and its name is thought to come from Heira, the wife of Telephos, who founded Pergamon. Old sources knew the city for its metalwork, carved stone and woven cloth. It became capital of the province of Phrygia under Constantine the Great, and in Byzantine times it was the seat of a bishop.
The springs, though, are why it exists. In the Roman period the sick came from all over Anatolia to take the waters, and the city became a place of healing where some patients stayed for a while and others for the rest of their lives; graves in the necropolis belong to people who arrived from elsewhere and never left. Research cited by the ministry suggests that priests and physicians ran the treatments together, and that religious ceremonies and festivals took place at the springs themselves.
What remains is complete enough to feel like a town rather than a scatter of stones: the theatre and temples, the agora and gymnasium, monumental fountains and tombs, and among them the spot the Romans believed to be a way down to the underworld. Bathing here takes place in pools set among the standing remains, so a swim at Pamukkale is also a swim inside Hierapolis. For a longer stay, thermal establishments near the ancient city offer rooms along with thermal water, massage and mud baths.
St Philip's bridge and the martyrion
On the eastern side of Hierapolis, past the St Philip gate, a bridge of large rectangular travertine blocks, twelve metres across at its widest, carries the line of the paved road out of the city centre. Only its southern side still stands. Across it, up on the hill, is the Martyrion of St Philip. By the bridge, next to an octagonal building that may have been a baptistery, a flight of steps climbs to the place where St Philip was buried, which before the Byzantine period was one of Asia Minor's chief pilgrimage sites.
The museum in the Roman baths
The Hierapolis Archaeological Museum occupies the city's Roman baths, part of a complex that also took in the gymnasium and the library over some 14,000 square metres. Its galleries are the bath's own vaulted halls of travertine, and it opened on 1 February 1984. The first gallery holds sarcophagi and statues, mostly from Hierapolis and Laodikeia. The second runs in date order from the fourth millennium BC, starting with the pottery, idols and stone objects that the British Institute of Archaeology excavated at Beycesultan, near Çivril, between 1954 and 1959; the coins follow the same sequence, from the first ones struck in the sixth century BC through to the Ottomans.
Laodikeia, the trading city
Laodikeia lies six kilometres north of Denizli and covers around five square kilometres in the Lykos valley, the modern Çürüksu, at the point where Phrygia, Lydia and Caria met. The Seleucid king Antiochos II Theos founded it between 261 and 253 BC and named it after his wife Laodike. Its wealth came from trade, textiles above all and then marble, grain and livestock, and its buildings show it: the provincial governorate describes its stadium, 285 by 70 metres, as the largest in Anatolia, and the city also had two theatres, four bath complexes, five agoras and five monumental fountains.
Much of it can be walked today: 400 metres of Syria Street, the towered East Byzantine Gate and its fountain, the central agora, Temple A, the house complex called House A, the Laodikeia church under its protective roof and 350 metres of Stadium Street. Look for the carved pomegranates, aubergines and cockerels, still the emblems of Denizli, and for the loom weights and dye workshop that tie the modern province's textile trade to its ancient one. After a great earthquake under the emperor Phocas, sometime between 602 and 610, the city was abandoned.
Hot springs and a thermal cave
Pamukkale is not the only place in the province where warm water has shaped the ground. At Karahayıt, a neighbourhood of Denizli, the main spring flows all year at close to 60°C, and its metal oxides have coloured some 500 square metres of terraces red, green and white; the hotels and guesthouses there use both the red water and the thermal mud. The Gölemezli area at Akköy, west of the Pamukkale archaeological site and 25 kilometres from Denizli, has four geothermal sources running between 35 and 60 degrees, one of them used as a mud bath, and its greenhouses are heated by the same heat underground. Kaklık Cave, on the Ankara road thirty kilometres from the centre of Denizli, holds clear, sulphur-scented thermal water inside the rock, with moss and algae growing thick on the dripping walls where the sun reaches them.
Further around Denizli
Tripolis, in the Buldan district on the bank of the Büyük Menderes, was a frontier city of Lydia where roads from Smyrna, Pergamon and Ephesus met before running on through Hierapolis and Laodikeia. It was founded as Apollonia, briefly renamed Antoniopolis when Mark Antony visited Asia Minor in 41 BC, and from the time of Augustus was called Tripolis, after three small communities that came together to form it; excavation has uncovered its colonnaded street, agora, a church and a monumental fountain. Colossae, two kilometres north of Honaz and twenty-five kilometres east of Denizli, was counted by Xenophon among the six great cities of Phrygia and was wrecked by an earthquake in Nero's reign; today it is a mound that was once its acropolis, with rock-cut chamber tombs to the north.
Honaz Dağı, a national park of 9,429 hectares, sits where Mediterranean plants meet the steppe flora of the interior: 964 species are recorded inside it, 122 of them endemic to Türkiye and three found on no other mountain. Paragliding pilots use the stretch between Çökelez Dağı and the site at Pamukkale. In the Acıpayam district, Keloğlan Cave, opened to visitors in 2003, has a lit walkway of 145 metres among stalactites, stalagmites and columns. In Denizli itself, the City Museum fills the 1940s stone workshops of a former vocational school, designed by the architect Selçuk Milar, with nine halls on the city's past; and the Atatürk House and Ethnography Museum keeps the embroidered banner under which the mufti Ahmet Hulusi Efendi called the town to resistance on 15 May 1919, the same day that Greek forces occupied İzmir. Each place has its own page on this site with the visiting details.
