Side is an ancient city on a narrow peninsula in the Manavgat district of Antalya, and its ruins are the reason to come. A great theatre stands where the peninsula pinches in, a museum occupies a Roman bath among the agora and the monument of Vespasian, and the temples of Apollo and Athena lie a walk away. The same district holds Köprülü Canyon further inland and a Seljuk caravanserai at Beydigin, and the theatre of Aspendos stands in neighbouring Serik.
The theatre of Side
The ministry describes this theatre as the only one of its kind in Anatolia, and the reason is the way two building traditions meet. Its plan carries the seats past a half circle, a Hellenistic habit, while the construction is Roman. Up to the diazoma the seating leans on a natural slope. Above that there was no hill to use, so vaults, some of them trapezoidal, were built to lift the upper rows.
The three-storey stage building has the baroque ornament of the Antonine period, a style that descends from the theatre of Pompey in Rome. Look for the frieze on the first-storey podium, which tells the life of Dionysus from west to east and ends with the battle of the giants on the eastern side.
The temples of Apollo and Athena
The two temples stand apart from the theatre, and the walk out to them is best left for the end of the day.
The museum in the Agora Bath
The Side museum is in the Agora Bath, a Roman building that was excavated in the 1950s, partly repaired from 1959 to 1961, and made a museum in 1962. Arif Müfid Mansel, who led the digs at Side, and Jale İnan were at the opening. Excavation began in 1947, and its finds form the core of the collection.
Inside, the displays begin in the Late Bronze Age and end in Byzantine times: terracotta figurines, the scales and steelyards of a trading town, statues of gods from the public buildings, friezes of the marine thiasos, a statue of Hermes and sarcophagi with Erotes. The city had its own language with Luwian roots and its own script, and inscriptions in Sidetic can now be seen together here for the first time. Archaeological evidence puts settlement at Side from the eighth century BC.
A good part of the collection is outside. From the door on the east a stone-paved court, thought to be a second tepidarium, leads to a garden that was the gymnasium and palaestra of the baths. Sarcophagi, capitals, reliefs and stelae fill it, and the finest pieces are the friezes on the court's north wall, which tell stories of Poseidon.
Köprülü Canyon and Tazı Canyon
Köprülü Kanyon National Park lies in Manavgat around the canyon between Bolasan and Beşkonak. It measures fourteen kilometres by a hundred metres in depth, the longest in the country. The Köprü stream runs fast through it and is rich in trout, an old stone bridge still crosses it, and the park has cedar forest and rock formations that recall the fairy chimneys of Cappadocia.
Tazı Canyon is also inside the park, reached through Beşkonak, and is known as the Valley of Wisdom too. It is about four kilometres long with walls of 300 to 400 metres, and people go for the view from the rim. From here a trip can take in Selge, the St Paul Trail and the Adam Kayalar rock figures.
Kargıhan, a Seljuk stop on the old road
Kargıhan stands at Beydigin, on the old trade road between central Anatolia and the Mediterranean. It carries no inscription, but its architecture dates it to Gıyaseddin Keyhüsrev's reign, between 1236 and 1246. Thick walls enclose a covered section and cells around a square courtyard, and the portal in the south wall is unusual, a low-arched door inside a pointed iwan-like opening.
Aspendos
Aspendos, in the Serik district, stands near the same river, the Köprüçay, known in antiquity as the Eurymedon. Its Roman theatre was built under Marcus Aurelius by the architect Zenon, and the ministry calls it the best preserved in the Mediterranean world. Seljuk repairs helped keep it standing. The aqueduct on its arched bridge about a kilometre long is the other thing to see.
