Aphrodisias was a city dedicated to Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, and it carries her name. It lies twelve kilometres south-east of Karacasu in Aydın province and is known above all for how completely its monumental buildings have survived; UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 2017, at the 41st session of the Committee in Kraków.
The mound on which the theatre was later built is a prehistoric settlement going back to about 5000 BC, and the Byzantine writer Stephanos traced the city's founding to the thirteenth century BC. By the sixth century BC it was still a village, though the first temple of Aphrodite stood there. The change came in the second century BC, when the settlement was laid out afresh on a grid and some fifteen thousand people came to live within about a square kilometre.
Its fortune was sealed in the first century BC, when the emperor Augustus placed the city under his personal protection. Nearly everything standing today was built in the two centuries that followed. By the late third century AD it was one of the great cities of Rome's province of Caria. From the sixth century it lost importance, and in the twelfth it was abandoned altogether.
Two things made it unusual. One was the cult of Aphrodite, which drew people to it as a religious centre. The other was marble: rich beds nearby fed workshops that developed a recognisable manner of carving, known as the Aphrodisias school, and the city became a centre of sculpture as much as of worship.
First among the things to see is the best preserved stadium of the ancient world, two hundred and seventy metres long with seating for thirty thousand. The Temple of Aphrodite, converted into a church in AD 500, keeps its grandeur, and the white marble theatre seats seven thousand. The monumental gateway, the Tetrapylon, is another of the celebrated structures, and the list goes on: the Sebasteion, the baths and the Hadrianic complex, the odeon, the agora, the bishop's palace, the Tetrastoon and the Portico of Tiberius.
The site owes its present state to the excavations of the archaeologist Kenan Tevfik Erim between 1961 and 1990. The Aphrodisias Museum stands at the entrance, the two interwoven in a way few sites manage, and the finds are displayed there: the richest part of the collection is the statues, reliefs and sarcophagi of the Aphrodisias school, running from the late Hellenistic period to the early Byzantine. Nobody lives any longer in the village of Geyre, cleared during the excavation, but a few surviving houses and the ceramic workshops in Karacasu can still be seen, and the Sırtlanini Cave near the town — three hundred and forty-eight metres long, home to colonies of bats — is another stop worth making.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Aydın as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 8.2 °C in January to 28.4 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in April, May, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in December (126 mm) and lightest in August (6 mm). Long-term means for 1940-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
Visiting hours
- Hours
- 08:30 - 19:00
Getting there
- Access
- Aphrodisias lies 12 km southeast of Karacasu.
