Anavarza lies in the village of Dilekkaya, 28 kilometres south of the town of Kozan in Adana. In the 1st century BC the Romans left the administration of this region to Tarkondimotos, whom they appointed as a vassal king. After the city came under direct Roman rule in 17 BC it grew into one of the most important metropolises of Anatolia.
What survives is a full city rather than a single monument: a colonnaded street, baths, the remains of a church, a theatre, an amphitheatre, a stadium, water channels, rock tombs, the cemetery and ancient road on the west side, a pool mosaic of the sea goddess Thetis, a triumphal arch with three openings, and the medieval castle on the hill that rises out of the plain like an island.
Two names attach to the place. Dioscorides, who served in the Roman army under Nero and whose five-volume De Materia Medica was still taught as a foundational text in the medical faculties of every modern country into the 18th century, lived at Anavarza. The poet Oppian was born and lived here too. Ancient sources also record that the city held a great many linen weaving workshops.
Carrying traces of the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, medieval, Arab, Armenian and Ottoman periods, Anavarza has been put forward as world heritage and was entered on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List in 2014. It is reached on the vehicles running from Kozan to Dilekkaya; the address is Dilekkaya Mahallesi, 01500 Kozan.
The provincial directorate of culture and tourism puts the site at 1,143 decares — a little over a square kilometre — and in the Cilician plain the city held the rank of metropolis, with festivals and games of its own. The directorate calls the castle above the ruins the largest in Çukurova, and it is layered rather than the work of one period: inscriptions and repairs survive from the years when the armies of Harun al-Rashid held it as a garrison, there is a chapel from the Byzantine and later Armenian kingdom periods, and cisterns, vaulted passages, bastions, niches and altar areas were added and reused as each power took the rock in turn.
Of the lower city's four main gates only the Ala Gate remains, built as a triumphal arch and, according to the directorate, the largest of its kind in the region. Excavation here is recent: the first permitted work, in 2013, was the cleaning and restoration of that gate, and since then some 500 block stones shaken loose from the arch by earthquakes have been drawn, photographed and moved to a stone park while their original positions are worked out one by one. A long stretch of the main street, 34 metres wide, has been cleared.
Getting there
- Access
- Take a vehicle from Kozan to the village of Dilekkaya, also called Anavarza.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Adana as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 9.6 °C in January to 28.8 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in April, May, October and November; rainfall is heaviest in December (125 mm) and lightest in August (9 mm). Long-term means for 1929-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
Visiting hours
- Hours
- 08:30 - 17:00
