Pergamon, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2014, is a hill city, and that fact shaped everything about it. The ancient name comes from perg or berg, meaning castle or fortified place, and the site kept being settled through occupations and destructions because of where it stands.
There was no natural level ground here, so from the earliest phase of settlement space had to be won by terracing, and as building land ran short and needs grew, old terraces were absorbed into new ones — which is also why so little is known about the city's earliest history. The oldest settlement traces found on the citadel date to the seventh and sixth centuries BC. The ministry describes the resulting town plan, forced on the builders by the topography, as a form and planning without parallel.
The city was always two things at once: the walled citadel at the very top of the mountain, and a lower town on the gentler southern slope, walled in its own right, and the residential areas changed repeatedly in size and extent with political and economic conditions. The upper city was where the royal families, the notables, the intellectuals and the commanders lived, and it had an official character; its agora stood high up and was reserved for state business. The middle section, running north to south, held the sanctuaries of Hera and Demeter, the Temple of Asklepios, the gymnasia and the city fountain — buildings not tied to government, and meeting places people came and went from freely. In the lower town were the lower agora, the city's commercial centre, built in the early years of Eumenes II, and a line of shops along both sides of the main road up to the middle and upper city, along with peristyle houses, one of which still serves as the excavation house and another known as the house of Attalos.
The city and its walls reached their greatest extent under Eumenes II, and the buildings of his reign are the ones people come for: the Altar of Zeus, raised to commemorate the defeat of the Galatians; the propylon of the Temple of Athena and the stoas around it; the library that held 200,000 book rolls; the great palace; and the city walls. The earlier Temple of Athena was kept, as was the theatre — seating ten thousand, and the steepest surviving from antiquity — and the city opened out like a fan on three sides of that core. A wide, evenly ramped road crosses the whole city, beginning at the Eumenes gate in the lower town, zigzagging and then curving broadly through the middle city to reach the upper city up the southern slope of the mountain.
Under Trajan and Hadrian, in the second century AD, Pergamon flourished again: the city spilled beyond its walls and spread on a grid plan down to the plain, and the most important building of that expansion is the Temple of Serapis, the Red Basilica. A Roman theatre, an amphitheatre and a stadium were added.
The Asklepion, on the plain below, was a healing centre the directorate ranks with Epidaurus and Kos. Pausanias records a first temple of Asklepios at Pergamon in the first half of the fourth century BC, and excavation confirms the sanctuary existed from that century and developed in the Hellenistic period, though its brightest time was the second century AD. In the Roman period a sacred way led from the city to the sanctuary, ending in the propylon court, which is surrounded on three sides by Corinthian colonnades and was built by the consul Claudius Charax, a historian. The precinct holds a theatre for 3,500, a cult hall of the emperor Hadrian, a library and the round Temple of Asklepios, modelled on the Pantheon in Rome and built around AD 150 by the consul L. C. Rufinus. In the southern part are three small Hellenistic temples, the sleeping rooms, the sacred spring and pools, and a long underground tunnel built to shield patients undergoing treatment from cold and heat.
Entry fee
- Single entry to the museum or site · Local
- MüzeKart
- Single entry to the museum or site · Foreign
- €15
Visiting hours
- Hours
- 08:30 - 20:00
Getting there
- Access
- Bergama is 106 kilometres from İzmir, 110 from Balıkesir, 499 from İstanbul and 659 from Ankara.
When to go
- Climate
- Across İzmir as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 8.9 °C in January to 28 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in April, May, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in December (146 mm) and lightest in July (4 mm). Long-term means for 1938-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
