The Asklepion is a healing sanctuary outside the acropolis of Pergamon, and people came to it to be cured. It was founded in the fourth century BC in the name of Asklepios, the god of healing; the ground had been sacred before that, but its real growth begins then. The ministry gives it the title of the most important centre of treatment in western Anatolia, for its architecture and for the methods practised in it. What a visitor walks through today, though, is largely second-century AD: the standing remains belong to the rebuilding carried out under Hadrian.
The approach was deliberately long. A sacred way called the Via Tecta ran for a kilometre, roofed over, its last stretch colonnaded, and ended at a monumental gateway. To the right of the entrance stood the library hall, to the left the temple of Zeus Asklepios. Beyond it opens the great festival courtyard, enclosed on its north, south and west by colonnaded galleries.
Around that courtyard the buildings can still be read off the ground. A theatre for 3,500 people adjoins the north-west corner. The west gallery belongs to the enlargement made under Eumenes II. The great dining hall stands on the south side and the latrines in the south corner, and at the south-east corner is the round building on the lower level that served as the treatment house. West of the courtyard are the sacred springs, the foundations of an earlier temple, and those of the sleeping rooms.
What went on in those rooms is known because a patient wrote it down. Aelius Aristides, the celebrated orator of the period, was treated here and set the methods out in detail in his Hieroi Logoi: patients lay down to sleep so that a cure might come in a dream, and the regime included the sound of running water, mud cures, healing water, cupping, alternating fasting and eating, therapy and sessions of music. Pergamon was also the home town of Galen, the physician called the father of pharmacology, who looked after gladiators and Roman rulers here. The combination — the plan, the treatments, the doctors — is what set this sanctuary beside its contemporaries at Epidaurus and Kos.
The site is on Prof. Dr. Friedhelm Korte Caddesi in Zafer Mahallesi. An audio guide is available, and the Müzekart is valid here for citizens of Türkiye.
Entry fee
- Single entry to the museum or site · Local
- MüzeKart
- Single entry to the museum or site · Foreign
- €13
Visiting hours
- Hours
- 08:30 - 20:00
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).
