Didyma was not a city but a sanctuary — the seat of an oracle of Apollo at Didim in Aydın province — and its temple is one the ministry describes as the third largest of the ancient world built in the Ionic order, and counts among the best preserved. Scientific excavation between 1906 and 1913 brought it fully to light, and part of it was raised again; the protective wall that rings the site, built of architectural pieces too worn to place, dates from that same campaign.
In antiquity the gift of prophecy was believed to have been handed to people by Apollo himself, god of the sun, of light, of music and of foretelling, and temples to him stood across Anatolia, each with priests and priestesses who put the questions of visitors to the god and brought back his answers. The district governorate tells Didyma's founding story this way: Apollo, walking in the country around Didim, met a shepherd named Brankhos, took a liking to him and taught him the secrets of divination. Brankhos raised the first temple to Apollo beside the laurel grove and the spring where the temple stands today, and his descendants, known as the Branchidae, administered the sanctuary for a very long time afterwards.
A double row of columns wraps the building on the outside, making it dipteros in plan. The one element that breaks with convention lies further in: a courtyard open to the sky, with no stone paving on its floor. Inside that central court stood the sacred spring — whose exact position has still not been fixed — and a small temple, the naiskos.
The oddity of the plan follows from what the building was for. This was an oracle, and the shape served that function. An earlier temple of the sixth century BC had already won wide fame before the Persians destroyed it early in the fifth; the foundations still visible in the central court belong to it. The Hellenistic naiskos in that court was taken down in the fifth or sixth century AD and a Christian basilica built in its place, and the basilica, like the temple, was ruined by an earthquake.
Medusa guards the temple. She was the only mortal of the three sisters called the Gorgons, who in Greek myth had snakes for hair and faces so terrible that anyone who looked turned to stone.
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 - 18:45
Getting there
- Access
- It can be reached from central Efeler in Aydın by the metropolitan municipality's buses and by Didim minibuses.
