Guide
The Roman theatre of İznik lies in the İznik district of Bursa, ninety metres north of the city walls. It was built in the second century AD, in the reign of the emperor Trajan, by Pliny, then governor of Bithynia. The seating and the tunnel through which animals were let into the arena both stand largely intact.
Because it was built on flat ground and raised on vaults, the source calls it architecturally the only example of its kind in Türkiye. It was used for two centuries for gladiatorial combat and other games, and afterwards it was put to other uses.
The theatre covers an area eighty-four metres long and sixty-three metres wide and held some ten thousand spectators. The stage building had three floors, of which only the first survives. It consists of three entrances and four main spaces divided from one another by corridors.
During the state of Nicaea, founded after the Latins took Constantinople, soldiers killed in the fighting were buried together in the passages beneath the theatre. In the Ottoman period the site served for a time as a pottery kiln, and after the kilns fell out of use the blocks of the building were carried off and used in the houses around, a practice that went on into recent centuries.
The theatre was first identified and sketched in 1743. The first excavations were carried out in 1980 by Bedri Yalman, a specialist at the Bursa Museum, and continued until 2006. Digging went on under the direction of the İznik Museum between 2011 and 2015, and from 2016 it has been carried on by a team from Dokuz Eylül University under Aygün Ekin Meriç.
