Kastabala — Hierapolis in antiquity — lies about twelve kilometres north of Osmaniye, inside the bend where the Ceyhan, the ancient Pyramos, turns north-west, between the villages of Kesmeburun and Bahçe. A thirteenth-century castle called Bodrum Kalesi rises on a spur of rock commanding the plain, and the ruins spread from its foot over several square kilometres. The English diplomat E. J. Davis was the first to describe the site in detail, in 1875; that the city's other ancient name was Hierapolis was established only in 1890, when the English researcher Th. Bent found inscriptions here saying so.
The name is older than the Greek city. Kastabala comes from an Anatolian language, and the earliest document carrying it is an Aramaic boundary inscription found in 1961 near Bahadırlı village, about twenty kilometres north — Aramaic being the official script of the Persians, who ruled Anatolia in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. That text records that part of the land of the Anatolian mother goddess Kubaba, who also bore the name Pirvaşua, belonged to Kastabala; whether it means a city or a territory is not certain. Ancient writers place it among the cities of lowland Cilicia: Ptolemy and Pliny mention it after Anazarbos and before Epiphaneia, while Strabo mistakenly believed there was a second Kastabala in the Taurus.
The city called itself Hierapolis, the holy city, from the coins struck under the Seleucid king Antiochos IV Epiphanes between 175 and 164 BC. He gave it that name because of the temple of a goddess called Perasia who had long been worshipped here — a name probably descended from the Pirvaşua of the Aramaic inscription, with roots reaching back to the late Hittite period. Images of Perasia on the city's coins and votive inscriptions found at the site confirm that this was the centre of her cult, and the coins show her chief attribute: the torch.
Strabo describes a striking practice at her festivals — the priestesses walked barefoot over red-hot coals without burning their feet — and records that at Kastabala Perasia was identified with Artemis. The provincial governorate calls this the most conspicuous case in the Çukurova of a local Anatolian goddess of Hittite descent merged with a deity of the Greek pantheon. A metrical inscription from the site, of the early Roman imperial period, invokes Perasia under the names of Selene, Demeter, Artemis, Aphrodite and Hekate together, which shows how thoroughly the religions of east and west had grown into one another here.
The archaeology is younger than the history. Excavation began here for the first time in 2009 and is still running under Prof. Turgut Hacı Zeyrek of Karadeniz Technical University on behalf of the ministry; the excavation director's own account is candid that the archaeology of Kastabala from the first millennium BC to the Roman empire has not yet been sufficiently investigated. What has come out has already changed the city's history as it was understood: material now dated to the late Neolithic and early Chalcolithic, the fifth century BC, the first century BC to the first century AD, the second century AD, the fourth to sixth centuries and the thirteenth to fifteenth suggests the gaps are about to be filled.
The work has also fixed how far the city reached: a fertile plain bounded by the Ceyhan to the south, Karatepe to the north and the Kırmıtlı bird sanctuary to the west. Inside the walled centre the buildings occupy the north, south and east slopes of a small valley below the castle hill, with rocky outcrops forming the settlement's natural northern limit, and a passage cut through the rock on the north-east flank of the castle links the western and eastern residential areas. In the second century AD the city is thought to have had no wall at all, the first defensive system going up at the end of the fourth. Its planning turns on a colonnaded street; walls and vaults won level terraces out of sloping ground, and on that grid the public buildings stand at the centre — the theatre, the baths, the shops, the north and south churches — with the first building phase of the surviving public architecture dating to the Severan period. The broken slopes ringing the city east, north and south hold a great many tombs. The site is reached by asphalt road; without a car, the village minibuses to Bahçe, Kesmeburun or Karatepe serve it.
Getting there
- Access
- Within the bounds of Kesmeburun and Bahçe villages, 12 km from Osmaniye, on an easy asphalt road. Without a car, take one of the village minibuses for Bahçe, Kesmeburun or Karatepe.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Osmaniye as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 8.9 °C in January to 28.7 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in April, May and October; rainfall is heaviest in March (116 mm) and lightest in August (10 mm). Long-term means for 1986-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
Visiting hours
- Hours
- 09:00 - 18:00
