Lagina was a major Carian cult centre, and its fame has lasted: the area is still known by the name Leyne. Remains found here and around show settlement reaching back to the third millennium BC, and recent research indicates the area was inhabited without a break from the Early Bronze Age to the present. After Early Bronze Age graves at the Yarbaşı locality, the earliest finds belong to the Submycenaean period; from the eighth century BC small settlements began to grow and multiply, and in time the sanctuaries were built up with monumental architecture.
The Seleucid kings made Lagina the religious centre of the region through major building work, and made Stratonikeia — twelve kilometres away — its political centre. Inscriptions surviving at Lagina and on the walls of the Stratonikeia bouleuterion record that the two were joined by a sacred way.
The sanctuary holds a propylon, the sacred way, the altar, the peribolos wall enclosing the precinct, Doric stoas and the temple of Hekate. The enclosing walls, which also form the back wall of the stoas, still stand to two metres. The monumental entrance has three doorways and, at its western end, an apse carried on four Ionic columns, and it connects to the stoa by a door. Ten flights of steps link that entrance to the paved road running to the altar.
One episode is recorded closely. In 40 BC the Roman general Labienus, who had joined the Parthians, attacked Stratonikeia in his campaign against Rome and failed to take it; he then plundered the sanctuary of Hekate at Lagina. In 27 BC Augustus made a large donation for the repair of what had been wrecked, and the inscription recording that gift is still on the lintel of the precinct propylon.
The temple stands in the exact middle of the sanctuary, on a platform ringed by five flights of steps and carrying a single row of columns on Attic-Ionic bases with Corinthian capitals. It was built in the Corinthian order with eight columns by eleven, and two Ionic columns stand in the pronaos. A decree of the senate cut into the temple wall, confirming the inviolability of the holy place, shows that the temple certainly existed in 81 BC; its date of building is not known for certain, but it is thought to fall between the end of the second and the beginning of the first century BC. The carving went on for a long time afterwards. The areas to be decorated were planned when the temple was built, but some of that work continued into the early imperial period, and parts of it can still be seen unfinished.
The friezes that ran above the columns, round the outside of the temple, carry four subjects, and they are worth taking one at a time. On the east front the subject is the birth and the life of Zeus. On the north is the moment of peace and friendship between the Amazons and the Greeks, with Hekate shown pouring a libation on the ground in honour of that friendship. On the west is the battle between the gods and the giants, in which Hekate can be seen taking part with the torch in her hand used as a weapon. The figures on the south side have not been identified with certainty, but they are thought to stand for the Carian gods and their cities.
Two further things about the place. The reason Augustus helped Lagina, had new buildings raised and had that recorded on the gateway in particular is that the sanctuary still mattered to the region under Rome; it kept its importance through the Roman imperial period and late antiquity, and in the first half of the fourth century, immediately after freedom of worship was granted, a church on a basilical plan was built between the altar and the temple. And the excavations in the sanctuary hold a place in the history of the discipline: they were the first archaeological excavations carried out by Turkish scholars.
Getting there
- Access
- The sanctuary of Hekate at Lagina lies within the town of Turgut in the Yatağan district. On the Yatağan–Milas road, turn right beside the thermal power station and follow the metalled road nine kilometres.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Muğla as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 10.8 °C in January to 27.6 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in April, May, June, September, October and November; rainfall is heaviest in December (207 mm) and lightest in August (4 mm). Long-term means for 2001-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
Visiting hours
- Hours
- 09:00 - 20:00
