Magnesia on the Maeander stands in the village of Tekin, in the Ortaklar sub-district of Germencik in Aydın, on the Ortaklar–Söke road. It sits in the fertile valley inside the triangle formed by Priene, Ephesus and Tralleis, and that position is most of its story: it mattered commercially and strategically, and it kept being moved and rebuilt because the Meander would not stay in its bed.
By legend the city was founded by the Magnetes, who came from Thessaly on the prophecy and guidance of Apollo; where their first Magnesia stood is not known. Diodorus writes that the Athenian Thibron moved the city in 400 and 399 BC, because the river kept flooding and bringing outbreaks of disease, and because of the Persian threat. In all likelihood Thibron did not found a new city so much as bring the people of Magnesia to Leukophrys, on the skirts of Mount Thorax below the present site, and protect them there — on that reading the Magnesia visible today was founded later. It was ringed by a wall, covered roughly 1,300 by 1,100 metres and was laid out on a grid of streets.
Its politics followed the region's. Magnesia was under Persian rule until it joined Alexander of its own accord in 334 BC, passed to the Seleucid kingdom in 240 BC and to Pergamon in 189 BC; those were its best years, and an inscription records that after defeating Miletus it pushed its border out to the Hybandos river. When Pergamon passed to Rome in 133 BC it became one of the cities of the province of Asia, held out against Mithridates of Pontus in 87 BC and was rewarded by Sulla with independence. Under Rome it grew beyond its walls onto the far bank of the Gümüşçay, and on a coin of Gordian III, between AD 238 and 244, it called itself the seventh city of Asia.
That ended in 262, when the Goths burned Magnesia along with Ephesus and Priene. Between about 620 and 630 the inhabitants withdrew inside the wall around the sanctuary of Artemis against the armies of Khosrow II. In the twelfth century the place appears as a Byzantine town and a bishopric; after 1300 it came under the Aydınoğulları, and repeated flooding and the sickness that followed finally emptied it altogether.
What Magnesia is known for is one building and one architect. Vitruvius records that Hermogenes was the first to set out the pseudodipteral temple plan and to define temple types by the spacing of their columns, and names the temple of Artemis Leukophryene here as his chief work. Hermogenes built it in the Hellenistic period on the ruins of an earlier Archaic temple; it is Ionic, eight columns by five, and at 67.5 by 40 metres the fourth largest temple of the Hellenistic period in Anatolia.
Finding it took two centuries. In the eighteenth century Magnesia was wrongly identified with Tralleis, and in 1757 with Heracleia, until W. M. Leake visited in 1800, identified the city correctly and drew the first plan of the temple. Excavation in 1842 and 1843 was abandoned because the ground was marshy and the water table high — but not before 41 frieze blocks and fragments, some forty metres of carving, were taken to the Louvre; in 1887 Osman Hamdi Bey, director of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums, had the remaining twenty metres or so brought to Istanbul. Continuous German excavation began in 1891.
Work in the sanctuary between 1994 and 2001 uncovered a marble-paved ceremonial area between the altar in front of the temple and the agora. Reliefs of gods reaching three metres in height run around it, with rings for sacrifice before them, and the paving blocks bounding two sides carry inscriptions naming where each association taking part in the ceremonies was to stand; parts of the enclosing stoa have also been uncovered. The agora itself has disappeared beneath the silt, but it was entered from the sanctuary through a sacred gate whose propylon has been fully uncovered — at 26,000 square metres and with 414 columns it was among the largest markets of its day.
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 - 17:30
