Guide
The region that holds the town of Konuralp is named by ancient writers such as Herodotus, Xenophon and Strabo as the home of Thracian peoples between about 1200 and 700 BC. In the classical period a settlement was founded here by Megarians under the name Kieros.
In 183 BC the city was taken by Prusias I, king of Bithynia, and received the name Prusias ad Hypium — Prusias on the Melen, the river the ancients called Hypium. In 74 BC, in the reign of Nicomedes IV, the region passed to Roman rule. The city began to grow in the first century AD and reached the height of its prosperity in the second and third.
Dedicatory inscriptions found on the site show that many of its monumental buildings — the aqueducts, the agora, the council house, the theatre and the baths — were put up in those centuries. Inscriptions and the records of church councils give a good deal of information about the city in the Middle Ages, and it remained lively through the early Christian period and after. In 1323 Prusias ad Hypium was taken by Konur Alp Bey, one of Orhan Gazi's commanders, and joined to Ottoman territory.
The ancient theatre, known locally as the forty steps, was built in the Hellenistic period, between 300 and 30 BC, with additions belonging to the Roman period that followed. The theatre has two tiers. Of these, the wall behind the stage building and part of the seating of the upper tier have come down to us, and the vaulted passages that carried people in and out from right and left still stand above ground. The stage building measures 144 feet long by 48 feet wide.
The seats of the lower tier are no longer visible, but there was room for about seventeen rows. The upper tier, reached from the middle walkway by very steep stairs, keeps fifteen rows in place and had room for four more, so the theatre held roughly thirty-six rows in all. Lions' paws are carved at the ends of the rows along the radiating stairways, and the steps of those stairways and their ornament were each cut from a single long block, as at the theatre of Side. The theatre covers 5,978 square metres in a space a hundred metres long and seventy-four metres wide, and its capacity was about ten thousand.
The gate known as the Atlı Kapı, the horse gate, together with the stretch of wall it belongs to, was the entrance to the ancient city. The wall was repaired at different times with reused inscribed blocks. The lintel of the gate, carved with a horse, is of local limestone and carries a Greek inscription.
