Tepecik is a settlement mound on the Çine plain, 36 km south of Aydın, standing where the Çine Çayı swings round in a marked bend. Its excavated layers run from the chalcolithic age to the Roman period, when the mound was reused as a cemetery with graves built from roof tiles.
The earliest traces go back to 5500–5000 BC, to farmers and herders who kept storage buildings, cooked in everyday pots, ground grain on stones and wove on looms whose weights survive. They ate mostly cattle, sheep, goat, fallow deer and roe deer. Their blades and sickles were made of flint and of obsidian brought from central Anatolia and from the islands of Melos and Giali; waste from working the island obsidian shows the tools were made on the spot and passed on to neighbouring settlements, evidence of exchange by sea. The same levels yielded marble vessels and figurines, among them several of the so-called Kilia type, with triangular heads and carved noses. The Tepecik examples helped settle a long debate by showing that this type originated in western Anatolia and belongs to the chalcolithic.
The burials reveal a careful set of customs. In them, infants were laid in pots, adults in plain earth graves or large storage jars, often with vessels, ornaments of stone, bone and shell, and lead rings. One woman was buried wearing a pair of bronze earrings in each ear, her baby in a pot beside her; in another grave a skull had been set on a deer antler, a very rare practice.
In the 2nd millennium BC Tepecik became a town. From the middle Bronze Age come a clay model crowned with stylised bull heads, whose nearest parallels are tomb finds at Kotchati, Kalopsidha and Vounous, and a storage jar shaped as a woman, with face, ear, earring, arm and bracelet modelled in relief. A layer of volcanic ash spreads over the southern part of this settlement, burying walls and household pots; analysis links it to the eruption on Santorini/Thera. In the Late Bronze Age the town had a mudbrick wall on stone foundations, 2.20 m thick, with square towers measuring 6.36 x 6.36 m set at 20-metre intervals. Mycenaean kraters from the storerooms show a warrior about to throw his spear and a stag brought down by dogs, while clay seal impressions bearing Hittite hieroglyphs, the first found in a building in western Anatolia, include one read as 'tà-mi-pi-ya, prince' and another whose name has been linked to Tarkasnawa, king of Mira. Together they place Tepecik between the Aegean world and the Hittites.
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).
