Blaundos sits on a hill by the village of Sülümenli in the Ulubey district, 40 kilometres from Uşak, and its setting does the explaining: three deep, steep-sided stream valleys close it in, so that the site reads as a peninsula and the only way in was a single gate with a tower, on the north. It is registered as a first-degree conservation site.
The city was founded in the Hellenistic period, in the third century BC, by settlers from Macedonia who came in the wake of Alexander's campaigns in Anatolia, and its people called themselves the Macedonians of Blaundos. That is not only a story: in the 1840s Hamilton found an inscription known to have come from the city carrying the phrase Blaundeon Makedonon, which settled both the name and the claim. It lay in Lydia, close to the Phrygian border.
After Alexander's death the city fell to Antigonos, one of the generals who divided the empire between them. It later passed to the kingdom of Pergamon, which kept it as a military town, and from Pergamon to Rome in 189 BC; its importance grew under Roman rule and it held its strategic value through the Roman and Byzantine periods. In the church organisation it came under the bishopric of Sebaste, in what is now the Sivaslı district of the same province.
What survives includes the arch of the Hellenistic gate, parts of the walls, the mint rooms and administrative buildings, an Ionic temple in the middle of the city dedicated to the emperor Claudius, a stadium with seating on one side only, the theatre on the southern slope, aqueducts and rock-cut tombs. Excavation has been carried out since 2018 by the Uşak Museum and the archaeology department of Uşak University.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Uşak as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 2.4 °C in January to 23.6 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in December (85 mm) and lightest in August (13 mm). Long-term means for 1939-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
