Ancient City of Stratonikeia

Ancient City

The “City of Gladiators”: a vast ancient city woven into the village of Eskihisar, layered from Hellenistic marble to Ottoman baths.

Some seven kilometres west of Yatağan, at Eskihisar, you walk into a village built inside an ancient city — or into an ancient city scattered through a village. At Stratonikeia, Hellenistic marble, a Roman street, an Ottoman bath and a mudbrick village house stand side by side; few places in Anatolia gather so many layers of history into a single view.

The city was founded in the 3rd century BC by the Seleucid king Antiochus I, named after his wife Stratonike, on top of an older Carian settlement (Idrias). Strabo wrote that it was equipped with very fine buildings, and what still stands bears him out: the bouleuterion, whose outer wall carries Diocletian’s famous price edict; a theatre for some ten thousand spectators; a colonnaded street and the monumental north city gate; baths, an agora — and the largest known gymnasium of the classical world, roughly 105 by 267 metres. What earned the city its nickname, the “City of Gladiators”, is the gladiator school that stood here and the inscriptions depicting its fighters.

Its modern story is no less striking. An earthquake in the mid-1950s left most of Eskihisar’s houses, market, mosque and bath unusable, and in 1957 the village was moved some two kilometres away. The lignite basin feeding the Yatağan power plant then emptied what remained — part of the reason for the silence you walk through today. Excavations began in 1977 under Prof. Yusuf Boysal and have been directed since 2008 by Prof. Bilal Söğüt of Pamukkale University, who has raised structures such as the city gate back onto their feet. Stratonikeia has been on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List since 2015: an official candidate, not an inscribed site. From Bodrum it is reached via Milas and pairs well with Beçin or Euromos in the same day.