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MILETUS Miletus, an ancient city located near the present Akkoy at the mouth of the Buyuk Menderes (Meander) River, owed its importance to its position on trade routes. It was one of the largest cities in Anatolia with a population of between 80,000 and 100,000. Highly prosperous, it founded many colonies and was the home of the 6C BC philosophers Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Thales, the town planner Hippodamus and architect Isidorus. Miletus seems to have produced geniuses the way Aphrodisias produced sculptors. History of Miletus According to legend, the city was founded by Neleus, son of King Codrus of Athens. Neleus came to settle with his men and killed the resident males compelling the women to marry the newcomers. After this took place the women swore not to sit at the same table with their husbands and also not to call them by their names. In the 11C BC Ionians came to Miletus, and by the 7C BC Miletus was at its peak which was to last for more than two centuries. With other cities of Ionia in 499 BC, Miletus rebelled against the Persians, who had captured, burned it to the ground and enslaved its surviving population. This last battle was that of Lade in 494 BC, just outside the harbor of Miletus where the Persian fleet of 600 warships defeated the Ionian force. The destruction was so bad that when the play of Phrynichus, The Capture of Miletus was performed in Athens, as Herodotus reported, "the whole theater burst into tears, and the people sentenced the playwright to pay a fine". The role of Miletus was significant in the defeat of the Persians at the Mycale battle in 479 BC. Shortly after the battle, Miletus joined the Delian Confederacy with a contribution larger than that of Ephesus. Upon an agreement between the Persian Satrap and Athens, Miletus and other Ionian cities of Anatolia came under the rule of the Persians again. At the end of the 5C BC Miletus was ruled by the Carian satraps. Captured by Alexander the Great after a siege in 334 BC and ruled by the Seleucid Dynasty in the following years, Miletus remained an important trade center into Roman times.
St. Paul
stopped there in 57 AD on his way back to Jerusalem at the end of his third
missionary journey. In Miletus Paul sent word to his friends in Ephesus to
join him, and after speaking with them for the last time he bade them an
emotional farewell, boarded his ship in Miletus and sailed off via Cos and
Rhodes to Patara. The Site Miletus was a major port city located on a peninsula with four harbors. With the silting of the Buyuk Menderes (Meander) River the ruins of the ancient city today are a few kilometers away from the sea. The city had a grid plan which was developed by Hippodamus when it was rebuilt in the 5C BC after the Persians had sacked it. The Theater was a small Hellenistic theater with a seating capacity of 5,300, but in the beginning of the 2C AD it was modified to a Roman theater and held about 15,000 people. The lower section was built onto a natural hillside, and the upper is supported by vaulted substructures up to a height of 40 m / 131 ft. The facade facing the harbor is 140 m / 460 ft long. During the Roman period the stage building had three stories and was 34 m / 111 ft wide. In front of the stage building it is still possible to see pieces depicting hunting scenes of Eros. At the top of the theater hill was a Byzantine fortress which is thought to have been built mostly with the stones of the theater in the 7C AD but restored later by the Seljuks. Harbor monuments stood in front of the Lions’ Harbor. There were two of them; different in size but similar in style. The large piece was 7.5 m / 25 ft high, mounted on a three-cornered base built on a round foundation with a diameter of 11 m / 36 ft. The smaller one was only 5.3 m / 17.5 ft. The Delphinium was a Hellenistic open air shrine surrounded by stoas on four sides with a 6C BC altar in the center. Together with Apollo, the dolphin was sacred for the Milesians as they believed that when the first settlers sailed they were guided by god in the form of a dolphin. The annual festival and celebrations of Didyma were started here. An Ionic Stoa lay parallel to the processional road on the south of the Delphinium. It is a 1C AD structure which had 35 Ionic columns and 19 shops behind the columns. The Bouleterion was a 2C BC building which consisted of a propylon, a courtyard and an auditorium. The propylon had three Corinthian columns and friezes depicting war scenes. It opened into a courtyard with a monumental tomb in the middle. There were four gates that opened into the main hall. The auditorium seated 1,500 people and had a wooden roof. The Nymphaeum was first built in the 2C AD and rebuilt in the following century. It faced the bouleterion across the processional road and had three stories with statues of gods placed in niches and water spouting from the mouths of bronze fish. The South Agora lay behind the bouleterion. It was a Hellenistic structure which was later remodeled in the Roman period. Today the North Gate is unfortunately another of the gems from Anatolia currently housed in the Pergamum Museum in Berlin. The South Gate was 180 m by 150 m (196 yards by 164 yards) and destroyed during the construction of Ilyas Bey mosque. The Temple of Serapis lay between the south agora and the Faustina baths. It consisted of a pronaos and a naos with Corinthian columns and a relief of Serapis on the pediment. The temple was a 3C BC building which was rebuilt in the 3C AD with a donation by Emperor Julius Aurelius. The Baths of Faustina were 2C AD Roman baths which were built by Faustina, Marcus Aurelius’s wife who usually accompanied her husband on his journeys through the Empire. The frigidarium had a reclining statue of the river god probably personifying the Meander River. Ilyas Bey Camisi (The Ilyas Bey Mosque) was part of a complex which consisted of a mosque, medrese, cemetery and an imaret. It was built in the early 15C by Ilyas Bey, the regional Ottoman military commander. The dome of the mosque was made of bricks. At the entrance are three arched partitions separated by two columns. The entrance is through the center arch. The mosque was destroyed in 1955. The Caravansary is a 15C building built by the Mentese Principality which had a lower floor for animals and an upper for people. |