Aphrodisias

Inland from Aydın, a city of sculptors dedicated to the goddess of love, where a stadium for 30,000 survives almost intact — the best-preserved ancient stadium in Anatolia.

Why go

Aphrodisias is one of the largest ancient cities in the Aegean and one of the least crowded, which is precisely its advantage. At Ephesus you move with the flow of people. Here you can often stand alone in front of a temple, which changes what the place feels like entirely.

The city takes its name from Aphrodite and was known across the Roman world for the goddess’s cult. But what really sets it apart is something else: this was a city of sculptors. Marble quarries in the hills immediately above the site supported a school of sculpture that ran for centuries, and works signed by Aphrodisian sculptors have been found all over the Roman Empire. The result is a density of statuary and carved relief far beyond what a city of this size would normally leave behind.

What to see

The stadium is the signature. Roughly 270 m long, seating around 30,000, and standing almost complete — the best-preserved ancient stadium in Anatolia. Its scale only registers once you walk inside and sit down on the tiers.

The Tetrapylon, the monumental four-way gateway, has been re-erected from its fallen pieces and is the most photographed structure on the site. The Temple of Aphrodite, later converted into a basilica, still stands in colonnade. The Sebasteion, a building dedicated to the imperial cult, is famous for the relief panels of mythological and imperial scenes that lined it.

The Aphrodisias Museum sits inside the site and should not be skipped. It holds the original Sebasteion reliefs, the city’s finest statues, and — unusually — unfinished pieces straight from the sculptors’ workshops. Seeing work abandoned midway is a rare document of how the stone was actually cut.

Visiting

The site is large and, unlike most Aegean ruins, partly wooded, so there is real shade — which makes a summer visit more bearable than at Ephesus or Patara. A tractor-drawn shuttle runs from the car park to the entrance.

The village of Geyre sits right beside the site. The old village stood directly on top of the ancient city and was relocated during the 20th century to allow excavation. Pamukkale is about an hour away, and pairing the two on one route makes good sense.

Worth knowing

Aphrodisias was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2017, and the inscription covers not only the city but the marble quarries that supplied it — a deliberate choice that explains why the place became a centre of sculpture in the first place. Excavation is ongoing, so parts of the site may be fenced off at any given time.