Hierapolis: Ruins of Empire1

• Walking among the ruins of Hierapolis, once a Greek spa centre because of its thermal springs, then a Roman and Byzantine city and Selçuk fortress. As beautiful as it was, and as much a pleasure centre, the area is also prone to earthquakes which have repeatedly leveled buildings, no matter how mighty. At one point, in 1334, people packed up and left after an especially large quake.
• Today, scattered over west-facing hillsides and a plateau are the remains of a Roman theatre (a good example with ongoing restoration work), gymnasium, temples, a massive agora (public plaza, market and houses), colonnaded streets with great archways at both ends, baths (which the Byzantines turned into a church), an ingenious olive press and grand public latrine once finely decorated with marble columns and friezes rising around the still necessary squat holes.
• Across the hillside at the edge of this historic health centre is a large necropolis – some 1,200 tombs, which makes you wonder about the cures on offer – used by the elites of shifting empires who built tumuli, sarcophagi and house-shaped tombs, the latter with roofs made from huge solid slabs of cut stone. Most are slowly sinking into the earth under their immense weight, although a lone unusual one still rises square from white limestone, capped with a delicate, upwardly curved winged roof
• The central attraction of Hierapolis has been its healing thermal waters and, today for the tourist industry, the curious effect – like melting snow and ice – of the movement of these waters down the hillside to form white limestone travertine terraces, pools and falls. In fact when the ancient city remains were rediscovered in modern times, they were buried under trees and earth as well as layers of limestone. Nowadays, many busloads of tourists are brought in daily to have a quick walk over the travertines and agora, and take a dip in the thermal pool (once, they are told, a ‘sacred pool’), now conveniently littered with pieces of broken columns and finely-crafted pediments, and surrounded by cafes and knick-knack shops.
• Today, in the off-season, it is easy to move around mostly on our own, following hillside paths between the far-flung ruins, feeling a little of the reflective quiet one needs for such places … to consider the body-breaking labour that these monumental stone arches and columns represent; the friezes of gladiators in training for the performances and battles to come; imperial-feeling power images of lions jaws clenching the necks of weaker beasts; the frieze death masks of ghastly horror, now made even more ghastly by the twists and gaps created by weather-worn, moss-covered stone … but also to experience the stunning beauty of Hellenistic and Roman stories – heroes and heroines, dancers, musicians, lovers, new mothers – carved so finely into the frieze work of the amphitheatre, temples and other public buildings ….some of the latter intact, but now mostly strewn around us in pieces, grass and dust and moss between them, the massive cut stones of the two still-standing arches pressing towards their centre and from there to earth, gravity holding them in place and promising collapse at any moment.
• At midday we create our own spa, resting on and against marble columns on a hillside beyond where most people walk, looking over the tomb houses and agora, with our bread, cheese, olives, cucumbers, hazelnut spread, honey, apples and pears.
• A footnote. It is a commonplace in travel writing to have fun with the near misses of translated tourist literature and public signage. I’ve resisted so far, but here are two happy examples from a tourist booklet on Hierapolis. The purpose of the olive press? To “crash olives.” And this description of the power of an earthquake, perhaps in the spirit of Jane Austen: “the canal departed from the church wall because of a fault.”