Greeks and Romans in Anatolia
- The most prosperous region of the ancient Mediterranean world.
- The finest collection of Hellenistic and Roman city ruins to be found anywhere.
- All the major sites and many which are off the beaten track or difficult to get to.
- Scenically varied and spectacular, coast, mountain and plain.
Beginning their influx only a thousand years ago, the Turks were latecomers to Turkey. Greeks had settled on the western fringes over two thousand years before and, as recounted in The Iliad, had been meddling in Anatolian affairs a few centuries earlier still.
After the demise of the Mycenaean civilization of Homer’s heroes, large numbers of Hellenes migrated from Greece to Aegean Anatolia and its offshore islands. First, around 1100 BC, Aeolians came to settle in the northern part of this coastal area, then Ionians moved into terrain further down the coast, to be followed at the end of the tenth century by Dorians who established themselves yet further south.
They founded cities all along the Aegean coast and in due course along the river valleys into the heart of Anatolia and along the Mediterranean coast to the south. Most of the peoples the Greeks encountered eventually became Hellenised.
No less than the Greeks of Greece proper, Asian Greeks contributed to the ‘Greek miracle’ by supplying philosophers, mathematicians, sculptors, architects and other civilization-builders of genius. The canon of classical architecture owes much to the Asian cities – not least the Ionic order, which appears in the gigantic Archaic temples of the Ionic coast, prodigies of architecture produced by the confluence of civilisations in the region.
Sharing the young adventurer’s Hellenic ideology, the Asian Greek cities succumbed willingly to Alexander. Freed from the Persian threat, they piled up the riches – material and architectural – of the Hellenistic period and became more numerous, more prosperous and more progressive than the western Greeks. They slipped with equal ease into membership of the Roman Empire, benefiting from an unusual reversal of the normal relationship with the conqueror deferring to the conquered.
Imperial Rome was besotted by the Greek achievement, and Greeks continued to supply many of the finer aspects of Roman civilization. Greek culture proved more enduring than Roman, and after the fifth-century collapse of the western empire the use of Latin soon languished. Despite the subsequent collapse of trade, the destruction of the Aegean cities by the Sassanids and the invasions of Anatolia by Selçuk and Ottoman Turks, the Greek language and other aspects of Greek culture and Christianity, the new religion of the Greeks, were never entirely extinguished in Asia Minor.
The abandoned ancient cities now comprise the most magnificent set of Archaic, Classical and, particularly, Hellenistic and Roman remains to be found anywhere. While the proximity of some of the sites to holiday resorts and cruise ports means that they are also among the most visited, others are still relatively difficult of access and far from the beaten track. And the settings are usually ravishing: whether coastal, mountain or plateau, the landscapes provide a backdrop for this tour of extraordinary beauty.