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The City That Rose from the Ground at Konuralp

Konuralp, eight kilometres north of Düzce, looks at first glance like a quiet neighbourhood of the city.

Radar TürkiyeRadar Türkiye4 Kasım 2026
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The City That Rose from the Ground at Konuralp

Konuralp, eight kilometres north of Düzce, looks at first glance like a quiet neighbourhood of the city. Beneath its gardens, houses and narrow streets, however, lies an ancient city whose name changed several times over the centuries. This article tells the story of Prusias ad Hypium not as a sightseeing stop but as a story the ground has slowly given back. In the light of official and academic sources, we follow a mosaic found by chance in a field, the river route told by coins, and a theatre re emerging from among the houses.

From Kieros to Prusias ad Hypium

The first name of the city was Kieros. An article published in the journal Höyük by Emre Okan and Ahmet Bilir of Düzce University and Doğuş Çalışkan of the Turkish Historical Society excavation team looks at the origin of this name through coins. Coins struck in the reign of the Emperor Maximinus carry a portrait of Kieros on one side. On a coin of the reign of Antoninus Pius in the British Museum collection, Hypios and Kieros are shown as river gods on either side of the god Dionysos. The authors note that this second coin suggests the city may have taken its early name from a river.

According to the ancient tradition based on Memnon of Herakleia, the city remained under the rule of Herakleia Pontike for a long time. It joined the kingdom in the time of the Bithynian king Prusias I and took a name meaning Prusias by the Hypios, today's Melen River. The name also served to distinguish the city from Prusias ad Olympum in Bursa and Prusias ad Mare in Gemlik. In the Ottoman period the town was known as Üskübü and later took the name Konuralp. The Düzce Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism records that it was brought into Ottoman territory by Konur Alp Bey in 1323.

A traveller's notebook

One of the first to introduce the city to the scholarly world in detail was the French traveller Georges Perrot. According to the Höyük article, Perrot came from Karadeniz Ereğli to Akçakoca in the 1860s and reached Üskübü from there by land. His colleague, the architect Edmond Guillaume, made a detailed drawing of the surviving parts of the theatre and carried out small soundings at the foundation of the stage building. However, the lowest seating section of the theatre was not visible at the time. For this reason Perrot drew the building as a theatre with two tiers. A century later, in 1970, Daria de Bernardi Ferrero proposed a new plan. According to the authors, the most important conclusion in Ferrero's drawing that has held up is that the seating area consisted of three sections.

The mosaic in the field

The story of Konuralp's most famous find begins in a field. According to a study by S. Sezin Sezer of Kafkas University published in the Journal of Mosaic Research, the Orpheus mosaic was found by chance in the 1950s in a field south of the city. B. Rüstem Duyuran carried out an excavation in the area on behalf of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums, but the finds were not published and the excavation team covered the mosaics with soil again to protect them. In the 1990s a nearby irrigation canal overflowed. Officials from the Bolu Museum then stepped in, and the mosaic was cut into rectangular panels and moved to the storeroom of the Konuralp Museum. Its conservation was carried out in 2012 by the Istanbul Central Laboratory Directorate for Restoration and Conservation, and the mosaic went on display in the stone works hall of the museum.

The mosaic decorated the floor of a Roman villa and measures 8.10 by 5.30 metres. In the round central panel, Orpheus sits on a rock. He wears a Phrygian cap, a long sleeved tunic belted high at the waist and loose trousers. According to Sezer, this clothing points to the eastern origin of the figure. Orpheus rests a many stringed kithara against his left arm and plays it with a plectrum held in his right hand. Animals enchanted by the music gather around him. A parrot raises its beak upward as if singing along with him, a peacock listens intently, a deer turns its head back to look at him, and the lion at his feet crouches calmly. A stork, a partridge and a small figure that may be a lizard are also in the scene.

Female heads personifying the four seasons are placed at the four corners of the panel. Two of them are well preserved. The head in the lower left corner represents autumn with her wreath of vine leaves. The one in the lower right has wrapped her head in a thick cloak and wears a wreath of reeds over it, and stands for winter. Only a small fragment survives from the upper left corner. Because of the ivy branches emerging from either side of the neck, Sezer interprets her as spring or summer. Since there was no excavation data, the mosaic was dated by comparison with similar examples. Sezer places it at the end of the 3rd or the beginning of the 4th century AD on the basis of its stylistic and iconographic features. The stones of the central panel are half a centimetre or smaller, while in the frame borders they reach up to one and a half centimetres.

Tykhe, guardian of the city

One of the most striking works in the museum's archaeology hall is the statue of Tykhe. According to the Kültür Portalı introduction, which draws on the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage and Museums, the statue was found in the excavations at Prusias ad Hypium. The same source writes that the work is a Roman copy made in the 2nd century AD of a statue from the 4th century BC whose original is exhibited at the Istanbul Archaeological Museums. In Greek mythology Tykhe is the goddess of luck and success, and she was also regarded as the guardian of each city. On the Konuralp statue she wears a crown representing the city walls. On her left arm she carries a horn of plenty filled with fruit and the child Plutos, the symbol of wealth. The stone works hall holds the two faced statue of Janus. This work shows the Roman god of gateways and beginnings with two faces, one looking at those entering the city and the other at those leaving it.

The river route told by coins

Prusias ad Hypium was not a port city and lay far from the sea. Even so, according to an article by Ahmet Bilir and Emre Okan in the Journal of the Institute of Social Sciences of Hitit University, the city made use of the river that flows into the Black Sea at Melenağzı. The river mouth also served as a sheltered harbour. The river god Hypios is depicted on the city's coins of the Roman imperial period. According to the authors, the ship images on the coins point to the city's overseas trade. In this way the goods of Prusias ad Hypium must have reached cities such as Herakleia Pontike, Olbia, Tomis and Pantikapaion.

The same article also traces the city's link with the coast through inscriptions. It has been established that the city of Dia to the north, today's Akçakoca, was under the rule of Prusias ad Hypium. Inscriptions show that in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD emperors such as Hadrian, Caracalla and Elagabalus visited the city and that it developed considerably in this period. A visitor driving the road between Akçakoca and Konuralp today is in fact following the route of this old trading relationship.

The re emergence of the forty steps

The theatre, known locally as the forty steps, carries the longest chapter of the city's story. According to the Höyük article, the building was used as a place of residence especially from the Ottoman period onward. Until the first scientific excavations there were about 22 houses inside the theatre. The orchestra was fenced with stones from the seating steps and cultivated as a garden. Some of the stones were used in other buildings or sold. The authors note that this use did great damage to the building, but that it also ensured the lowest seating section was preserved almost entirely.

Scientific excavations began in 2013 under the direction of the Konuralp Museum and with the scientific advice of the Department of Archaeology at Düzce University. Between 2013 and 2015 the entrance corridors were opened, and a sounding in the orchestra showed that this area lay beneath about five metres of fill. Between 2017 and 2020 the work concentrated on the western part of the theatre, the lower seating area and the stage building. As a result it became certain that the seating area consisted of three tiers, and it was calculated that the theatre could hold about 9,500 to 10,000 people.

The excavations also gave clues about how the theatre was used. An inscription on the architrave blocks of the stage building tells that, in the reign of Hadrian, a citizen of Prusias named M. Iulius Proklos had the front part of the stage and some statues built after receiving an honorary title. An Emperor Probus coin found in a layer of soil in the western corridor suggests that the theatre was no longer in use by the late 3rd century AD. In a small structure later built in this corridor, cut animal bones and a gaming piece made of bone were found. The authors state that this was a bone working workshop in Late Antiquity. A funerary inscription in the Konuralp Museum tells that an Athenian tragic actor died in Prusias and that years later a colleague from Corinth had a theatre mask carved in relief on his gravestone.

On the trail of this story today

To follow this story on site, it is best to begin the day at the Konuralp Museum. According to Kültür Portalı, the museum is at Cumhuriyet Caddesi No 50 in the Çiftepınarlar quarter of Konuralp, ten kilometres from the centre of Düzce, and can be reached by city transport. In the museum, the Orpheus mosaic and Janus are in the stone works hall and Tykhe is in the archaeology hall. After reading this article, remember to look for the season heads in the corners and the plectrum in Orpheus's hand when you look at the mosaic. You can then move on to the theatre and see how the steps on the slope look out over the plain. Because excavation is ongoing, the parts of the theatre open to visitors may change. Before you go, check the current visiting conditions of the museum and the excavation area on the official pages of the Düzce Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism and the Museum Card system.

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