Amorium Antik Kenti

Amorium is an ancient city spreading beneath and around today's Hisarköy, in the Emirdağ district of Afyonkarahisar. The Culture Portal states that the city lies about 170 kilometres southwest of Ankara, about 70 kilometres northeast of Afyonkarahisar and about 12 kilometres east of Emirdağ. Its name appears as Amorion in Greek sources and as Ammuriye in Arab and Islamic sources. In the Ottoman period the place was known locally as Hergen Kale or Hergan Kale. The city stood on the old Byzantine military road running from Istanbul to Cilicia. The history of the settlement goes back to the Early Bronze Age. The Afyonkarahisar Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism writes that the city was called Aura in the Hittite period, while the name Amorium belongs to the Classical age. The Culture Portal states that settlement continued without interruption through the Hittite, Phrygian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman periods. According to one tradition, Aesop, famous for his fables, was from Amorium, although his birthplace is disputed. The fact that the city minted its own coins from around the 1st century BC to the 3rd century AD shows that it was a developed and important place at that time. The Culture Portal writes that Amorium was among the first cities in the region to which the Roman Senate granted the right to mint their own money. The city gained its real importance in the Byzantine period. Its walls were built under Emperor Zeno in the late 5th century. From the 640s Amorium became one of the Byzantine army's headquarters in Anatolia and then the capital of the Anatolikon theme, or province. In the period from the mid-7th to the mid-9th century it served as a strong fortress protecting Byzantine lands against Arab raids. Because Michael II, who came to the throne in 820, was from Amorium, the dynasty he founded is known as the Amorian dynasty. In 838 the army of the Abbasid caliph al-Mu'tasim besieged and captured the city and largely destroyed it. According to the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, although the city was rebuilt, it was devastated once again in 931 by the emir of Tarsus. Excavation finds show that the city regained its military importance in the 10th and 11th centuries. It is known that Amorium was in Seljuk hands in 1116. In Ottoman records the place appears from 1516 under the name Hisarcık, and today's Hisarköy was founded in 1892. The location of the city remained unknown for a long time; the English geologist William Hamilton visited the Hisarcık mound in 1836 and identified the ruins. Scholarly work began in 1987 with a survey by R. Martin Harrison of Oxford University and turned into excavation in 1988. From 1993 to 2009 the excavations continued under the direction of Chris Lightfoot. From 2013 the work was carried out under the Directorate of the Afyonkarahisar Museum, and since 2014 it has been led by Zeliha Demirel Gökalp of Anadolu University. The city consists of two parts. The Upper City is the mound that was the centre of the earliest settlement, and traces of the Byzantine city walls can still be seen along its edges. The Lower City is surrounded by a second wall that encircled the whole city. Excavations in the Lower City uncovered a large basilica and the buildings around it, and south of the city a Late Roman and Early Byzantine structure called the Large Building. In 2001 a Byzantine bath dated between the 6th and 9th centuries and a street were found in the area called the Large Space in the middle of the site. Wikipedia also notes that the site was seriously damaged by treasure hunters' digging in the years before it was placed under protection. Start your visit on the mound; looking from the top of the Upper City over the flat plain and the area where the Lower City spread is the easiest way to grasp the scale of the city. Then go down to the excavated buildings of the Lower City and follow the rows of walls, the column fragments and the line of the walls. Because some of the remains lie beneath and around village houses, pay attention to the limits of the excavation area and to warning signs. The plain is open and shadeless, so a hat, water and sturdy shoes will make things easier. Since visiting conditions can change during and after excavation seasons, get up-to-date information from the Afyonkarahisar Museum or the Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism before you go.