“Nysa on the Meander” is famous for its library, its theatre, a tunnel and various other buildings. For us it was famous for its tranquillity and the fact that a lot of it was undergoing excavation and therefore you could see ancient remains “in-situ, in-discovery”.
The Agora is large and square and shows signs of a drain running underneath the pavement alongside a wall
and some rudimentary infilling between its pillars
Within the agora some pillars have been re-erected by the archaeologists excavating the site
as is the reuse of Agora building materials over the aeons.
Here parts of pillars have been used to create some sort of fence
and the base of a pillar can be seen here partially excavated.
as can this road which continues underneath the earth bank.
The Bouleuterion is of a standard semi circular design and seats around 700. This indicates that it doubles up as a theatre.
In front of it is a pond which would have been fed by a fountain,
entry is via one of two archways
beneath one of these is a rather nice carving
The stream running through Nysa is the Cakircak. It approaches the town in a deep
gorge and the sides of the gorge are reveted using an interesting construction which include arches
and then roughly at the centre of the town
it goes into a 100m long tunnel which passes under a road and around some buildings – the tunnel is important because there are only a few examples of tunnels from the period and this one is the second longest of its kind in
antiquity. At the base of the tunnel are large load bearing stones
and then there is a large arch made out of rougher stone. That it is still standing after all of these years, is remarkable.
At the other end, the design and fabrication is quite remarkable. The gorge is still very deep and in order to reduce the weight of soil above the tunnel, a second set of weight relieving arches were built above the tunnel arch.
To a first view, the Theatre (dating from 1st Century AD) looks similar to many other theatres and it seats around 12,000.
An artists impression of how it looked like shows a three storey stage area with the usual statues in alcoves.
However, four of the five original frieze sections remain and these tell much of the story of Zeus and Semele and there follows left and right (and occasionally middle) photographs of these friezes.
Nysa - the Library
The Library now stands in a quiet olive grove
to the side of a road leading down from the theatre.
In its day it was a major seat of learning and its remains are said to be the second best remaining example of a library (after Ephesus).
Its design is similar to that at Ephesus but it has not undergone as much restoration.
The stadium at Nisa was thought to have accommodated 30,000 but quite how it fitted into the landscape is a bit of a mystery.
Most of the remains overlook the river valley and there are indications of parts of a stadium on the other side of the valley. There are just not enough pieces of the jigsaw left to work out how it functioned.
Alinda
As seems quite often to be the case, Alinda is another example of a citadel on the top of
the hill with the town spreading down the hillside. It has been virtually left alone over the years and therefore what you see is what it has become as it has gradually turned into ruins.
The Aqueduct comes in to the top of the citadel after wending its way around the hills for some 7 kms. The arches of the aqueduct are still in good condition
and show some lovely stone cutting (note the angles on the facing stones, how these stones have been carefully cut to fit.
The whole hillside is covered with olive trees, and fittingly just inside the citadel is the remains of a very early olive press.
Olives were placed in the pit, a stone put on tip and then this was forced down by a wooden lever which rested one end in the hole in the upright rock behind the pit.
Remnants of the city walls remain together with this bastion
which is unusual in its design because of the large purpose built doorway / hole / window on one side.
Take away the stones which have been put there to hold up the fractured lintel and one has a bastion tower with a large “something” in one wall.
It was this fortress which was held by the exiled Carian Queen Ada (sister of Mausolos of Halikarnassos) and she greeted Alexander the Great here in 334 BC.
the remains of a temple / altar are clearly evident on the summit.
The theatre is very impressive, partly because of its size and position but also because of the numerous olive trees which are now growing in it.
Of all of the buildings there, the Hellenistic Agora wins the prize. This view from the summit shows the Agora (roughly in the centre of the picture).
And this view is the reverse looking up to the summit from the Agora
Built onto the hillside, the Agora has a major reveting (“reveted” and derivations of it became the word on this trip) wall to one side
and one can clearly see how the floor spanned to the wall and that there were two levels of basements beneath.
As is always the case throughout the world, pieces of ancient monuments seem to appear in houses in the local modern day town
or the foundations of walls.
Alinda is an impressive site and well worth the visit.
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