Assos Ancient City

The climb tells you where you are. Cobbles shift underfoot, thyme and dry oregano scent the air, and below you the Aegean flashes between stone houses. Village women sit beside the path with baskets of herbs and lace. Keep going. The path ends on a flat hilltop about 240 metres above the sea, ringed by broken columns. Wind arrives here without obstacles. It crossed open water from the Greek island of Lesbos, which sits on the horizon ahead of you, close enough to count its ridges.

This hilltop was the acropolis of Assos, a Greek city founded by settlers from the island of Lesbos. The city spilled down the slope beneath you in terraces, ringed by walls, down to a small harbour at the bottom. Around 530 BC, the people of Assos built a temple to Athena on this summit. It was Doric, the plainest and oldest of the Greek column styles, and it is the only archaic Doric temple known in all of Anatolia. Several of its columns stand again today, re-erected by archaeologists.

The stone under your feet is andesite, a hard volcanic rock, grey and rough. Almost everything in Assos was built from it, which is unusual. Greek temples were normally limestone or marble. Andesite is stubborn stuff to carve, so the temple's decoration stayed simple and bold. The stone had a strange reputation too. Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer of the first century, recorded that stone from Assos dissolved the flesh of the dead. Coffins cut from it were called sarcophagus, meaning flesh-eater, and the word spread to coffins everywhere.

Assos had one resident who changed the world. In 348 BC, after Plato died in Athens, Aristotle left that city and came here. The local ruler, Hermias, was said by ancient writers to have once been a slave, and he had studied at Plato's academy. Aristotle stayed about three years. He married Pythias, the ruler's adopted daughter, and gathered thinkers around him on this hill. Some historians see these years as the start of his turn toward biology, studying real animals and plants instead of pure theory.

The story ended badly. The Persians captured Hermias, tortured him, and executed him. Under torture, he is said to have betrayed nothing, sending word that he had done nothing unworthy of philosophy. Aristotle grieved, wrote a hymn in his memory, and moved across the strait to Lesbos to continue his animal studies. From there he went on to tutor a boy named Alexander, later called the Great. When you look out at Lesbos, you are looking along the next step of that journey.

Below the summit, on the seaward slope, a Greek theatre faces the water. Its curved rows were built in the Hellenistic period and later repaired by the Romans, and modern restorers have rebuilt much of the seating. Walk down to it if your legs allow. The design puts the sea directly behind the stage, so every play, speech, and concert happened against moving water and passing ships. Sound rises well here. Stand at the centre of the orchestra circle, speak normally, and listen to your own voice return.

On your way around the site, notice the city walls. They run for around three kilometres, and long stretches stand many courses high, with square towers and gates. Most of what survives was built in the fourth century BC. Engineers admire these walls. The blocks are cut and fitted without mortar, and they have survived earthquakes for more than two thousand years. Few Greek cities anywhere kept their fortifications this complete, which is why textbooks on ancient warfare keep printing photographs of Assos.

Outside the main west gate lies the necropolis, the city of the dead. Sarcophagi line the old road, huge lidded boxes of the local stone, some plain, some carved. Greek and Roman custom placed the dead along roads outside the walls, so travellers arriving at Assos walked past generations of its citizens first. Weeds grow through some of the lids now. Look for the sheer size of the largest examples. Moving them took teams of oxen and a great deal of money.

One traveller is recorded by name. The Acts of the Apostles, in the New Testament, tells how Saint Paul crossed this region in the first century. His companions sailed around the headland from Troas, but Paul chose to travel overland, on foot, and met the ship here at Assos. The text gives no reason for his walk. From the harbour below you, he boarded and sailed for Lesbos. Christian pilgrims still come to stand at the same waterline.

The village wrapped around the ruins is Behramkale, and it has its own layers. On the hilltop beside the temple stands a small domed mosque from the fourteenth century, built in the reign of Sultan Murad the First. Look closely at its doorway. The builders reused older stones, and a carved Greek inscription survives there, a leftover from the Byzantine centuries. Down at the shore, old stone buildings along the harbour have become small hotels and fish restaurants.

Take in the wider geography before you go. Behind you, inland, rise the wooded slopes of the Kaz Mountains, known in antiquity as Mount Ida, a mountain woven into the Greek myths of the Trojan War. Troy itself lies to the north, in the same ancient region called the Troad. Assos belonged to that busy corner of the Aegean. Ships trading between the Black Sea and Greece passed this coast, and the city taxed and supplied them from its little harbour.

Find a seat on a fallen column near the temple platform. The Aegean below you has not changed its colours. Fishing boats cross toward the strait, the wind moves through the dry grass, and Lesbos holds the horizon exactly where Aristotle saw it. Twenty-three centuries of visitors have climbed this hill for the same view. Take one more slow look, from the harbour up to the columns beside you, before the path leads you back down through the village.