Side Ancient City

Listen for the sea first. It arrives as a low, steady sound from beyond the columns — the Mediterranean working at the rocks below. The air here carries salt and warm pine resin. Under your feet, the paving stones are polished smooth, worn down by centuries of carts, sandals and, lately, sneakers. Touch a fallen column drum and you will find the marble cool on its shaded side and hot on the side facing the sun. Side sits on a small peninsula. The water is never far away, in any direction.

The name is older than Greek. Ancient writers recorded that Side meant pomegranate in the local language of this coast — a language that has since disappeared completely. Pomegranates appear on the city's coins. That is a small clue about the people who lived here before Greek settlers arrived from the north-west Aegean. One ancient account claims the newcomers forgot their own speech within a short time and began using the local tongue instead. Whatever the truth of that story, the city kept its non-Greek name.

Side had a harbour, and harbours make money. Ships stopped here for grain, for olive oil, for timber cut in the mountains behind the coast. The city also had a darker trade. The geographer Strabo described Side as a place where pirates from the Cilician coast sold captured people. He wrote it plainly, without much comment. Rome eventually cleared those pirates from these waters. The city went on trading, and the money paid for many of the buildings you are standing among.

Walk toward the theatre and the scale changes. This is one of the largest theatres in this part of Anatolia, and it is built differently from most Greek examples. Instead of resting the seating against a hillside, the builders raised it on massive vaulted arches, because the peninsula gave them no convenient hill. You can walk into those vaults. They are cool and dim, and the sound of your footsteps changes as you pass under each arch. Thousands of people once climbed these stairs to their seats.

The theatre changed jobs more than once. Later Romans walled off the lowest rows so the space could hold animal shows and combat displays. Later still, when the city had become Christian, part of it was used for open-air worship. Look for small crosses cut into reused blocks as you walk. Buildings here were rarely demolished. They were adapted, patched, robbed for stone, and adapted again. That habit explains why so much survives — and why almost nothing you see belongs to a single period.

The main gate stands at the neck of the peninsula, where the land narrows. Just inside it are the remains of a monumental fountain, a nymphaeum. Water arrived by aqueduct from the mountains and poured down a decorated stone face into wide basins. It was the first thing a traveller met after the gate. The message was simple. This city has water to spare. From there a colonnaded street ran down toward the harbour. Sections of those columns still line the modern road.

Beside the theatre lies the agora, the main public square. In the middle you can make out the round foundation of a small temple. It was most likely dedicated to Tyche, the goddess of fortune, who was often shown holding a city's fate in her hands. On one side of the square is a public latrine — a long curved room with stone seats above a flushing channel. It is one of the better preserved examples on this coast. Roman towns took sanitation seriously, and made no secret of it.

Now go to the tip of the peninsula, to the temples by the water. Several columns of the Temple of Apollo stand together again, re-erected in the twentieth century from pieces lying on the ground. Look up at the fragment of curved stone they carry. Carved along it are the heads of Medusa. Romans used that face as a guard, placed on a building to turn away harm. At sunset these columns go orange, then pink, then grey, while the sea behind them keeps its light a little longer.

The city's Roman baths now hold the museum. That is a sensible match, because a bath building is essentially a series of tall, well-lit halls. Inside are statues found in the streets and squares around you. There are emperors, athletes, a bathing Aphrodite, and portrait heads with startlingly specific faces. Standing close to one of those heads is a strange experience. The hair is arranged in a fashion that lasted perhaps a generation. Someone in this town wanted to be remembered exactly as they looked.

Here is the part visitors rarely expect. For a long stretch of time, Side was empty. The ancient city was abandoned, and the peninsula was left to sand, scrub and grazing animals. Then, in the late nineteenth century, Muslim families from Crete were resettled on this spot. They built houses among the ruins, using ancient blocks in their walls, and they fished for a living. Their village grew into the town you walked through. Some older houses still have a column drum built into a corner.

That layering is the real character of the place. A restaurant terrace rests on a Roman wall. A shop sells sunglasses beside a Byzantine arch. Cats sleep in the shade of old tombstones. Some visitors find this careless. Others find it honest — a place where people simply kept living on the same ground for a very long time. Both reactions are fair. The town never treated its ruins as untouchable, and that is partly why the ruins are still here at all.

Before you go, walk down to the water at the very end of the peninsula. Sit on a block of fallen marble and face the open sea. The horizon looks much as it did to a sailor bringing a grain ship into this harbour. The wind is the same wind. Behind you, the columns hold their piece of carved stone against the sky. Ahead there is nothing but water and light. Stay for a minute without taking a photograph. Then let the sound of the town pull you back.