The city of Perge was in fact the first place Paul really preached on the mainland of the western part of Turkey. And it had long been an impressive city back in the Hellenistic age and even before. Here is a little map which will show you the relationship between Perge, Aspendos, and Attalia.
Perge was indeed a walled city with famous towers that date to the Hellenistic era. Let’s first look at a couple of scale models of the site…
This schematic gives a sense of the length of the ancient city, but it also makes clear that there was still building in the Roman period, with a stadium and a theater built outside the old Hellenistic city walls. This bespeaks a period of relative peace where the residents in the Roman period were not worried about invading armies or even pirates coming up from the coast.
At the Perge museum in Antalya there is model of the city for kids and here is a sample….
But if you want an actual scale model you have to visit the site itself so let’s go….
Above is the entrance to the site.. and here’s the scale model…
It’s that stadium outside the city walls we will go see first….
Let’s next consider the Hellenistic watch towers…
Notice the water pipes in the walls inside the city gate…
Just inside the towers there is an honorific inscription to a major patroness of the city named Plancia Magna… Plancia the Great…
She was a priestess of Diana/Artemis in this city…
Now we turn around and have a look at main street… long and very straight, and bordered by fountains that come all the way through town, and started at a fountain on the slope leading to the ‘upper city’.
Notice the deep ruts in the stone pavement, showing just how heavy some of the wagons coming into the city were….
As usual there are tops of columns and arches just sitting on the ground…
There are still some interesting columns on the right side of the main street honoring Artemis and her devotees…
The new archaeological work has been on the Western street and the houses or shops alongside it… and the gate at the far end of the street. Naturally, the important artifacts have been moved to the museum in Antalya.
There was a Palestra and a Gymnasium alongside this street…
Here’s a house with a mosaic floor on the left side of the street…
There was also a street off the Western street heading up to the acropolis…
Here’s an interesting water bowl connected to the water course through the middle of main street..
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