Guide
Amorium, known locally as Hisar, lies 12 kilometres east of Emirdağ, 70 north-east of Afyonkarahisar and 170 south-west of Ankara. It was settled without a break from the second millennium BC through the Hittite, Phrygian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman periods, and the site divides into an Upper City on the mound, where the earliest settlement was, and a Lower City below it. Byzantine walls can still be traced around the edge of the mound, and a further circuit enclosed the whole of the lower town.
No Classical or Hellenistic remains have turned up, but the city clearly mattered in central Anatolia before Rome: Amorium was among the first places in the region the Roman senate allowed to strike its own coinage, which puts it in a strong position in eastern Phrygia by the early first century BC. In late antiquity it was a trading town whose regular festivals and fairs drew people from the country around, and its walls date to the reign of Zenon, between 474 and 491.
From 640 it was the headquarters of the Byzantine army in Anatolia and then the capital of the Anatolikon theme. Through the Byzantine dark centuries, from the middle of the seventh to the middle of the ninth, it held the eastern frontier against Arab raids. The army of Mutasım, son of Harun al-Rashid, besieged it in 838, and the emir of Tarsus burned it in 931; the excavations show it regaining military importance in the tenth and eleventh centuries. By 1116 it was in Seljuk hands.
Work on the site began with a survey by R. Martin Harrison in 1987, followed by excavation from 1988 to 1992 on the south-western walls, in the Late Roman and early Byzantine building south of the city, at the Lower City basilica and on the mound. Chris Lightfoot carried the project on from 1993 to 2009, continuing at the Lower City church complex, where the main church, the baptistery and a number of graves were uncovered, and then at the large structure north of it in the middle of the site.
