Guide
Nysa, an important city of ancient Caria, stands on the Aydın–Denizli road thirty kilometres east of Aydın and three kilometres north-west of the town of Sultanhisar. What is known of its founding comes from Strabo, the traveller and geographer of the age of Augustus, and from the historian Stephanus: the region, then called Caria, was settled in the Hellenistic period, in the first half of the third century BC, by Antiochos I Soter, son of Seleucus.
The city was founded as two settlements joined by a bridge. A theatre, a gymnasium, an agora and a tunnel stand here, and further building was added in the Roman period. Nysa reached its height in cultural terms under Roman rule. Buildings, streets and squares were laid out on both sides of a very steep gorge and carried on vaulted substructures.
In antiquity Nysa was known above all for education — Strabo himself was schooled here — and the remains of the gymnasium and the library are what is left of those buildings.
Nothing survives of the Hellenistic city wall that once ringed Nysa, though traces of Byzantine walls can be seen here and there. The theatre stands on the eastern slope at the centre of the city and is well preserved, its seating running somewhat beyond a semicircle. The best-preserved building is the bouleuterion, which Strabo describes as the gerontikon, the council of elders: a rectangular building with semicircular seating inside.
A swiftly flowing river cut the ancient city in two through a deep gorge, and three bridges over it joined the two sides. West of that stream bed stand the gymnasium and the stadium, with a Byzantine building and the library to the north and, north-east of the library, a theatre seating ten thousand. The library has two floors and is, after the library of Celsus at Ephesus, the best-preserved ancient library in Anatolia. East of the stream bed are the agora, the council building and the Roman baths, and the necropolis of the city lies to the west, on the road to Akharaka, the sanctuary of the ancient city.
The agora east of the bouleuterion is a market place of 89 by 105 metres made up of halls ringed on all four sides by columns. Another great building of the city is the gymnasium, where the young were trained in mind and body; it measures about 165 by 70 metres and must have been smaller in Strabo's time.
