Guide
Tripolis stands on the bank of the Büyük Menderes, at the north-eastern edge of the fertile Lykos plain, within the bounds of the Yenicekent quarter of the Buldan district of Denizli. The city spreads over about three square kilometres. Excavation and restoration are carried out by Associate Professor Bahadır Duman of Pamukkale University.
The earliest accounts of where the city stood come from the historians and geographers of antiquity. Herodotus first places the region within Lydia, while other ancient writers report that Tripolis lay within Caria. In the Sibylline texts it appears as the Tripolis beside the Maiandros.
Although the city's history is generally traced to the Hellenistic period, archaeological material from surface surveys at the mounds of Hamambükü and Yenice, east and south-east of the city, shows that settlement on this ground reaches back to the late Neolithic and early Chalcolithic, around 5500 BC. The latest traces of settlement date from the thirteenth century AD, and the ancient remains at Tripolis spread over about 281 hectares.
The city was first founded in the Hellenistic period under the name Apollonia. For a short time it was called Antoniopolis, during the triumvir Mark Antony's visit to Asia Minor in 41 BC. From the reign of Augustus onwards the name was changed for the last time to Tripolis, meaning a city formed by the coming together of three small communities or settlements.
As a frontier city of Lydia, Tripolis held a position of real strategic and geopolitical importance, above all because it lay on the trade routes. The roads beginning at great cities of antiquity such as Smyrna, Pergamon and Ephesus meet at Tripolis and run on through Hierapolis and Laodikeia to the eastern and southern parts of Anatolia.
The city was at its height in the Roman period. In the first century AD it was laid out on a grid, with avenues and streets enclosing insulae of about sixty by forty-five metres. Work at the site has identified public buildings — a theatre, a stadium, a bath and gymnasium, a nymphaeum and an agora — along with buildings of domestic architecture.
