8-31-13. Pinara, Turkey
From first to last, my visit to Pinara was dominated by the blood red cliff that looms over the city. I first caught sight of it from the potholed access road: a massive rectangular butte hovering over the pines, riddled with hundreds of rectangular tomb slots.
Parking my car in the empty field beside the guard’s hut, I hiked up a short path to a cliff incised with a fine series of Lycian house tombs. The walls of one, aptly named the “tomb of reliefs,” are carved with scenes of daily life. A whole city – perhaps Pinara itself – is represented, complete with streets, buildings, and (appropriately enough) tombs.
Climbing higher, I found myself among the ruins of Pinara proper. As in most places, the residential district was poorly preserved, with only a few crooked door-posts recognizable amid the debris. The chief public buildings stood one terrace higher, where the so-called Temple of Aphrodite (named for its heart-shaped columns) is shaded by a cluster of pines. The remains of the agora slouch nearby, where a compact bouleuterion spills its debris onto the remains of a colonnaded square.
The main street of the Roman city is lined with the lapsing stone walls; I picked out a temple and a row of the shops, but most of the ruins were too nondescript to be easily identified. The view from the end of the street, however, was striking: Roman ruins in the foreground, the cliff beyond, and pine-covered mountains in every direction. The most interesting ruins on the highest terrace, the Roman residential district, were the Lycian tombs clustered along its south end. These diverted me only briefly from my main goal: to follow the base of the cliff and investigate the rows of tombs. This proved much more difficult than I had anticipated (pine needles on steep slopes make for very poor traction), but I finally reached the lowest register of niches, only a few feet above ground level.
The niches, arranged in neat rows and columns, were all about the same size, roughly eight by four feet at the opening and five feet deep. None showed any sign of decoration, or even of a covering slab. If these tombs were ever used for burials – some archaeologists speculate that the niches actually served as storage – they seem to have departed radically from usual Lycian practice.
After sliding down another needle-covered slope, I visited the small but well-preserved Roman theater. If the size of a city’s theater is measure of its importance (or at least its population), Roman Pinara was insignificant indeed.
At the end of my visit, I clambered back through the south necropolis to visit a number of Lycian house- and temple tombs I had missed the first time around.
The view from the carved porches of these tombs was the finest in Pinara. The whole site, from cliff to theater, was spread before me. Forrest and mountain extended to the invisible plain beyond, counterpointed by a bank of thunderheads on the northern horizon. My photos, as usual, did the scene no justice.
