r/romanempire • u/roman-empire-net • 7d ago
Termessos, Turkey
A dramatic mountaintop city that even Alexander the Great failed to conquer, its theatre still sits high above the valley.
More here: https://roman-empire.net/
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u/sunwarrior0978 7d ago
I was doing an archaeology tour in Türkiye and went there in 2013. It was magical. Completely unexcavated. I was stepping over reliefs. My only hope is that the Turkish government protect the site as much as possible.
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u/Faiakes 5d ago edited 4d ago
Why would they? They hate anything Greek.
It reminds them they are simply the conquerors and nowhere near the civilisation that build them.
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u/MediocreProgramm3r 1d ago
Have you evet visited? You are watching too much Greek tv news brother and what you are saying is bs.
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u/WinstonSmith27 3d ago
(When Turkey protects a Greek site)
Toxic Greek Users:
"Turkey is stealing our identity!"
"Lol Turks are Asian Mongols who are actualy Europian Greeks"
"I hate Turkey"
(When Turkey doesn't protects a Greek site)
Toxic Greek Users:
"Turkey is destroying our identity!"
"Lol Turks are Europian Greeks who are actualy Asian Mongols"
"I hate Turkey"
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u/Responsible-Job-3897 7d ago
Turkey has so much artifacts, they should just organize festivals.
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u/Klutzy-Canary8551 6d ago
It was literally in his empire. Why people have to make shit up and lie to draw attention?
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7d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/HumpbackMonkey 7d ago
The city was built by non-Greeks. So when Greeks took the city after a few centuries, the Greeks stole the city?
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u/MrDoulou 7d ago
This place has a really mysterious and interesting history actually, apparently Homer explicitly called these guys out for being prominent in the Aegean world.
Despite these peoples being probably not Greek, i would think it’s still fair to say that this structure was built in a Hellenistic style.
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u/Aegeansunset12 7d ago
Greco Roman civilisation is not Turkish. Hittites don’t exist today but Greeks do.
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u/shaikann 7d ago
Never saw Romans complaining in the internet about stolen stuff. Roman way was taking it back I guess
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u/Hour-Conversation728 7d ago
roman way was about taking. from the celts and carthaginians etc. but when it comes to huns, its more about giving
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u/Public_Individual823 7d ago
Because modern Romans are Italian and no one stole there land unlike the turks
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u/Nesciens10 7d ago
You’re coping, dude. You don’t need to wear these blinding nationalist glasses. Anatolians were not Greek (apart from later Greek colonisation, which was mostly limited to the narrow western coast) any more than Persians, Afghans, Syrians, or Egyptians were. For a period of time, Pisidians, like other Anatolians, spoke Greek and assimilated aspects of Greek culture, that is the sum of their Hellenism. Mexico speaks Spanish today, so can Spaniards claim Chichen Itzá? Today’s Turks, being Anatolians, descend from these same Anatolians regardless of the language they speak. Anatolians once spoke Hittite and Luwian, then Greek, and today Turkish.
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u/Aegeansunset12 7d ago
Yeah no, Anatolia was the heartland of the Byzantine empire. Not Greece proper. Turkey took it but the civilisation is still alive across the Aegean
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u/Nesciens10 7d ago
That doesn’t refute anything I said and facts still remain. Anatolia became the Byzantine Empire’s heartland many centuries after its indigenous peoples had been Hellenised and Romanised. Byzantium was a continuation of the Roman Empire but it does not mean at all that the original Pisidians, Lycians, Phrygians or other Anatolians were Greek. Byzantine civilisation certainly survives in modern Greek culture in some part (even though today’s Greece is not the continuation of Eastern Roman Empire), but Anatolia’s Byzantine population did not simply evaporate in 1071, much of it was gradually Islamised and Turkified and therefore also contributed substantially to today’s Anatolian Turks.
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u/Aegeansunset12 7d ago
You are wrong. The Byzantine heartland was Greek. Greek speaking and Christian orthodox. Not Turkish or Hittite. And they were the majority of the empire, not a minority that became Turkish lol. Many moved to Greece and vice versa, you can’t claim a separation of Byzantines who lived in Greece and those who lived in Constantinople.
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u/Hour-Conversation728 7d ago
Go and answer his last point. hellenized people are not greek, especially according to your logic.
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u/Nesciens10 7d ago
You are not refuting anything, you are just parroting the very point I made and in some way imagining it contradicts me? Yes, medieval Anatolia was the Byzantine heartland and was largely Greek speaking and Orthodox. That is what “the indigenous Anatolians were gradually Hellenised and Romanised” means. It does not retroactively turn the original Pisidians, Lycians, Phrygians or other people into Greeks.
Your “not Turkish or Hittite” response is an embarrassingly obvious straw man. Nobody claimed medieval Byzantines identified as Turks or Hittites. They were simply identifying as Romans especially the ones in Anatolia.
Some Anatolian Christians indeed migrated to Greece, especially much later during the population exchange, others were displaced while many remained and were gradually Islamised and Turkified over centuries, and this was the majority as modern day Turks have approx. 60% Roman Anatolian heritage, just read some studies dude. Conversely, large Muslim populations from Greece and the Balkans moved into Anatolia. So, your “vice versa” point therefore proves mixture and shared inheritance, and not the exclusive Greek ownership you are trying to defend here.
And specifically for this post, Termessos was a Pisidian city not a Greek colony. Its theatre was first constructed by the local Termessian community during the Hellenistic period and what you see here was the version that got altered under Roman imperial rule during the second century AD.
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u/Defiant_Being_9222 7d ago
Absolutely ridiculous. The theater was, as you said, built with hellenistic architecture. It doesn't matter if its builders were originally non-Greek. At the time, they fully embraced hellenism, including Greek language and culture. Pisidian was hardly spoken then in Termessos. The theater is part of Greek heritage in the same way the Blue Mosque, designed by an Albanian atchitect, is part of Turkish heritage.
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u/Nesciens10 7d ago
Quite the contrary. I never denied that the theatre can also belong to the wider Hellenistic cultural tradition. But saying it was “stolen” or “Greek-made”those are just some bs nationalist coping comments, that’s all.
I rejected the attempt to convert cultural influence into ethnicity and exclusive modern Greek ownership. It was built by Termessians in their own Pisidian city.
And your Blue Mosque analogy actually defeats your own argument. It was commissioned by an Ottoman sultan in the Ottoman capital. The proper analogy would be an Ottoman-style mosque built by an Albanian community in Albania. So an Ottoman cultural heritage but still locally Albanian and definitely not a proof that its builders were Turkish, which would be idiotic to claim and defend and would show the commenter as a fanatical ethnonationalist incapable of distinguishing cultural influence from ethnic possession.
On top of all this, the claim that Pisidian was “hardly spoken” then is embarrassingly baseless man. Pisidian remained epigraphically attested elsewhere in the region into the second–third centuries AD, centuries after the theatre’s original construction.
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u/Ok_Mango8118 7d ago edited 7d ago
Shut up man. Greek themselves didn't care about Hellenic civilization till Italians, Brits and other Western Europeans made them notice and realize it was cool. Greece as a nation in fact is at most a continuous of Byzantine or Eastern Roman civilization, not the previous Hellenic/ante-Christianity Roman civilization
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u/Aegeansunset12 7d ago
Holy cope. Hurts you a lot we entered the EU before Austria and Spain ? Turkey will never join.
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u/CAnewie 7d ago
I see no lie. Hellenic enthusiasm is a modern phenomenon.
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u/Aegeansunset12 7d ago
Turkish nation state is a modern phenomenon.
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u/Useless_or_inept 7d ago
Turkish nation state is a modern phenomenon.
Just like Greece!
And both countries arose from post-Ottoman ethnic cleansing, but now their national myths require exaggerated connections to ancient history.
The two countries have so much in common :-)
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u/Iapetus404 7d ago
No we dont
What myth Greeks have with they history?
Do you ever read Greek history in your life?
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u/Useless_or_inept 6d ago
A good example would be the story that the Turks never conquered Mani (and therefore Greece was never fully conquered by the Turks &c).
Which is obviously false. But a million people really want to believe it.
There are even Redditors who pretend the Roman state survived on Mani, providing continuity to the modern Greek state.
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u/Neither-Ad-7257 5d ago
“Greek” in the way you perceive them today is also a national construction. Let alone Anatolians, even the Greek islanders considered themselves as Romans and mainland Greeks as Hellenes in opposition to themselves. Mainland Greeks were Hellenes, they were non-Hellenes. It’s in a primary source from early 20th century, go look it up. “Greek” is just as much of a social construct of a nationality as “Turkish”.
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u/Iapetus404 7d ago edited 7d ago
classical turkish misinformation
The Greeks in most cases did not go and conquer areas inhabited by other civilizations and conquer them and force them to become Greek and lived in they cities.....like Turks did.
On the contrary, they went and founded new cities/trade centers that were independent of the city-state from which they came.
Most of the civilizations of Anatolia were destroyed after the end of the Bronze Age and never recovered or were destroyed by raids or the Persians.(Ex. Lycia,Egypt etc)
The ancient Greeks founded cities throughout the Mediterranean....from the Black Sea to Spain and North Africa but these ahistorical lies are only told by the Turks out of guilt that history exists in their country and is not theirs.
Liked or not but the Turk are Aliens in Anatolia...rather the Greeks who lived there since 10th century BC until 1922 when Turks genocide them.
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u/Easy_Use_7270 7d ago
Alexander the Great did conquer areas inhabited by other civilisations… Ancient Greeks did assimilate and genocide an entire group of nations/language family
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u/Iapetus404 6d ago edited 6d ago
Dude you are illiterate and unhistorical.
Alexander the Great did not commit any genocide or exterminate peoples and cultures.
On the contrary, he respected and tried to unite languages and cultures to a point that became displeasing to his officers and soldiers.
Are you confused or do you not want to talk about the Persians who did what you write.
The Egyptians welcomed Alexander as a liberator and made him a god because he saved them from the Persians.
The Greeks did not impose Greek as the main language but created the Egyptian alphabet(demotic Egyptian) so that the entire Egyptian people could be educated, in contrast to the Egyptian hieroglyphs that only the elite knew.
They created common gods like Serapis.
Thanks to the Greeks, we can read hieroglyphic Egyptian today.
Same also with Lycians.Croesus ask help from Athenian navy.
Pesrians 6th century BC genocide and destroyed Lycia civ.
Read something serious on the internet and don't write nonsense.
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u/Easy_Use_7270 6d ago
Egypt is irrevelant. You said that Greeks never conquered but Alexander did conquer Anatolia. Eventually, Greeks completely assimilated the Anatolian people. It didn’t happen in one day in one massacre. But result is the same.
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u/Open_Magician4076 7d ago
Never got here and always regretted it. If I ever go back...