An update on Germenicia

Back in 2012, I posted my first blog about the city of Germenicia located some one hundred kilometers north of Gaziantep in eastern Turkey (see: Ever heard of Germenicia?).

Illegal digs carried out in 2007 revealed the presence of the Roman city of Germenicia or Germenicia Caesarea named after Emperor Caligula (in full Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus) which covered an area of 140 hectares. The terrain has been divided into 50 parcels and after almost ten years the land of 30 of them has been expropriated. Works have been ongoing since in order to register, excavate and preserve the many large Roman villas and their exquisite floor mosaics.

[Mosaic from Germanicia, at the Kahramanmaraş Museum. 

Regional Directorate of Culture and Tourism Kahramanmaraş]

It appeared that these villas belonged to the local elite and military leaders and it is estimated that there are approximately one hundred such residences built on the foothill of the mountain. The mostly intact mosaics that have been unearthed so far are of the highest quality and generally date from the 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th century AD. They feature sophisticated designs using a mix of colored glass, marble, and limestone tesserae, deploying even three-dimensional effects. The quality of these mosaics is unusual because of their realism and their details ranging from architectural representations to scenes of daily life.

The Romans were not the first to occupy the region. Earlier settlers were the Urartians, Assyrians, Persians, Macedonians, and Seleucids because the city was built on the crossroads of several ancient trade routes, like the Silk Road. But the wear and tear of repeated wars, landslides, and fire buried the city into oblivion for almost 1,500 years.

Kahramanmaraş, the modern version of Germenicia  has a worthwhile museum of its own. It displays more than 30,000 artifacts from local excavations dating from prehistoric times, Hittite occupation, and Roman and Byzantine eras. Most spectacular are, of course, the mosaics recovered from the Roman villas of Germenicia  but also from other nearby sites. An adjacent room is exhibiting a number of steles, sarcophagi, and marble heads of the Roman elite; another room illustrates daily life through a rich collection of tools, jewelry, armory, pottery, bronze, and glass artifacts as well as coins from Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman eras.

As elsewhere, Turkey hopes to draw tourists to Germenicia, who may already be visiting the treasures of Sanliurfa (founded by Seleucos in 304 BC as Edessa) and Gaziantep (where the mosaics from Zeugma are being exhibited).