For Pergamum, read Bergama
What a strange little town Bergama is! Home to some of Turkey’s finest Hellenic and Roman remains, it has still managed to miss the big-time boat as regards attracting independent travelers and has to make do instead with busloads of tourists who bus in, whip round the sites, snatch a quick lunch and then move on again.
But the malaise seems to run a little deeper than that. Bergama is firmly in western Turkey and only a short way inland from the Aegean; yet walking the never-ending main street in the evening a visitor could be forgiven for thinking they had hopped on the wrong bus and ended up somewhere far further east, so complete is the absence of big-name stores or even halfway glitzy places in which to eat.
Still, the fact remains that for any lover of ancient ruins Bergama, the historic Pergamum, has to be a fixture on the itinerary. There are two main sites to see here, although they lie far apart at opposite ends of the town. The first of the two, the Acropolis, is clearly visible ringing a hill to the north of Bergama. This was the location of a great library of 200,000 volumes built up by King Eumenes II (r.197-160 B.C.) in an attempt to rival the more famous one in Alexandria in Egypt. Nowadays it’s hard to imagine how much angst and jealousy this venture generated, but so worried were the Egyptians that the Pergamene library might steal their thunder that they actually banned the export of papyrus to Asia Minor in an attempt to stop the creation of any more books. They’d reckoned without the wiliness of the Pergamenes, however, since they quickly set to work to come up with an alternative, a form of parchment made out of finely pressed animal hides (”pergamena”) that enabled the creation of the first actual books as opposed to scrolls. Of course Alexandria won in the end anyway when the besotted Mark Anthony donated all the Pergamene books to his lover Queen Cleopatra of Egypt. They survived until the seventh century when, it seems, they were probably burned.
But that’s to jump ahead a little. Pergamum owed its importance to the break-up of Alexander the Great’s empire when the site fell to one of his generals, Lysimachus, who needed somewhere to stow his riches and thought the site of the Acropolis looked appropriately easy to defend. The booty safely secured, he rode on to fight with another of Alexander’s generals, Seleucus, for control of the rest of Asia Minor. When he died in the course of the fighting in 281 B.C., his treasurer Philetarus moved in to take his place, although, as a eunuch, he had no son to succeed him. Instead, his nephew Eumenes I eventually took over, thereby establishing the dynasty that would govern Pergamum until Attalus III bequeathed it to the Romans in 129 B.C.
Up on the Acropolis there is still plenty to see, most famously a jaw-droppingly steep theater that could have seated an audience of 10,000, and which was cut into the contours of the hillside. Conspicuous, too, are the remains of a later temple to the Emperor Trajan, which was reused as a cistern in the Middle Ages. A path winds round the site and back down to the town. On its way it passes the location of a vast altar of Zeus, which used to be adorned with friezes depicting a fight between the gods and giants of ancient Greek mythology. Unfortunately, these were removed by German archeologists in the 19th century, and now adorn the Pergamon Museum in Berlin instead.
The Asclepion, to the southwest of town, is primarily a Roman site, approached along the remains of what must once have been a busy street of shops. Asclepius was the Greco-Roman god of medicine and the shrine here was set up by a man who had been cured of his ills after traveling to the Asclepion at Epidaurus in Greece. Patients who came here were apparently treated using a form of dream interpretation, but in the second century the physician Galen, who had been born in Pergamum, set up a proper clinic, which brought it great fame. Galen’s ideas about the circulatory system were so ahead of their time that they continued to form the basis for most medicine right up until the Renaissance. Look out for the remains of a column decorated with snakes which are still a symbol for surgeons -- patients were seen as shedding their illnesses in the same way that a snake sheds its old skin.
Some of the finds from the sites are on display in Bergama’s museum, along with a magnificent statue of Aphrodite dredged from the mud at nearby Allianoi, an ancient thermal resort currently threatened by plans for the Yortanlı Dam. A third site is fairly unmissable. It is the Kızıl Avlu (Red Basilica), which probably started life as a temple to the Egyptian gods Isis, Serapis and Harpocrates in the second century, but went on to be regarded as one of the Seven Churches of the Apocalypse. A huge, brooding structure, it’s flanked by twin towers, one of which now houses the Kurtuluş Camii (mosque).
That is all that most bus-tour visitors are going to see of Bergama, although much of the old Greek neighborhood that lay to the north of town until the 1924 population exchange still survives, and repays a quick wander. The narrow streets are packed with attractive stone houses much like those in Ayvalık and Yeni Foça, although here gentrification is only just getting into its stride. The local authorities are also taking a belated interest in the area, relaying some of the cobbles and expensively renovating one of the houses near the Odyssey Guesthouse. Another newly converted building houses the Bergama Ticaret Odası Sosyal Tesisleri (Bergama Chamber of Commerce Social Facilities), not a name to trip off the tongue perhaps but one of the few truly inviting places to eat.
The Belediye has also busied itself with the renovation of the old Arasta (bazaar), the heart of the shopping area in the northern part of town. Two ancient hamams, the Merkez Hamamı and the Küplü Hamamı, have also been restored although neither is currently welcoming bathers. It’s worth strolling down as far as the Kurşunlu Camii opposite the post office to look at two fine 19th-century buildings that house government offices: the Emniyet Müdürlüğü and the Milli Eğitim Müdürlüğü. The latter is especially beautiful with fine neoclassical details around both doors and windows.
Bergama’s problem remains that the infrastructure for independent visitors is so limited. Three small pensions compete for business in the older part of town, but none of them can boast the style of those in Ayvalık, while most of the other local accommodation is in modern concrete blocks. What Bergama really needs is a burst of enterprise. With the cost of visiting the four local attractions now a whopping YTL 45, why not a BergamaBilet that would offer a discounted price of YTL 35 for visiting all of them? Or a YTL 45 ticket that would throw in a minibus transfer between the far-flung sites? It doesn’t seem a lot to ask for.