The stadium
A 270-metre track with seating for thirty thousand, intact from end to end and among the best-preserved stadiums surviving from antiquity.
Brocken Inaglory — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Rabe! — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Rabe! — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Rabe! — CC BY-SA 4.0
About a hundred kilometres from Pamukkale, in a quiet valley almost nobody visits, stands a Roman city with nearly all its features intact. Aphrodisias is not a scatter of stones you need imagination to read: there is a theatre for seven thousand, a council chamber with its marble seats still in rows, Hadrianic baths, and the Tetrapylon gateway, re-erected column by column until it looks finished yesterday. The reason for all this survival is marble. The quarries lie two kilometres away, and they fed a school of sculptors whose city name became a recognised signature as far as Rome itself. UNESCO listed the site in 2017. The real jolt comes at the end of the circuit: the stadium. A track roughly 270 metres long, seating for thirty thousand, complete from one curved end to the other, so intact you half expect to hear the crowd. Archaeologists count it among the best-preserved stadiums anywhere in the ancient world, and it alone justifies the drive. Do not shortchange the on-site museum either, which is covered by the same ticket. Its long hall holds the reliefs from the Sebasteion, the building the city raised to glorify Rome's emperors: whole marble panels of emperors subduing nations while gods look on, all carved here by local hands. There is no practical public transport from Pamukkale, so it comes down to three options: a hire car via Tavas in roughly an hour and a half, a hired driver, or the organised Aphrodisias day tour sold by hotels in Pamukkale and Denizli. Cars stop in Geyre village, and a farm tractor towing a trailer with benches carries you to the site gate, a short ride children tend to enjoy more than the ruins. Paths are gravel and stone and run about three kilometres, so a pushchair is hard work, and shade is scarce: in August start early or after four in the afternoon, because the white marble throws the heat straight back at you. In spring and autumn this is one of the finest outings in the region. Allow two to three hours, and weigh it honestly: Ephesus is more famous and larger, but it takes coaches by the dozen, while here you walk among the temples on your own. Anyone spending two days at Pamukkale who skips this road misses the best thing the area has to offer.
A 270-metre track with seating for thirty thousand, intact from end to end and among the best-preserved stadiums surviving from antiquity.
A whole museum hall of locally carved marble panels glorifying Rome's emperors, the peak of what the city's sculpture school produced.
A sixteen-column gateway re-erected in 1991 from mostly original blocks until it looks much as it did two thousand years ago.
Kenan Erim Caddesi No:4, Geyre village, Karacasu, Aydın province
With a single day, stick to the white terraces and Hierapolis. With two days, go without hesitation: Aphrodisias is in better condition than Hierapolis and far quieter, and the stadium alone beats anything up there. The drive is an hour and a half each way, so leave in the morning and you are back before sunset.
Children enjoy the village tractor and the vast stadium, but the full circuit is about three kilometres over gravel and stone with little shade, so a pushchair is hard going and summer heat is fierce. Older visitors can limit themselves to the museum, the temple and the Tetrapylon near the entrance and skip the distant stadium.
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