Life After Death – Hierapolis: City of The Dead (Istanbul & Everything After)

I am so glad they made it. Traveling forward in time two thousand years is not easy. I was not expecting to find that some of the Romans and Byzantines who died in Hierapolis would still be with us. Their journey holds a valuable lesson for us all. If they can make it, there is a chance that we can as well. While none of us wants to die, we also realize that it is impossible to live forever. The best we can hope for is what I found in Hierapolis. Lives memorialized in stone. The less than famous, the accomplished, and anonymous. These are not the emperors who bestride the history books, or the Legions that conquered distant lands. These are the rank and file of humanity, bureaucrats and traders, skilled workers and those who did the dirty work, city leaders and laborers. Paradoxically, they have faded from memory but are not completely forgotten. They still live in the city of the dead at Hierapolis. If a few of us are lucky, in another two thousand years someone will be standing beside tombs contemplating our mortality and comparing it to their own.

Missing Pages - History In Fragments

Hierapolis died a long time ago, back in the Byzantine days, when the progressively weakening empire retreated from its Anatolian hinterlands in the face of Arab and Turkish incursions. The city was abandoned, left to the looters and passage of time. Its once magnificent theater slowly decayed. City gates crumbled. Monuments and statuary fell into disrepair. A city of 100,000 became a ghost town set in stone. Earthquakes in the 14th and 17th century helped the process along. The city had lasted longer than most, from its rise under Pergamene rule in the 2nd century BC until it finally faded in the Dark Ages. The sun still shone bright on the nearby travertine terraces just as it had done before the Romans arrived. And it would continue to do so until the advent of archeological digs. Tourists soon followed. ?

Hierapolis’ fame comes not from its ruins, but its location beside the travertine terraces and hot springs of Pamukkale. Visitors go to Hierapolis as an afterthought, a bit of value added to a vacation, a diversion for the restless or curious. Hierapolis is like a middle child, largely ignored despite a life full of accomplishments. Pamukkale is the supermodel, Hierapolis is the girl next door. Here is the thing though, once you get to know the girl next door, her charms are so much more astonishing than you could ever imagine. Hierapolis will never achieve the fame of Troy, Ephesus or Pergamon. That is such a shame, and quite wonderful all the same. Troy has Homer, Ephesus, just about everything a historian or archeologist could ever want, Pergamon, the Asclepieion and a theater clinging to the edge of a plateau.

If you only scratch the surface, Hierapolis cannot compete. Its main thoroughfare offers a walk-through of antiquity’s scrapyard. Here lies a city broken into a hundred thousand pieces. No one could possibly piece the confusion of broken columns and scattered stones back together. Hierapolis is a history written in fragments, filled with missing pages that blew away when the threadbare binding collapsed. Its ruins should be the cover image for the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This is what decline, devastation, and disintegration looks like. That is until you spy the tombs climbing up the hillside. That here the life and death of this ancient city still resides.

Everlasting Life – Mortal Reminders

We came, we saw, we did not conquer. Instead, we stood and stared in wonder. We were surrounded by death and yet it felt so alive. My best friend Steve and I had the place to ourselves. Hierapolis no longer exists, at least not in the form of a living city. It is now a dead city and a city of the dead. It has the most extensive ancient necropolis in Turkey covering 2.5 kilometers. Over 1,200 tombs in an array of shapes, sizes, and designs, located beyond where the city walls once stood. There are numerous sarcophagi, some still have the names of those buried behind the stone walls. Others who were commoners are buried beneath the ground and remain nameless. I found the necropolis to be fascinating, rather than morbid. A place to ponder mortality, ancient life, and funerary customs.

No matter how much we try, death is the one thing that none of us can escape. We can only stave it off for a while. Our time here is limited, the necropolis at Hierapolis was a reminder of that. Many of those buried in the necropolis at Hierapolis came to the city to do just that. With its hot springs and mineral pools, Hierapolis was both a spa town and a city. Romans and Byzantines came hoping to prolong their lives by bettering their health. Ironically, many of them ended up in the necropolis. That was not the worst thing that could happen to them. They achieved a bit of posthumous recognition that continues to this day. They did not live forever, but achieved the next best thing, the memory of them still does.

Meeting & Greeting – Ancient Recognition

And so here we have a merchant by the name of Flavius Zeusi, who passed through the Peloponnese seventy times while traveling to Italy. That was an amazing accomplishment in ancient times, or any time for that matter. He was a merchant always on the move. Zeusi’s greatest accomplishment was traveling several thousand years to be with us during this visit to Hierapolis. What was that name again? Marcus Aurelius Ammianus? Ah yes, he was associated with the linen workers. Amminanus was a man who took pride in his work. How about that tumulus over there? Could that be where Lucius Salvius Paolinus resides? Yes, it is. I never knew him until now. Come to think of it, I never knew anyone buried in Hierapolis before I visited this necropolis. Now they, and all the others, are the ancient people I will never forget.