Andriake
Coordinates: 36 ° 14 ' N , 29 ° 57' E
Andriake was the port of ancient Myra , five kilometers southwest of today's place Kale (Demre) in the Turkish province of Antalya , at the mouth of the Andriakos ( Demre Çayı ) in Lycia . Today the port has silted up or swamped due to the flooding of the river. A team from the Austrian Archaeological Institute has carried out field research in Andriake since 2005 .
Archaeological evidence indicates that the place was founded in early Hellenistic times . At that time, the branch extended over two hills on both sides of the port entrance. The place is mentioned for the first time in 197 BC. BC, when Antiochus III. Andriake conquered. In the course of the capture of the port by Lentulus Spinther in 43 BC. A chain that secured the port entrance was broken. The apostle Paul waited here in the autumn of 59 AD on his journey to Rome for better winds and changed the ship ( Acts 27 : 5-6).
The importance of Andriake lies in its location on one of the most important shipping routes. During the Roman Empire, Andriake was, along with Patara, one of the most important ports for the grain fleet from Egypt, first for Rome and , since the 4th century AD, increasingly for Constantinople . In the middle of the imperial period there was a massive expansion of the port infrastructure. In addition to the Horreum , a storage building, a large plaza and other structures, which have now largely been destroyed, were built on the south bank of the harbor basin. A water pipe secured the water supply, which until then was only provided by cistern management .
In the 6th century the port settlement experienced a further boom. Six large churches and two baths as well as numerous other buildings were built. In the early Byzantine period - according to a massive accumulation of purple snail shells, which overlay the plaza east of the granary - was produced in Andriake purple . The settlement was probably given up in the early Middle Ages , probably due to the increasing silting up of the harbor basin. In Ottoman times, a small fort was built on the western tip of the northern settlement hill .
In addition to the remains of an aqueduct , an agora , some cisterns and ruins of five early Byzantine churches, the granarium (horreum) from the Hadrian era , a granary around 35 by 62 meters in which up to 6,000 cubic meters of grain could be stored, is worth seeing . The churches, dated to the end of the 5th or 6th century, were three-aisled basilicas , each with a semicircular apse on the east wall. The entrances were in the west wall, and four churches had a narthex . In the rocky terrain overgrown by bushes, remains of the walls of the churches have been preserved up to a single storey height.
literature
- Jürgen Borchhardt (Ed.): Myra. A Lycian metropolis in ancient and Byzantine times = Istanbuler Forschungen , Vol. 30 (Berlin 1975), pp. 64–75. 401-411. ISBN 3-7861-2209-1
- Hansgerd Hellenkemper , Friedrich Hild : Lykien und Pamphylien , Vol. 2, Tabula Imperii Byzantini 8, Vienna 2004, pp. 435-439 ISBN 3-7001-3280-8
- Gerhard Forstenpointner, Ursula Quatember, Alfred Galik, Gerald Weissengruber, Andreas Konecny: Purple-Dye Production in Lycia - Results of an Archaeozoological Field Survey in Andriake (South-West Turkey) , Oxford Journal of Archeology 26 (2007), p. 201– 214, doi : 10.1111 / j.1468-0092.2007.00281.x .
Individual evidence
- ↑ www.histolia.de Historic Anatolia , accessed on January 15, 2011
- ↑ Peter Grossmann, Hans-Georg Severin: Early Christian and Byzantine Buildings in Southeastern Lycia. Ernst Wasmuth, Tübingen, 2003, pp. 3–13
