Corasion

Coordinates: 36 ° 24 ′ 32 "  N , 34 ° 4 ′ 35"  E

Corasion​

Turkey

Korasion ruins

Korasion (Κοράσιον) was a Roman - Early Byzantine port city on the Mediterranean coast of Asia Minor between Cilicia and Isauria . It was on the site of today's Atakent in the Silifke district of the Turkish province of Mersin .

history

The mountain slopes of the natural harbor bay, which is now silted up, were already settled in early Roman times. This is evidenced by a mention by Artemidoros , handed down by Stephanos Byzantios , as a pseudocorasion and finds of houses from the Middle Imperial period . However, the settlement never merged into one place, and the place may have become deserted again in the 3rd century. According to a building inscription on the east gate, the city was re-founded by Flavius ​​Uranios, the governor of the Roman province of Isauria, between 367 and 375 AD during the reign of the emperors Valentinian I , Valens and Gratian . The place never achieved the status of a polis , but as evidenced by numerous inscriptions found, it must have gained some importance in the 7th century. There is no more archaeological evidence from a later period. In the 10th century, the place is described by Ibn Chordadhbeh under the name Q-rās-yah as lying in ruins. In later mentions the place is referred to as Ponta, Pharsipec or Perşenti.

description

The silted up former harbor bay of Korasion is now almost completely built over by the modern town of Atakent (formerly Susanoğlu) and only a few remains of the ancient buildings are still visible. The British captain Francis Beaufort , who explored the Cilician coast on behalf of the Admiralty in the years 1811-12, visited the place and handed down a copy of the building inscription. Josef Keil and Adolf Wilhelm were able to draw up a plan of the city at the beginning of the 20th century. A wall just under a meter thick enclosed the harbor basin, which was around 100 meters wide and 300 meters deep. It probably had three gates, one to Korykos in the northeast, a non-localized one to Seleukia on the Kalykadnos (Silifke) in the southwest and one to the northwest inland, into today's valley Yenibahçe Deresi to Karakabaklı and Işıkkale . In the north-east of the village, where the French traveler Victor Langlois found the arches of a water pipe in the 19th century, there was a bath. In the west stood two three-aisled basilicas , outside the local area there were necropolises with rock graves and free-standing sarcophagi , individual houses and an oil press.

literature

• Walther Ruge : Korasion . In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume XI, 2, Stuttgart 1922, Sp. 1377.
• Josef Keil , Adolf Wilhelm : Monuments from the rough Cilicia (= Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua 3). Manchester 1931, pp. 102-117 (with map).
• Friedrich Hild , Hansgerd Hellenkemper : Cilicia and Isauria (= Tabula Imperii Byzantini Volume 5). Publishing house of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna 1990, ISBN 3-7001-1811-2 , pp. 311-312.
• Jon C. Cubas Díaz: Korasion: A Cilician small town that has become invisible. In: Olba 28, 2020, pp. 351-376 ( digitized version ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ernst von Leutsch : The geographer Artemidoros of Ephesus. In: Philologus 11, 1856, p. 229 ( full text ).
2. ^ Francis Beaufort: Karamania, or, A brief description of the south coast of Asia-Minor and of the remains of antiquity . R. Hunter, London, 1817, pp. 230 ( limited preview in Google Book search).