Antalya Ancient Cities Tour — Perge, Aspendos & Side

The coastal plain between Antalya and the Manavgat River — ancient Pamphylia — was one of the most densely settled and culturally rich strips of Anatolia in the classical world. Greek colonists arrived in the first millennium BCE, Alexander the Great passed through in 333 BCE, Rome absorbed it in the second century BCE, and the Byzantine church followed after Rome. Today three cities from that sequence are accessible within a single day's excursion from Antalya, and each one illuminates a different aspect of what urban life looked like in the ancient Mediterranean. Perge, the closest to Antalya at twenty kilometres east, was a prosperous city famous for its cult of Artemis and for producing the mathematician Apollonius, whose work on conic sections remained the definitive text on the subject for fifteen centuries. The ruins spread across a wide area: a Hellenistic gateway flanked by two horseshoe towers, a colonnaded main street running north from the gateway for nearly three hundred metres with a water channel down its centre, and beyond it the agora, baths, and stadium — one of the largest of the ancient world, seating twelve thousand spectators. The Antalya Archaeological Museum holds the finest statuary recovered from Perge, but the site itself conveys scale and street-level texture in a way no museum can replicate. Aspendos, forty-seven kilometres east of Antalya, is the reason most visitors take this tour. Its Roman theatre, built in the second century CE under the emperor Marcus Aurelius, is the best-preserved ancient theatre anywhere in the world — not restored in the nineteenth-century manner but genuinely intact, its stage building rising five storeys, its cavea seating fifteen thousand, its arched vaulted passageways still carrying the acoustic and structural logic of their original design. The theatre was used as a Seljuk caravanserai in the medieval period, which accounts for its survival: the Seljuks maintained it because it served them. Today it hosts the annual Aspendos International Opera and Ballet Festival each June, proof that two thousand years on, it remains one of the finest performance spaces in the Mediterranean world. The agora and aqueduct at Aspendos are less visited but equally impressive: the aqueduct, which supplied the city from the Taurus Mountains more than fifteen kilometres away, is the most complete ancient water-supply system visible in Turkey, its two tall pressure towers still standing to near-original height. Side, eighty kilometres east, occupies a small peninsula where the ancient harbour walls meet the sea. The city was colonised by Greek settlers from Aeolia in the seventh century BCE and became one of the principal ports for the slave trade in the classical Mediterranean — a history sobering and important, particularly for African diaspora travellers who may find the context resonant. The ruins here include a well-preserved Roman theatre, the Temple of Apollo (five columns standing at the water's edge, one of Turkey's most photographed ancient images), and the remains of the Monumental Fountain and temple of Tyche. The old harbour town of Side has grown into a small resort, and lunch is typically taken here at a restaurant by the sea — a genuine pleasure after a morning among ruins. The full-day excursion from Antalya covers three ancient cities, a meal by the Mediterranean, and a return journey through citrus groves and pine-covered ridges. Travel Orbit can arrange hotel transfers and guide for this excursion as part of your Antalya package — speak to our team about scheduling.