Didyma (Temple of Apollo)

Didyma was not a city. It was a sanctuary belonging to Miletus, some 20 kilometres up the coast, and its reason for existing was the oracle of Apollo housed in a temple so large that six centuries of building work never finished it. The site lies in what is now the town of Didim, in Turkey's Aydin province, south of Kusadasi, and the Temple of Apollo is still counted among the best-preserved Greek temples anywhere.

Excavation here has produced a great deal, and much of it has gone abroad: statues from the Sacred Way to the British Museum, architectural fragments to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, further material to the Louvre. What stayed is the important part - the temple platform, the standing columns, the tunnels and the sunken inner court - and the scale of them is the reason to come.

The History of Didyma

The earliest archaeological evidence at Didyma dates to the eighth century BC, though the cult on this spot is probably older than the arrival of Greek settlers. The sanctuary belonged to Miletus, one of the twelve cities of the Ionian League, and it was Miletus that administered the oracle and drew the pilgrims. Consultation brought traffic, money and dedications, and the sanctuary rose and fell with the fortunes of the city that owned it.

The oracle was the whole point. A prophetess seated above a sacred spring delivered the responses, and the priests - the Branchidae, the hereditary family who ran the sanctuary in the archaic period - put them into a form the enquirer could carry away. Questions covered matters of state and war as much as private business, and Didyma's answers carried weight across the Greek world.

In 494 BC, after the Ionian Revolt collapsed at the naval battle of Lade, the Persians burned the sanctuary and carried the bronze cult statue of Apollo off to Persia. The spring is said to have failed, and the archaic oracle fell silent. It revived after Alexander the Great's conquest: around 300 BC Seleucus I Nicator returned the statue, and Miletus began an entirely new temple on a scale nothing else in the Greek world matched.

That temple was never finished. Its main body was more or less complete by about 100 BC, and work was still going on under Roman emperors including Hadrian, four hundred years after it began. Columns were left unfluted, blocks were left with their lifting bosses in place, and the roof was never put on. The oracle outlasted the building programme: Diocletian consulted it around 302, and the emperor Julian restored the sanctuary in 362. It closed at the end of the fourth century, when Theodosius I shut the pagan temples. A Christian church was later built inside the temple's inner court, and earthquakes brought down the columns, leaving the handful that still stand.

From Miletus to Didyma: A Trip Along the Sacred Way

The Sacred Way ran roughly 20 kilometres between the two, and was laid out in the sixth century BC for the festival processions. It was lined with temples, shrines and seated statues - the row of archaic figures now in the British Museum came from this road - and had places along it where pilgrims could rest.

The geography has changed completely since. Miletus stood near the mouth of the Maeander, which emptied into the Aegean. Over centuries the river's silt built a delta of fertile farmland and filled the city's harbour, until ships could no longer reach Miletus at all; the site is inland today. Once the sea approach was gone the road mattered more than ever, and long stretches of its paving can still be walked.

The Temple of Apollo at Didyma

The Hellenistic temple measures roughly 109 by 51 metres, standing on a platform that gives a building area of more than 5,500 square metres. It was designed as a dipteros, with a double ring of columns around the inner chamber: 122 in the plan, each about 2.5 metres thick at the base and just under 20 metres high, the tallest proposed for any Greek temple. Only a fraction were ever raised.

The design turned on the spring. Because the water had to remain at ground level, the inner court - the adyton - sits well below the surrounding platform and was left open to the sky, even though from outside the building appears fully roofed. The naiskos, a small shrine holding the cult statue, stood in this court alongside the spring and a laurel tree. Two vaulted tunnels, each over 21 metres long and barely a metre wide, slope down from the front of the temple to the floor of the court. The priests used them; enquirers waited above and received the response from a chamber reached by a broad flight of steps.

The steps at the eastern front and the columns still standing at the corner are what most visitors photograph, and they give the clearest sense of the height the building was meant to reach.

The Temple of Artemis

Apollo's twin sister had a shrine here too. Its foundations were identified in 2013 and measure about 31.6 by 11.5 metres - small beside the Didymaion, but confirmation that Artemis was worshipped alongside her brother at the sanctuary. Only the foundations survive.

The Theater and the Stadium

A Greek theatre came to light in 2010 and 2011, built in the middle of the first century AD with room for somewhere between three and four thousand spectators. A coin minted under Nero, found at the site, helped date it. It is still only partly excavated and the stage building has not been cleared, but the cavea can be walked.

The stadium ran along the southern side of the temple, and the temple's own south steps served as seating for the crowd. It was laid out in the Hellenistic period and stayed in use under the Romans, hosting footraces, wrestling and the athletic contests attached to the sanctuary's festivals. Only sections of it are visible now, but they give a sense of its length.

Excavation continues, so more of the sanctuary is likely to surface. There are also remains of Byzantine churches and chapels in the vicinity, from the centuries after the oracle closed.

Visiting Today

The site is compact and covered on foot in an hour or two, with cafes along its edge. A great deal has been carried away, by looters and by nineteenth and twentieth century excavators alike, but the platform, the tunnels, the sunken court and the standing columns are all in place, and the size of what was attempted is legible on the ground. Didim sits on the coast within easy reach of Miletus, Priene and Kusadasi, and many visitors combine a day of sightseeing with a private gulet charter along the Turkey coast.