Labranda Ancient Ruins

Labraunda is a Carian sanctuary of Zeus in the mountains above Milas, in Mugla Province — roughly 13 to 14 kilometres north-northeast of the town, at around 650 to 700 metres. It was never a city. It was the sacred precinct of Mylasa, reached from it by a paved processional road, and in the middle of the 4th century BC the ruling Hecatomnid dynasty rebuilt it on a scale nothing else in Caria matched. The site lies in the territory of the village of Kargicak, with Ortakoy the other settlement nearby.

The God and the Name

The name comes from labrys, the double-headed axe. The word is Lydian or Carian rather than Greek — Plutarch states flatly that labrys is the Lydian word for axe — and the place name is usually read as the site of the sacred labrys. The god worshipped here is Zeus Labraundos, also called Zeus Stratios, shown standing with a tall lotus-tipped sceptre upright in his left hand and the double axe over his right shoulder, as he appears on Hecatomnid and Mylasan coinage.

Herodotus records that the Carians, beaten in the field, fell back on the grove of plane trees sacred to Zeus Stratios at Labraunda. Plane trees still stand on the site.

The Hecatomnids

The monumental sanctuary is the work of Mausolus, satrap of Caria from 377/6 to 353/2 BC, and of his brother and successor Idrieus, who ruled from 351/0 to 344/3 BC. This is Late Classical building rather than Hellenistic — it comes before the Hellenistic period, not during it — and the interest of it lies in the mixture. Ionic and Doric elements sit alongside Achaemenid ones, the work of a satrapal court that answered to Persia and built in Greek.

What Stands There

The hieron, the sacred precinct, is laid out on a series of artificial terraces climbing the hillside.

• Temple of Zeus Labraundos — a peripteral Ionic temple of six by eight columns, roughly 25 by 16 metres, built around an earlier and much smaller 5th-century cella that was left standing inside it. The architrave has two fasciae rather than the usual three and carries a dedication by Idrieus son of Hecatomnus, of Mylasa, to Zeus Labraundos.
• Androns A and B — near-identical monumental banqueting halls, A dedicated by Idrieus and B by Mausolus, with niches for statues of the dynasty. Their facades are the architectural surprise of the site: Ionic columns some eleven metres tall carrying a Doric entablature. A third, Andron C, was added later.
• The stoas and the Oikoi — east, west, north and south stoas frame the terraces, and the Oikoi building was another of Idrieus's dedications.
• The propylaea — two marble Ionic gateways on the southeast side. The South Propylon, built by Idrieus around 340 BC, has two columns of about 5.4 metres front and back and marks the end of the processional road; the East Propylon stands on a higher terrace above the East Stoa.

Around and above these are the Doric House, a built tomb, Roman baths, Byzantine churches and burial grounds, and a fortified acropolis. The sanctuary went on being used for centuries after the dynasty that built it had gone.

The Sacred Way

Mylasa and Labraunda were joined by a paved processional road about 13 kilometres long and seven and a half to eight metres wide, built by cutting and filling wherever the ground demanded it, with spring houses along the route for those walking up. Stretches of it survive. This is the road the processions took; the modern approach is a car from Milas.

Excavation

The Swedish Institute at Athens excavated Labraunda between 1948 and 1953. Axel W. Persson began the work and died suddenly in 1951, after which Gosta Saflund took it over. Alfred Westholm published the architecture of the hieron in 1963, and Pontus Hellstrom and then Lars Karlsson carried the Swedish mission on into the 2000s. Olivier Henry has directed the excavation since 2013, with Ipek Dagli co-director since 2019 and Cem Ardil since 2022.

The finds run to bronze figurines, pottery, coins, glass, terracottas, sculpture including the Labraunda sphinxes, and inscriptions. The inscriptions matter most: they are what fixes who built what, and when.

Visiting

Labraunda receives a fraction of the visitors that Ephesus or Pamukkale do, which is a good part of its appeal — you can have a terrace to yourself on a weekday. The site is large, spread across its terraces, and covering it means a steady climb on uneven ground, so proper footwear matters. Allow more time than its footprint on a map suggests.

Milas is the natural base for a visit, and the sanctuary sits high enough to run several degrees cooler than the coast in August. That is a reasonable argument for giving up a day at sea to the mountains when chartering a gulet in Turkey in high summer, and Euromos, Iasos and Stratonikeia are close enough to add to the same drive.