Amos Ancient City

Amos is a small but remarkably well-preserved ancient city on the elongated hill of Asarcik, at the headland known as Hisarburnu, or fortress point, above the gulf of Marmaris in Mugla Province. The ruins look down over Kumlubuk bay, a short climb from the resort village of Turunc, and the setting is half the attraction: a walled circuit and a theatre facing out across pine slopes to open sea.

A Rhodian Town in Caria

The name Amos, Greek Amos, is usually connected with ammos, meaning sandy. The city was a settlement of ancient Caria and belonged to the Rhodian Peraia, the belt of mainland territory that Rhodes governed as an extension of the island state. Its people were counted among the kherronesioi, the people of the peninsula, most likely the Loryma peninsula to the south, and the Doric-dialect inscriptions found on the site confirm the Rhodian connection. Epigraphic finds also point to a particular link with Lindos on Rhodes itself. In the fifth century BC Amos was drawn into the Delian League along with the other Rhodian territories.

By about 200 BC the town had a board of officials called hieromnamones, literally sacred rememberers, whose job was to keep the community's legal agreements. Some of those agreements survive. Lease contracts of the second century BC, cut into stone and recovered during work at the site in 1948, record how sacred land was rented out and give an unusually direct view of the local economy roughly 2,200 years ago. Amos went on functioning through the Hellenistic period and into the Eastern Roman centuries.

What Survives on the Hill

The circuit wall is the first thing a visitor meets. Built in coursed polygonal masonry, dated on stylistic grounds to the fourth century BC, it stands three to four metres high on the northern slope and is roughly 1.8 metres thick. Five towers survive, most of them solid rather than chambered, and a single gate pierces the northern stretch.

Inside, the theatre is the set piece. It seated somewhere around 1,300 spectators, and of the three Greek theatres known in the Rhodian Peraia it is the only one where remains of both the skene, the stage building, and the orchestra can still be made out. A fragmentary altar to Dionysos was found lying in the orchestra by the British topographer George Bean in 1948.

Close by are the foundations of a small temple in antis with a pronaos, measuring 6.8 by 13.8 metres. Inscriptions identify its deity as Apollo Samnaios, an epithet that is not attested anywhere else in the Greek world, making him a purely local version of the god. Steps belonging to the agora have been traced as well, and the necropolis lies just outside the walls to the north, with rock-cut tombs and inscribed fragments among the trees.

Excavation and Visiting Today

Amos was declared a first-degree archaeological site on 14 October 1978. Systematic surface survey began in 2019 under Associate Professor Mehmet Gurbuzer of Mugla Sitki Kocman University and was subsequently upgraded to a full excavation. In January 2024 the team reported ten Rhodian amphorae of the second century BC, one of them intact and the rest in fragments, found beside a thermopolium, an ancient food and drink counter, immediately east of the theatre.

A paved path now climbs through the ruins to a viewing platform above the bay, and the walk from the road takes only a few minutes, though it is uphill all the way. Kumlubuk and Turunc beaches lie directly below, which is why a stop here fits so easily into a day of chartering a gulet from Marmaris: an hour among the walls and the theatre, then straight back down to the water.