ADANA
later ANTIOCHEA AD SARUM Cilicia Campestris, Turkey.
In the center of the alluvial plain
at the main crossing of the river Seyhan (Sarus), it is ca.
32 km E of Tarsus. Although the place was almost certainly an important city in Pre-Hellenic times, and would
have been the logical place for Xenophon and the Ten
Thousand to cross over the Sarus, Adana appears first in
literature only in the time of Alexander the Great and
as Antiochea ad Sarum when Cilicia was under the suzerainty of Antiochus Epiphanes in the 2d c. B.C. After
Pompey's victory at Korakesion, Adana was settled by
“reformed” ex-pirates who proved themselves such successful farmers that under the Roman Empire the city
was celebrating “holy ecumenical Dionysia” (Dionysos
Kallikarpos was much venerated in the cities of the fertile Cilician plain). With its occupation by the Parthians
in A.D. 260, Adana lost semiautonomous status, but became a bishopric of Cilicia Prima with the emancipation
of the church. Taken by the Arabs in the 7th c., it was
recaptured for Christendom by Nikephoros Phokas in
964.
Of classical monuments in Adana only the great bridge
over the Sarus, restored by Justinian and recently widened by the Turkish authorities, remains intact. On the
citadel, and wherever foundations are prepared for new
buildings, architectural fragments and mosaic floors of
the ancient city tend to be exposed. Local brickwork is
still Roman in type.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Scylax 101-2; App.
Mith. 96.
Maggiore,
Adana, città dell'Asia Minore (1842); N.
Hammond,
CAH (2d ed. 1961-) XXXVI, 23-24; R. Barnett, “Mopsus,”
JHS 83 (1953) 140-43.
M. GOUGH
