ANEMURIUM
(Eski Anamur) later ISAURIA Rough Cilicia, Turkey.
On the E flank of Cape
Anamur, southernmost point of Asia Minor, a mere
64 km from Cyprus. Historical references are few but
its existence in Hellenistic times is certain (
Livy 33.20).
Tacitus mentions an abortive siege in A.D. 52 by the
native Cietae (
Ann. 12.55.2), and a similar threat from
inland Isaurians probably accounts for the restoration
of the seawall by Matronianus, Comes Isauriae in A.D.
382, mentioned in an inscription. A significant road station and port of call, Anemurium appears constantly
in topographic works from Skylax to mediaeval portolans, which refer to it as Stallimur. The coin series extends from Antiochos IV of Commagene to Valerian, but
the city's prosperity continued till the mid 7th c. when
it was largely, if not wholly, abandoned, probably as a
result of the Arab occupation of Cyprus. Sometime in
the 12th c. the site was in part reoccupied and the
citadel rebuilt as a stronghold of little Armenia, but
evidence of a subsequent Seljuk or Ottoman presence is
lacking.
The city is divided into an upper citadel and a lower
town. The former occupies the actual cape, protected on
three sides by steep cliffs and on the landward side by
a wall with towers and zigzag reentrants. Both the fortifications and the structures within are of mediaeval date,
but masonry of Hellenistic character is visible in places.
Covering an area at least 1500 m long from N to S and
400 m wide, the lower town is bounded on the S by the
fortification wall of the citadel, on the E by a seawall,
still standing in places, and on the W by the higher of
two aqueducts constructed on the slopes of the promontory. Only to the N, where the ruins lie buried in sand
dunes, are the limits uncertain.
The most striking feature is the necropolis rising up
the hillside in the NW quarter of the site. It consists of
some 350 individual numbered tombs, dating from the
1st c. A.D. to the early 4th c. They were built in fairly
coarse manner of local gray limestone; the interiors
were decorated with painted plaster and mosaic. The
simplest examples consist of barrel-vaulted chambers
on stone platforms with arcosolia along three walls, but
other types have developed well beyond this nucleus to
incorporate anterooms, side-halls for funerary banquets,
second stories, and small courtyards.
In the city proper the principal monuments still recognizable above ground are mainly at the S end of the
city and include a large theater, an odeon-bouleuterion,
an apsed exedra, perhaps belonging to a basilica, three
large baths, and traces of a colonnaded street traversing
the city from N to S. Since 1965 two of the baths and the
odeon have been cleared and restored. Fine mosaic floors
have appeared in both buildings and, most recently, in a
palaestra attached to the largest baths. This consists of
an open piazza almost 1000 sq m in extent, floored entirely with mosaic of geometric design. None of the
structures so far studied in the city appears earlier than
the late 2d c. A.D. Buildings of later date include several
churches and a small, but well-preserved, bath with
mosaic floor of complex design. Finds, for the most part
Late Roman or Early Byzantine, are deposited in the
Alanya Museum.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Annual reports in
TürkArkDerg from
1965; E. Rosenbaum et al.,
A Survey of Coastal Cities
in Western Cilicia (1967)
MPI; E. Alföldi-Rosenbaum,
The Necropolis of Anemurium (1971).
J. RUSSELL
