Anavarza (Anazarbus) Ancient City

Anavarza, ancient Anazarbus, ranks among the most extensive and least-visited classical ruins in Turkey, spread across the flat Cilician plain of Adana province near Dilekkaya village in Kozan district. The city was founded by the Romans in the 1st century BC and rose to become the capital of the Roman province of Cilicia Secunda in the 4th century AD, a status it held in competition with Tarsus for centuries. The most dramatic surviving structure is a triumphal arch erected in the 2nd century AD, measuring approximately 20 metres in height at its original span and considered among the best-preserved examples of its type in Asia Minor. A colonnaded street once extended more than two kilometres through the city centre; segments of columns and their bases remain visible above ground. The site also preserves the substantial remains of a Roman theatre cut into the hillside, a stadium of the 2nd–3rd century, bath complexes, a nymphaeum, and necropolis tombs scattered across the surrounding fields. In late antiquity, Anazarbus was an important Christian episcopal see and the birthplace of the physician Pedanius Dioscorides, author of De Materia Medica, the foundational pharmacological text of ancient and medieval medicine. The city later served as the political centre of Armenian Cilicia in the 10th and 11th centuries. The ridge-top castle visible above the ruins dates from this Armenian period and was subsequently modified during Crusader campaigns of the 12th and 13th centuries. Today the site is largely unexcavated and freely accessible as an open-air field site in Adana province. Visitors walk among standing column drums, mosaic fragments, and toppled capitals in active agricultural land. The castle above the settlement offers a steep 30-minute climb rewarded by panoramic views across the Cilician plain toward the Taurus Mountains.