Aphrodisias, Turkey: The City of Sculptors and the Goddess of Love

Long before marble became a byword for European sculpture, the workshops of Aphrodisias were shipping finished statues across the Roman world. The city sat on a seam of fine-grained white and blue-grey marble, and the artisans who worked it built a reputation so strong that signed pieces from Aphrodisias turn up in museums from Rome to Istanbul. On our small group tour of Ancient Turkey, a day is set aside here specifically because so few Roman-era cities have left this much intact — the stadium, the baths, the sculptors’ workshops, and the goddess’s sanctuary all still readable on the ground.

A City Named for a Goddess

Aphrodisias takes its name directly from Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, and the temple built in her honour was the reason the city grew wealthy in the first place. Pilgrims and patrons travelled here specifically to visit the sanctuary, and that steady traffic of the devout and the well-connected turned a modest Carian settlement into one of the more prosperous cities of Roman Asia Minor. The temple itself, later converted into a Christian basilica in the fifth century as the empire’s religious loyalties shifted, still stands with a row of its columns intact — a rare case of a pagan sanctuary’s footprint surviving its repurposing almost undisturbed.

What set Aphrodisias apart from other wealthy provincial cities, though, wasn’t devotion alone. The surrounding hills held deposits of fine white and blue-grey marble, quarried in significant quantities from at least the first century BCE. That combination — a prestigious cult centre and an on-site supply of high-quality stone — gave the city both the motive and the material to become something unusual: a genuine centre of artistic production, not just consumption.

The School of Sculptors

Roman sources and the archaeological record agree on this much: Aphrodisias ran something close to a formal school of sculpture, and its output was recognised as distinctive enough that patrons across the empire sought it out by name. Signed works by Aphrodisian sculptors have been found as far afield as Rome itself, which was no small thing in a period when most provincial workshops produced anonymously for local markets. The sculptors here worked in a polished, classicising style, often copying or reinterpreting earlier Greek originals for Roman clients who wanted the prestige of classical form without travelling to Athens to commission it.

The workshops themselves have been excavated near the site’s south agora, complete with unfinished pieces abandoned mid-carving — a rough-blocked head here, a half-emerged torso there. These unfinished statues are, in some ways, more informative than the polished ones on display in the museum: they show the actual sequence of carving a Roman portrait bust or a mythological figure from a raw marble block, a level of technical detail that finished works simply don’t reveal.

Walking the Ruins Today

The single most striking structure at Aphrodisias is its stadium, and it’s worth pausing on just how rare a survival this is. Built to seat around 35,000 spectators, it’s considered the best-preserved stadium of its kind anywhere in the ancient world — longer than most Roman stadia, with both curved ends (rather than the single curved end typical of the type) still largely intact. Standing at either end, it’s possible to trace the full oval of tiered seating in a way that simply isn’t available at better-known sites like Ephesus or Olympia.

Beyond the stadium, the Hadrianic Baths — commissioned in honour of the emperor Hadrian, who passed through the region on one of his extensive tours of the eastern provinces — give a clear sense of how a prosperous provincial elite bathed, socialised, and conducted business. The site’s theatre, agora, and bouleuterion (council house) round out a city plan that’s unusually legible for a visitor without specialist training: it’s genuinely possible to walk from civic space to bathing complex to performance venue and understand how each related to the others.

One structure worth deliberately seeking out is the Tetrapylon, a monumental gateway that once marked the ceremonial approach to the Temple of Aphrodite from the north. Reconstructed by archaeologists from its original fallen elements, it stands as four rows of four columns, its pediments carved with reliefs of Eros hunting and the goddess herself emerging from the sea. It’s a reminder that this was, first and foremost, a pilgrimage route — the sculptors’ workshops and the civic buildings grew up around a sanctuary, not the other way around.

The Archaeological Museum

Much of what makes Aphrodisias exceptional isn’t scattered across the open site at all — it’s concentrated in the on-site Archaeological Museum, purpose-built to house the sheer volume of statuary the excavations have produced since digging began in earnest in the 1960s under New York University’s Kenan Erim. The museum’s collection includes numerous depictions of Aphrodite herself, portrait busts of emperors and local worthies, and, most remarkably, the surviving reliefs from the Sebasteion — a temple complex dedicated to the Julio-Claudian emperors, whose decorated porticoes once carried more than 200 relief panels depicting mythological scenes and personifications of the peoples of the Roman world.

Seeing this scale of sculptural output in one place — much of it produced within a few hundred metres of where it now stands — makes the city’s reputation as a centre of production concrete in a way that reading about it never quite manages.

Aphrodisias in Context

On the tour, Aphrodisias falls roughly two-thirds of the way through the 21-day itinerary, reached by road from Pamukkale on the drive toward the Aegean coast near Kuşadası. By this stage, travellers have generally already visited Konya and its Seljuk caravanserai, and stood in the vast, flat expanse of Çatalhöyük, one of the earliest known proto-cities anywhere in the world. Seeing Aphrodisias after those two stops gives a useful sense of how much changed across the millennia this itinerary covers — from Neolithic mudbrick settlement, to Seljuk trade infrastructure, to a fully realised Roman provincial city with its own school of named sculptors.

For anyone assembling their own picture of the trip before departure, our complete Turkey travel guide lays out the full 21-day route from Istanbul to Gallipoli, with Aphrodisias as one stop among several equally distinctive ones.

Visiting Practicalities for Mature Travellers

The site is largely flat and walkable, though the ground underfoot is uneven in places — a mix of packed earth paths and low stone thresholds rather than the paved walkways found at some more heavily managed sites. Solid, closed walking shoes are worth the extra weight in your case. The museum offers welcome shade and seating during the warmer months, and the stadium’s tiered seating, while safe to view from ground level, isn’t something to climb without good footing and a steady pace. As with the rest of the itinerary, the pace here is unhurried by design, with time built in to sit, look, and let the scale of the place settle in rather than rushing from one ruin to the next.

Few sites make the mechanics of Roman-era art production this visible — the quarry, the workshop, the unfinished block, and the finished statue, all within walking distance of each other. It’s a city that rewards slowing down, which is exactly the pace our Ancient Turkey small group tour is built around, whether you’re travelling with a partner or joining, as many of our guests do, as a solo traveller.