Pergamon and the Asclepion: Healing and Power in Ancient Turkey

Two thousand years before spa retreats and wellness clinics became a travel industry of their own, the sick and the anxious climbed a hillside above the Bakırçay plain in western Anatolia hoping a dream might tell them how to get better. That hillside belonged to Pergamon, a Hellenistic capital that rivalled Alexandria for scholarship, and its Asclepion, a healing sanctuary so respected that Roman emperors travelled to visit it. On Day 19 of Odyssey Traveller’s 21-day Discover Turkey tour, travellers spend a morning exploring both sites before continuing on to ancient Troy, tracing the arc of a city that moved from imperial ambition to medical innovation within the same set of hills.

A City Built on Ambition: Pergamon Under the Attalids

Pergamon’s rise began with an act of opportunism. Around 282 BC, a commander named Philetaerus, who had been entrusted with a war chest by Lysimachus, one of Alexander the Great’s successor generals, used that fortune to establish his own line of rulers instead. His descendants, the Attalid dynasty, spent the next century and a half turning a fortified hilltop into one of the great intellectual centres of the ancient Mediterranean.

The dynasty’s high point came under Eumenes II, who ruled from 197 to 159 BC. He commissioned the Great Altar of Zeus and Athena, a monumental structure carved with a frieze depicting the mythical battle between gods and giants — a none-too-subtle celebration of the Attalids’ own victories over invading Galatian tribes. The altar was excavated by German archaeologists in the 19th century and now stands, reconstructed, in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, which means visitors to the acropolis today see the platform it once crowned rather than the altar itself. Eumenes also built the Library of Pergamon, which grew to rival the great library of Alexandria. According to ancient tradition, Alexandria’s rulers grew so anxious about the competition that they banned papyrus exports to Pergamon — forcing local scribes to perfect a treated animal-skin writing surface known as pergamena, the origin of the word “parchment.”

Above the library and altar terraces sits the theatre, cut so steeply into the hillside that it remains the steepest surviving theatre from the ancient world, with room for roughly 10,000 spectators across 78 rows.

Standing on the Acropolis Today

The acropolis rewards travellers willing to take in the whole layout rather than a single ruin. From the highest terraces, the ground drops away sharply toward the plain below, and it’s easy to see why the Attalids chose this particular ridge for their capital — it is as much a defensive statement as an architectural one. Walking the site today, you move through the footprint of the royal palace, the temple terraces, the library foundations, and the theatre in a single sweep, with each level revealing a different facet of how a Hellenistic court organised itself: religion and politics near the summit, learning just below it, and public spectacle carved into the slope beneath. Pergamon was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2014, recognised specifically for this layered, multi-period landscape rather than any one monument alone.

The Asclepion: Where Medicine Met Mythology

A short distance from the acropolis, at the base of the hill, lies a very different kind of ancient complex. The Asclepion was founded in the 4th century BC around a natural spring, dedicated to Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, and it grew over the following centuries into one of the most respected medical centres in the ancient world — second in reputation only to the sanctuary at Epidaurus in Greece.

Treatment at the Asclepion combined ritual and what we would now recognise as early clinical practice. New arrivals were assessed by priest-physicians, then underwent a purification process of ritual bathing before being permitted to enter the sanctuary itself. There were strict exclusions: those close to death were turned away, as were pregnant women, since the site’s association with healing could not risk an association with death or the dangers of childbirth. Patients then spent the night in dedicated sleeping rooms, a practice known as incubation, in the hope of receiving a diagnostic dream. In the morning, they described what they had dreamed to the resident priest-physicians, who used the account to prescribe treatment — a fascinating blend of psychology and medicine that modern scholars have connected to the origins of psychiatric care.

Galen and the Practice of Ancient Medicine

The Asclepion’s most famous figure was born, not just treated, in Pergamon. Galen, who went on to become one of the most influential physicians in Western medical history, began his career here in the 2nd century AD tending to wounded gladiators — grim but effective training in anatomy and trauma, since dissection of human cadavers was not permitted at the time. That early experience shaped a career that eventually took him to Rome, where he served as physician to the emperor Marcus Aurelius and produced medical texts that remained standard references in Europe for well over a thousand years.

The treatments practised at the Asclepion in Galen’s era went well beyond dream interpretation. Physicians prescribed diet regimens, therapeutic massage, hot and cold mud baths, herbal remedies, and — in keeping with ancient medical theory more broadly — bloodletting. The sacred spring at the centre of the complex, still flowing today, was later found to have mildly radioactive properties, which may explain some of the site’s ancient reputation for producing genuine physical improvement in visitors who drank or bathed in its waters.

The Sacred Way and the Tunnel of Whispers

Patients approached the Asclepion along the Via Tecta, or Sacred Way, a covered processional road lined with shops selling votive offerings, which led through a monumental gateway into the sanctuary courtyard.

Once inside, the most striking piece of ancient engineering awaited patients below ground: a 70-metre vaulted tunnel connecting the sleeping quarters to the treatment building, its ceiling pierced with small openings so that dripping water created an ambient sound as patients walked through in near darkness. At the tunnel’s end stood the Temple of Telesphorus, a two-storey circular building dedicated to the minor god of convalescence, whose design — a round plan with radiating chambers — is thought to have influenced the later construction of the Pantheon in Rome.

Visiting Pergamon and the Asclepion Today

The acropolis and the Asclepion sit roughly three kilometres apart, on opposite sides of the modern town of Bergama, so visiting both in a single day — as travellers do on Day 19 of the Ancient Turkey tour — means a reasonable amount of walking on uneven terrain, consistent with the tour’s Level 2 (Moderate) rating. A cable car now carries visitors up to the acropolis itself, easing what was once a steep uphill walk, though the site remains best explored slowly, with time to take in the theatre, the temple terraces, and the sweeping views before descending to the very different atmosphere of the Asclepion below.

Pergamon sits within Week 3 of Odyssey’s itinerary, following visits to the mountain village of Şirince and preceding the day’s continuation to ancient Troy and, not long after, the battlefields of Gallipoli. For the full route from Istanbul through Cappadocia to the Dardanelles, our complete Ancient Turkey itinerary guide lays out the pacing and logic behind the whole 21-day journey.

Few places compress quite so much of the ancient world’s ambition — political, intellectual and medical — into a single hillside. Standing where Eumenes II once looked out over his kingdom, or walking the tunnel that carried the hopeful toward Galen’s predecessors, gives a physical sense of history that no photograph quite manages. It’s the kind of morning best experienced with a guide who can point out what the ruins alone won’t tell you, and with a small group unhurried enough to actually stop and look.