ITINERARY

• According to your pick up time, meet with your guide and depart for Pergamum which had a principal place of its own in all of Asia. The city was the capital of the most magnificent Kingdom that existed in this region. The city is situated 100 km north of Izmir, and the historian Pliny named it: "By far the most famous city in all of Asia". The reason for this importance was when John wrote his Letter, Pergamum had been a capital city for nearly four hundred years. After the mythical times, Pergamum had already been the scene of several cultures, ranging from the Stone and Bronze Ages up until the Classical and Archaic Periods. Among the palaces, temples and agora’s, the Asclepion, which was constructed in one century, belonged to the Parchment Library and the big Zeus Altar. They stand as the most magnificent works of art of the third and fourth century B.C. in Anatolia. The Parchment Library contained the most famous collection of books from that time and written on a type of processed goat and lambskins. This was a process that was invented in Pergamum when the leaders of Ptolemean Egypt stopped the export of Egyptian papyrus sheets to Pergamum. Other grand buildings of this period are the Temple of Athena and those of Demeter and Dionysos.
• After lunch, we will continue to Asclepion known under the name of "The Pergamum God of Health". In ancient times there was in this part of the world three popular religious shrines and holy places. They were the Artemisia of Ephesus, the Apollo cult of Delphi and that of Asclepius Pergamum. Asclepius the deity health and medicine served the people for several hundred years; thus making Pergamum a medical centre of very great importance. Famous medical Scholar including Hippocrates and Galenus were born in Pergamum and worked there.