Kozak Granite Quarries

Marmor Misium

QuarryAsia · Kozak Plateau, near Bergama, Izmir Province, TurkeyBuilt 150 BCE

About

Cutters in the granite hills above Pergamon worked a mottled pink-and-black stone that masons shaped into columns and paving slabs for building projects across the Mediterranean. Local crews had opened the outcrops by the late Hellenistic kingdom of Pergamon, and large-scale export to Rome and other imperial cities took off around the end of the 1st century CE. Modern geologists still call the stone Marmor Misium, after Mysia, the ancient region surrounding these quarries.

What happened here

The rock is worked in benches from the top down, so that gravity does the moving. Channels are cut around a block with a pick, then it is split from the bed with iron wedges driven into a line of holes, sometimes with wooden wedges soaked to swell. Blocks are dressed roughly on the spot — no one hauls waste — and marked with the quarry, the gang, the date and the consular year, which is how the empire keeps track of what it owns. Sledges, rollers and ox teams take them to a river or the sea, because moving stone overland is the expensive part. Fine marbles are imperial monopolies. Abandoned faces still show the last unfinished cut, stopped mid-job and never resumed.