Kale Kapısı, a surviving gate of Antalya's old city walls · Wikimedia Commons

City Walls of Antalya

Moenia Attaleiae

WallLycia et Pamphylia · Kaleiçi, Antalya, TurkeyBuilt 150 BCE

About

Attalus II of Pergamon ringed his new harbor city with defensive walls when he founded Attaleia around 150 BCE, cutting the cliff-top site off from the plain behind it. Roman builders thickened and repaired long stretches after Rome absorbed the city in 133 BCE, adding towers that still shape Kaleiçi's street grid. By 117 CE the walls had guarded the harbor for well over two centuries. Cut stone from this circuit still climbs the cliff above the marina beneath later Byzantine and Seljuk rebuilding.

What happened here

A town wall is a claim as much as a defence. It is faced in stone, cored with rubble and concrete, and pierced by gates that are more decorated than the rest of it put together. Towers project so that anyone at the base can be shot from the side. In most of the empire in this century the walls are old, unmanned, and half built over — shops lean against them and houses are cut into them — because the frontier is a long way off and the danger is not here. On the frontier itself a wall is something else entirely: a continuous barrier with ditches, gates at intervals, patrol tracks and manned turrets, built to control movement rather than to stop an army.