Trebenna Antik Kenti

About Trebenna Antik Kenti

Trebenna stands 32 km west of Antalya on the northern foot of Sivridağ, on a projecting hilltop surrounded by rock outcrops. It is reached by a forest road through the villages of Geyikbayırı and Çağlarca. Thought of as the last line of defence for the coastal towns of the western Antalya plain, its original Luwian name appears to have been Trebewana, meaning land of Trebe. No evidence has been found for Trebenna before the Hellenistic period, though its land is expected to have shared the Ptolemaic rule that an inscription records at Termessos in the early 3rd century BC, and it may have fallen within the territory Pergamon took after the Peace of Apamea. The 3rd century AD was a prosperous time for the city: Emperor Gordian III granted it, like many Lycian cities, the right to mint coins. Officially within the province of Lycia in Roman times, it appears in the Byzantine period as a city of Pamphylia. The visible parts of the city walls date from the Byzantine era. The acropolis rocks hold many rock-cut rooms, some used as houses and some as tombs, and some first as tombs and later as houses; the finest faces the acropolis entrance. Roman buildings occupy the flat ground between the acropolis and Sivritepe, where an ekklesiasterion, a sebasteion and a stoa line the west side of the civic square and a bath on the slope of the Elmin necropolis closes its south side. In the Byzantine period the settlement withdrew to the walled acropolis, and Trebenna remained a Byzantine town until the late 12th century AD. It is thought to have been abandoned when the Antalya region passed to the Turks in the early 13th century. Trebenna is one of the Lycian ancient cities proposed for the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2009. The Culture Portal says it can be reached by private vehicle.