Half Day Tour to Asclepion, Red Court, and Archaeological Museum

After departing from the Port of Dikili the first stop will be at the Asclepion of Pergamum, named after Asclepion, god of health, and reached via a sacred road lined with monuments and architectural fragments from antiquity. In this place, in Pergamum, the unhealthy could bath in the water of the sacred spring, and in their dreams Asclepius would appear to tell them how to cure their illness. Archeologists have found lots of gifts that people would make afterwards, such as small terracotta body parts, presumably representing what had been healed. Your next stop will be at the Red courtyard, containing a large temple built using red flat bricks, dedicated to the ancient Egyptian god Serapis in the 2nd century AD. The truly massive red structure, though held at one time to be the house of the Devil, was converted into a church with the rise of Christianity and dedicated to St. Paul. It is uncertain, but suggested that one of the towers of the temple was once used as a synagogue by the Jews.

The last stop of this half-day tour is the Archaeological Museum of Pergamum, which contains just a fraction of the artifacts from the ancient city of Pergamum, If you like, you will have some free time to explore the city before returning to the pier and reboarding the ship.