The Architecture of Pergamon, Explained

By All Over InformationUpdated August 10, 20268 min read

Pergamon was the showpiece of Hellenistic architecture, and its genius was the marriage of building and hillside. The Attalid kings built their city on a mountain, terracing the slopes, cutting theatres into the rock, and raising temples, libraries, and palaces on artificial platforms that defied the terrain. Later, the Romans added their own monuments, from the healing sanctuary in the plain to the great brick temple that still dominates the town. This article explains the architecture of Pergamon, from the engineering of the terraces to the details of its most famous buildings.

Building on a Three-Hundred-Meter Hill

The fundamental fact of Pergamene architecture is the mountain. The acropolis rises steeply several hundred meters above the plain, and the Attalids built their city on its summit and its terraced slopes, refusing the easier ground below.

The answer to the terrain was the artificial terrace. The builders cut into the slope, built massive retaining walls of stone, and filled behind them to create level platforms, and on these platforms rose the palaces, temples, and public buildings of the city.

The result was a city that presented itself as a pyramid of architecture: the common quarters and the gymnasium on the lower terraces, the sanctuaries and the library above, and the royal palaces and the temple of Athena at the summit. Pergamon was architecture as monument, visible from the whole valley.

The Theatre: A Steep Cascade of Seats

The theatre of Pergamon is the purest expression of the city’s engineering genius. Built into the natural slope of the hill, its seating rises in tiers that follow the rock, and its angle is the steepest of any surviving ancient theatre.

The seating, around ten thousand places, was partly cut from the living rock and partly built on masonry substructures, and the whole assembly was stabilized by the terrace walls that enclosed it. The stage building stood on the long terrace below, rather than against the seats as in a Greek theatre.

The theatre also had a roofed upper gallery and was linked by a tunnel to the sanctuary of Dionysus. Its architecture is a lesson in how a city built on a cliff turned the cliff itself into a monument.

Pergamon, Turkey — Photo by Christian_Crowd on Pixabay

The Great Altar: The Art of the Terrace

The Great Altar of Zeus, built by Eumenes II, stood on a specially created terrace below the summit, visible from the whole city. Its design was a tour de force: a massive podium raised on five steps, approached by a broad staircase that cut into the front.

The podium carried the famous frieze of the Gigantomachy around its base, while the upper structure, the colonnade and the sacrificial table, stood within. The staircase created the impression of a gateway opening into the sacred space.

The altar was the masterpiece of Pergamene architecture, the fusion of sculpture and building in which the art and the architecture were one. Its terrace, cut into the hill, is still the emotional center of the site, even with the frieze in Berlin.

The Library and the Sanctuary of Athena

The library of Pergamon and the sanctuary of Athena shared the same terrace on the acropolis, a deliberate association of learning and the goddess of wisdom. The sanctuary was a colonnaded court with a small temple at its center.

The library stood at the north side of the sanctuary, its reading rooms and scroll shelves arranged in the colonnade. It held an estimated two hundred thousand volumes, and its architecture, with niches for the rolls and rooms for the scholars, was designed for study and display.

The terrace is one of the best-preserved parts of the acropolis, and walking it, you see how the Attalids gave their city the architecture of knowledge: a library built like a temple, learning given the setting of a sanctuary.

The water systems of Pergamon deserve their own mention, because they were as ambitious as the terraces. The city brought water from the mountains by a series of aqueducts and pipes, some under pressure, that climbed the terrain and fed the fountains, baths, and houses of the acropolis. The pipes, laid in stone channels and crossing the valleys on the arches that still stand in places, carried the water that made life on a mountain possible, and their engineering is one of the quiet triumphs of the site.

The Trajaneum: A Temple on the Summit

The summit of the acropolis was crowned in the Roman period by the Trajaneum, the temple of the emperor Trajan, built in the early second century AD on a high platform that leveled the very top of the hill.

The temple was of the Corinthian order, standing on a podium within a colonnaded court, and its foundations, cut deep into the rock and raised on vaulted substructures, still support the columns that have been re-erected in recent restoration.

The Trajaneum shows the Roman continuation of the Pergamene tradition: the emperors, like the kings, claimed the summit, and the temple of the imperial cult became the crown of the city. Its position, above everything, is its architecture.

The Gymnasium: Terraces of Education

The gymnasium of Pergamon was one of the largest in the ancient world, and its architecture solved the problem of the slope with a series of three great terraces, rising one above the other on massive retaining walls.

The lower terrace served the youngest students, the middle terrace the youths, and the upper terrace held the palaestra, the wrestling ground, and the main hall, with baths and a library attached. Each terrace was a level platform cut into the hillside, linked by stairs.

The gymnasium was the educational heart of the city, and its terraced design allowed the Attalids to give it the scale of a small town. Walking down the terraces today, you descend the grades of an ancient education.

The Lower City and the Roman Additions

The architecture of Pergamon was not confined to the acropolis. The lower city, along the plain and the lower slopes, held the houses, the markets, the sanctuaries, and, in the Roman period, a new set of public buildings.

The Romans added a stadium in the plain, a theatre below the acropolis, baths, and the great temple complex of the Egyptian gods, and they rebuilt the city’s infrastructure with aqueducts and water systems that brought the springs of the mountains to the town.

The most remarkable of the Roman additions is the Red Basilica, the vast brick temple in the modern town, and the Asclepieion, the healing sanctuary two kilometers away. Roman Pergamon spread across the plain, and its architecture carried the Pergamene love of scale into a new age.

The Asclepieion: Architecture of Healing

The Asclepieion, the sanctuary of Asclepius, was a separate architectural world, built around the ideas of healing and retreat. A colonnaded street led from the great gate to the temple, and the buildings were arranged around open courtyards and gardens.

The sanctuary included the incubation hall, where patients slept awaiting the god’s dreams, the sacred spring, the baths, the library, and a small theatre. The most remarkable structure is the underground tunnel through which patients were led to the temple, its architecture designed for the experience of therapy.

The Asclepieion was architecture in the service of medicine, built to calm, to shelter, and to heal. Its green courtyards and running water were part of the prescription, and its design influenced hospitals and spas for centuries.

The Red Basilica: Roman Concrete at Scale

The Red Basilica, the Kizil Avlu, is the most massive surviving structure of Roman Pergamon, a vast temple of Serapis and Isis built in the second century AD in the heart of the lower city.

Its walls are of brick-faced concrete, the Roman material par excellence, and they rise in enormous, windowed masses that dominate the modern street. The temple stood within a great colonnaded court, with subsidiary rotundas at the sides, and a bridge and arches carried processions across the river.

The building was a feat of engineering: the brick vaults, the scale of the concrete, and the foundations in the river plain. It was later converted into a church and then, in part, into a mosque, giving the architecture a continuous life of nearly two thousand years.

Materials and the Pergamene Legacy

The buildings of Pergamon were raised from the materials of the region: the local andesite and limestone for the terraces and the walls, marble from the quarries of the area for the temples and the facades, and brick and concrete for the Roman additions.

The Pergamene architects were masters of the retaining wall, the vault, and the terrace, and their solutions to building on a mountain influenced the architecture of the whole Hellenistic world. The school of Pergamon gave its name to a style: bold, theatrical, and monumental.

The legacy of Pergamon’s architecture is visible across the ancient world, from the terraced sanctuaries of the Aegean to the grand altar in Berlin. Few cities left a clearer signature, and the hill above Bergama still wears it.

Frequently asked questions

How did the Pergamenes build on such a steep hill?

They cut terraces into the slope and supported them with massive retaining walls, filling behind the walls to create level platforms. The theatre was carved into the rock, and the temples stood on artificial platforms. The whole city was a feat of terracing, vaulting, and engineering.

Why is the Pergamon theatre so steep?

Because the architects used the natural slope of the hill as the auditorium, cutting the seating into the rock rather than building it up from level ground. The result was the steepest seating in the ancient world, with the stage on the terrace below, and the hill itself became the building.

What is the Red Basilica in Bergama?

The Red Basilica, or Kizil Avlu, was originally a vast Roman temple of the Egyptian gods Serapis and Isis, built of brick-faced concrete in the second century AD. It was converted into a church in the Byzantine period, and one of its towers now houses a mosque. It is the most massive surviving building of Roman Pergamon.

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