The next morning found us back in our local U-Bahn station. Our intention was to visit the Pergamon Museum, located (like the Neues Museum and the Berliner Dom) on the Museumsinsel. This being the case, we had another look at the same subway stations we’d seen the day before. We got off at the same one, crossed the same bridge over the Spree, walked past the front of the Neues Museum and followed signs through a construction area to the entrance of the Pergamon Museum.

The city of Pergamon, located in the far west of what is now Turkey, not far from the site of the fabled city of Troy, was the capital of the kingdom of Pergamon, which existed from 282 to 133 B.C. Before the kingdom was established, its territory was owned by Greeks and Persians, and after the kingdom had lived out its years, it became the property (like pretty much everything else) of the Roman Empire. For awhile the kingdom enjoyed a certain amount of glory, as a result of choosing its friends well (mainly Rome), during wars against Macedon. Pergamon acquired some wealth and some power, and found itself aspiring to be like some of the more famous cities of the ancient world. A library was established which became second in reputation only to the library at Alexandria in Egypt. Parchment was invented for this library, as an alternative to papyrus. A hill in the city was repurposed as Pergamon’s very own Acropolis, modeled after the more well-known Acropolis in Athens. The hill was terraced, and a number of monumental structures were built, including the library.

After some good years under Roman rule, things turned south for Pergamon. Earthquakes and Goths happened, as did sackings by other invading armies. Pergamon became less important and was eventually largely forgotten. The ruins of the structures remained on top of the hill, and the locals sometimes used the stone for other purposes, including for structures of their own, or sometimes just for burning, in order to extract lime. In the 19th Century, this is where the Germans came in.

In the 1860s a German engineer named Carl Humann came across the ruins on the Pergamon Acropolis and urged their preservation, seeing that they were in danger. Some fragments of a frieze were sent to Berlin; they were added to the collection at the Altes Museum but did not otherwise receive any special attention. Not until 1877, anyway, when a man named Alexander Conze became the new director of the sculpture collection at the Berlin museums. Conze saw a connection between the frieze fragments and a description in an ancient text of a large altar at Pergamon.

Anxious for the newly-united Germany to make its mark in the archeological world, the museum leaders set in motion a major excavation effort at the Pergamon Acropolis, in cooperation with the Ottoman Empire, whose territory included Turkey at the time. It was agreed that the unearthed fragments would be sent to Germany and become part of the antiquities collection of the Berlin museums.

The fragments received in Berlin were initially displayed in the already-crowded Altes Museum. This was not an ideal way of displaying the pieces in any kind of coherent fashion, so it was decided that a museum should be built specifically for display of the Pergamon artifacts. A museum was built in the final years of the 19th Century, and was opened in 1901. As it turned out the new museum was too small; there was also a problem with its foundation, so the museum had to be demolished in 1908. Construction of a more appropriate museum started, but there were delays caused by World War I and the many problems (including hyperinflation) that occurred in the post-war years. But the new museum was finally completed and opened in 1930. World War II brought its own problems (the altar fragments were removed and kept in safer places, but many were discovered and “liberated” by the Red Army, and found their way to the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad), but by the 1990s most of the fragments had been reunited at the museum. At this point an extensive restoration was found to be necessary, as the previous restoration involved some measures (e.g. iron clamps which had started to rust) which were now becoming dangerous to the artifacts. The restoration was lengthy and expensive, but the results were unveiled in 2004. The country of Turkey has asked that the artifacts (and others) be returned to them, but the viewpoint of Germany (and the bulk of the international community) has been that a deal’s a deal. The foundation of the altar remains in Turkey, along with some wall fragments and some frieze fragments that were found later.

The Pergamon Museum is arranged so that the first thing a visitor sees is the reconstructed western façade of the Pergamon Altar. The Altar was a monumental structure, 117 feet in width (the central stairway of the western face occupies 65 feet of this) and 27 feet in height. The Altar was roughly square in shape, but no attempt has been made to rebuild the entire structure beyond the western façade.

There are two extensive friezes associated with the Altar, and attempts have been made to reconstruct both of them, though many pieces are damaged or missing. The larger of the two once wrapped around the base of the Altar (interrupted by the stairway), and is 370 feet long. As the entire Altar has not been reconstructed, the portions that were not on the western façade have been arranged around the interior of the large room in front of the façade. This frieze is known as the Gigantomachy frieze, and depicts a great deal of fighting between Greek gods and the reptilian-footed giants that were children of the primordial goddess Gaia. It is the second-longest surviving frieze from Greek antiquity, after the frieze from the Parthenon in Athens.





One has to climb the wide stairway to see the second frieze, which is arranged around the inside of a room at the top, as it is thought to have been when first constructed.

This frieze depicts the life of the mythological Greek hero Telephus, a son of Heracles (the Greek name for Hercules), and the legendary founder of the city of Pergamon. There are many variations on the story, but it goes roughly like this:

A king named Aleus is told by an oracle that he will someday be overthrown by his grandson. He doesn’t have a grandson yet, but he has a daughter named Auge, so he makes her a virginal priestess of Athena and sends her off to a temple. One day the hero Heracles happens to be passing through, and nine months later Auge gives birth to a son named Telephus. Aleus is not pleased, and sets both Auge and Telephus adrift in separate small boats to die. Except they don’t die – Auge lands in a kingdom called Mysia, and is adopted by its king, while Telephus is found and rescued by Heracles, who has him raised by nymphs.


Telephus grows up and eventually goes off to seek his fortune. He lands in Mysia (of all places), and helps the king win a battle. The king is grateful, and gives Telephus his adopted daughter to marry. The wedding takes place, but on the wedding night Auge and Telephus somehow become aware that they are mother and son (there are different versions of how this happens), and the marriage is undone in the nick of time. Instead Telephus marries an amazon named Hiera and eventually becomes the king of Mysia.

One day a Greek army on its way to Troy passes through Mysia, and they somehow start fighting with the Mysians. The wife of Telephus is killed, and Telephus kills the king of Thebes. The greek hero Achilles wounds Telephus with the help of the god Dionysus, inflicting a wound that won’t heal. Telephus consults an oracle, who tells him that Achilles can heal the wound. Telephus goes to Achilles in Argos and tells him how to get to Troy, and in return his wound is healed.


There is more (including Telephus killing his grandfather in battle), but this isn’t depicted in the frieze as it exists in Berlin. Instead, there are some panels depicting the founding of cults in Pergamon.

Back down the stairs and to the right of the room with the Altar is a room with miscellaneous artifacts from the Greek Hellenistic period, including some from the Pergamon Acropolis.




Crossing back through the room with the Pergamon Altar and through a door on the opposite side of the room, one enters a room housing another monumental structure, the Miletus Market Gate.

Miletus was another city on the Turkish west coast, located to the south of Pergamon, at the mouth of the Meander River. The Market Gate was built in the 2nd Century A.D., when the region was under Roman rule, probably during the reign of the emperor Hadrian. It’s 98 feet wide and 52 feet tall. The gate was destroyed by an earthquake in the 10th or 11th Century A.D., and the city of Miletus was abandoned a few centuries later, as the silting up of the Meander made Miletus an inland city and no longer a port (it’s now about six miles from the coastline). German excavation of the area took place from 1899 to 1911, and fragments of the gate were sent back to Berlin. After a demonstration involving models, Kaiser Wilhelm II himself ordered that the gate be reconstructed in the new Pergamon Museum that was being planned at the time. This reconstruction occurred from 1925 to 1929, late in the museum construction process. There were not enough fragments to complete a structure that would stand on its own, so modern materials were used in places, particularly in the base and lower level of the gate. The gate suffered some damage during and immediately following World War II, and a number of restorations have taken place since then, most recently from 2005-2008.



Across from the Market Gate, in the same room, were fragments from a Jupiter Sanctuary and a balcony built from pieces from a funerary monument for a Roman Priestess.


In the Market Gate there were three doorways. The doorways on the left and on the right were blocked off, so we passed through the one in the center, and …