Adramytteion, Ören — the Roman house where the cat and the dog have names

History

Herodotos names Adramytteion in his account of Xerxes’ march of 480 BC, and Xenophon’s Greeks passed it in 401 BC. From the fourth century BC it was an autonomous city minting its own coins, and one of the motifs it put on them was a winged horse. It passed from Lydian to Persian control, then to Alexander after the Granicus, then to Pergamon, and with the Attalid bequest into the Roman province of Asia in 133 BC. Under Rome it was one of the assize centres of the province, a shipbuilding and seafaring town living off the timber of the Kaz and Madra mountains and off two harbours open to the eastern Mediterranean. The Acts of the Apostles record that Paul left Caesarea for Rome in a ship of Adramyttium.

The Byzantine city was a bishopric under Ephesus from the fourth century. It was sacked by the Turkish commander Çaka Bey around 1090 and rebuilt by Eumathios Philokales in 1109, and it fell to the Karasid Turks in the fourteenth century. Archaeology and the written record agree that the site was abandoned in the early fourteenth century, its people dispersing to Edremit and the villages inland. The name went with them. Ören — the Turkish word means simply “ruins” — was resettled only from the 1950s, as a summer-house town, and the ancient city now lies under and between its streets.

The law caught up late. The site was registered in 1975, two years after Turkey’s Antiquities Law no. 1710; the Bursa conservation board fixed its two degrees of protection in 1989 and 1990, which froze building rights across the area. No conservation-led development plan was drawn up for the next twenty-two years, and the site lived under transitional rules while a modern resort grew around it. Planning work and the present excavation both began in 2012.

That excavation opened a roughly nine-thousand-square-metre undeveloped plot in two campaigns. Test trenches showed deep, multi-layered deposits; the second campaign reached a Roman residential quarter. The house is arranged round an atrium with three large halls off it, mosaic floors, frescoed walls, and an unusually complete set of water works: terracotta pipe runs, channels, drains and wet rooms, which the published assessment reads as part of a single architectural plan rather than as later additions. Under it, the foundations of a large Hellenistic building that the Roman builders reused.

The North Hall’s mosaic carries fifteen framed figurative panels in a three-by-five grid inside geometric borders. Among them are birds, a fish, a winged horse, a winged youth possibly to be read as Eros, a feline predator, Medusa and Gorgon heads, and pygmy figures attacking birds. Two panels show a cat and a dog, each with an inscription giving its name: the cat’s is reported as meaning “emerald”, the dog’s as Okyanos, “ocean”. Özgen has drawn two conclusions and offered both as questions rather than answers. The winged horse is the city’s own coin emblem, reappearing in a private house some five hundred years later. The pygmy motif belongs to the North African mosaic repertoire, which in a port trading with the eastern Mediterranean raises the possibility that the owner was a merchant with African connections. The full reading of the mosaics and their inscriptions has been deliberately held back for a separate specialist publication.