Old Smyrna (Greek Παλαιὰ Σμύρνα, Palaia Smyrna, Turkish Eski Smyrna) is an ancient Greek exonym first known to have been applied by Strabo (14.1.37) to a city of the endonym Σμύρνα, Smyrna. It had existed at the same location on the Bay of Smyrna, Turkey, since prehistoric times. Old Smyrna experienced what was termed dioecism (dioikismos), the removal of a city from its subordinate constituents, the reverse of synoecism, at the hands of its Lydian conquerors under their king, Alyattes, in 585 BC, in the Archaic Period of Greece. It is mentioned by Herodotus (1.16.2). Such a procedure, which was standard among the ancient Greeks, razes the center of the city and distributes the population to komai, or "villages," (where they may have lived anyway). Apparently they did not suffer andrapodismos, the massacre of the men and the sale of the women and children into slavery, but were allowed to live komedon, "in villages," albeit without a polis of their own.
The remains of Old Smyrna are known from several excavations in the neighborhood of Beyraki, İzmir. Its development can be traced for over 700 years. According to ancient sources, Smyrna was founded by Aeolians, but later conquered by Colophon and was therefore regarded as an Ionian city.Herodotus, Histories 1, 149 Having become part of the Lydian empire in 585 BC, its territory became part of the Achaemenid Empire in 545 BC. Around 330 BC, the rulers of Macedon synoecised a new city from the villages of the old including any that had been founded since then.The history is summarized in
The main difference besides the demographic changes of time is that a new site was chosen for the asty, or political center, about from the previous. Other than that it cannot be said that the polis was relocated. It had all the villages it would have had, had it not been dioecized. The old asty became a municipal unit of the new city. The ancients did not use the term new, however. Moderns have chosen it in opposition to Strabo's old, and politically there was a new city. The ancient sources chose to regard it as the same Smyrna. Only in 1930 did the more recent population break away from the ancient name, substituting the Turkish form, İzmir, instead. For all that, İzmir is derived from Smyrna.
Localization Locality problems There are a number of difficulties with the Strabo passage. Smyrna is razed and un-synoecized in 585 BC not to be reassembled for 400 years, which would be 185 BC. This reassembly, presumably of the villages, must be another synoecism. Different synoecisms create different cities, yet Strabo considers them in some way the same Smyrna, despite the distinction of one being "old." This turn of the phrase is far-fetched, as after 400 years neither the people nor their material objects can be the same in any significant way, any more than the city of New York continues York, England. İzmir also is considered Smyrna even though yet more different still.
There is, however, a common element. The territory of a polis is every bit as much the polis as the asty, or urban area. Smyrna's territory probably always was about the same; that is, the land around the Bay of Smyrna. Any polis in that territory would have to be Smyrna. If some other polis were there, its territory would belong to it, and have its name, not Smyrna's. Any number of differently named villages could be there.
Having reached this conclusion the investigators' next gambit was to identify villages of the komedon to see what geographic area they covered. The sources stating or implying borders as well as the boundary stones discovered by archaeologic survey were useful for this purpose. Hill is able to use this material to reconstruct the borders of the Ionian states.
For Smyrna, imagine that the border is a line leaving the north coast of the bay in a northward direction, ascending the slopes of the range enclosing the east end of the bay, veering always to the right in an ovoid line following the ridge or the upper slopes on the bay side until it comes around to the south of the bay and heads north to intersect it. The salient locations are as follows: + Approximate borderline of Old Smyrna territory Location point Name Coordinates Distance from asty Notes North coast of bay Mavişehir at the mouth of Peynircioğlu creek Intersection of 8-km circumference with bay Northern extremity Sancakli Kalesi on Adatepe Hellenistic permanent fort on a double peak with a ring wall long Watch tower, cistern with runoff for rain capture. Pottery is all Hellenistic. Elevation about , south slope of Yamanlar. North slopes are in Aeolia. View of Smyrna, use hypothesized to be to protect the northern approach. Eastern extremity Belkahve Walled fort overlooking Belkahve Pass from the north. Elevation of pass is ; of fort, . Its hill is conical from which stone was quarried to build an Archaic-period wall dated 7th century BC. Otherwise pottery is Hellenistic and Roman. Cistern. Unexcavated. Guards Smyrna on the east. Southern extremity Akçakaya kalesi Walled akropolis of a settlement on the border with Klazomenai at Limontepe Mevkii. Elevation . Cistern. Residence. Pottery Hellenistic and Roman except for one Classical sherd. South coast of bay Narlidere Not surprisingly the city of İzmir covers about the same territory as ancient Smyrna, except that İzmir extends over prograded land and has managed to inhabit more of the mountainous land. The territory must have filled up during the (new) Smyrna period. There was simply nowhere else to build. Currently over this relatively small territory are roughly 4 million people living on . İzmir is the 3rd largest city of Turkey.
Smyrna's conquerors that did not actually inhabit it had some trouble declaring it to be null and void or reducing it to villages. It was already too crowded to fit the village mold. Strabo himself said that it existed on the mountains, and filled up the plains by the harbor, and had a city wall, but only partly fit within it. It is not correct to say that anyone abandoned it or moved out of it to somewhere else or that it was ever a single settlement that could change locations. A polis is by definition a synoecism of multiple settlements. Whatever the site at Beyrakli was, it was not the single site of a single settlement, Smyrna. That the political center moved from there to a few miles away, there is little scholarly doubt. However no source gives any hint of why the Macedonian sponsors made that decision.
Strabo implies that some sort of qualitative improvement was the main intent. The new city, he says, has room for long, straight streets, stone pavements, more and better public buildings, additional monuments, and above all a closed harbor offered by the barrier islands before the mouth of the River Meles. He does have a criticism. The engineers, he says, neglected to build sewers, so that waste water was continually in the streets. Whether this problem remained so continuously would have to be the topic of another investigation, but in the 20th century the bay was too badly polluted even to bathe in. New sewage processing facilities brought an improvement in the 21st century.
The ever-changing terrain The Gulf of İzmir shown on today's maps is not the one on which Old Smyrna was founded and existed until the dioecism. The general features are the same, but not the details of the coastline. The same thing may be said of most of the other cities of Ionia, manifestly because they were all subject to the same geologic pressures, some few being in a position to be less influenced by them.
Most generally the land mass of Anatolia is extending (stretching) in a N-S direction due to tectonic factors (plate movements). The extension is opening up normal faults in an E-W direction, creating graben, or sunken valleys, through which the rivers of Anatolia drain to the Aegean Sea. As extension is on-going, and these faults are still active, the danger of earthquakes in the region is high.
Smyrna was placed on the south shore of the mouth of the Gediz River (ancient Hermus), which is the 2nd largest river of Turkey, flowing through the Alaşehir graben, named after the city inland on it (ancient Philadelphia). The L shape of the gulf is caused by the extensive aggradation of the Gediz into the drowned bay, creating the Foça Peninsula (ancient Phocaea) as the delta of the Gediz.
Chronology problems The chronological difficulties with the Strabo defining passage of Old Smyrna are with the starting and ending points of the komedon, the supposed village period between dioecism and new synoecism. Moderns tend to confuse these events in the life of a polis with the foundation and destruction of modern cities, which are allowed take all the time the builders or destroyers please and go through whatever phases they please. A polis on the other hand no matter what previous phases cannot be a polis without a synoecism, which must happen on a specific date, like the date of a birth or a death. Every Greek polis looked back on its foundation and commemorated the founder(s). No foundation, no polis, and this was the legal requirement exploited by the Lydians. No polis, no army, no legal standing, etc.
Old Smyrna flourished in the Archaic Period and was stopped in 585 BC by the dioecism of the Lydians, about half-way through the period. The archaeologists had every right to expect to find an Archaic layer succeeded by a destruction and cut off by it from all habitations and layer material until the Hellenistic period, but that is not at all what they found. The archeology often does not match the political history or the supposed political history.
The archaeologist, Ekrem Akurgal, excavating the site of Old Smyrna at Bayrakli, found no political clarity there. In his reconstruction of the structures and the main street, 500-600 houses existed from 630 BC to 545 BC, supporting a population of about 3000 people in a locale where Strabo stated there ought not to be any. John Manuel Cook, Akurgal's co-director of the excavation, publishing after Akurgal, expresses their conclusions about the date of the dioecism as follows.
First of all, the date deduced from the passage of Herodotus (see Introduction above) is based on an incorrect interpretation. He lists the campaigns of Alyattes' reign as though they were in chronological order: a war against the Medes under Cyaxares, expulsion of the Cimmerians, the capture of Smyrna, and the invasion of Clazomenae. Thus the sack of Smyrna has been believed to have followed the Median War. As conflict with the Medes was brought to an end in 585 BC by both parties when it was interrupted by the eclipse of 585 BC, the Lydians were believed to have gone on immediately to the sack of Smyrna. Cook rejects this interpretation mainly because it does not fit the archaeology.
The archeologists' next ploy was to rearrange the campaigns. They assumed that Alyattes would deal with his neighbors, the Ionians, first. There was no denying the existence of a "general destruction level ... recognized in all the main sectors of excavation of the site." This came to be called "the Alyattes destruction levels." The pottery phase in the level was "Early Corinthian," used to date it. As Cook reported, the date of Early Corinthian could not be brought up to over 600 BC. As it turns out, there was an earlier eclipse of the sun at 610 BC. Others suggested an eclipse of the moon if they were fighting by moonlight. The excavators chose 600 BC as the earliest historical and latest archaeological date.