İzmir, Bergama

This theatre is built on a steep hill. It has the highest number of seating benches in Turkey. The present form of the theatre, which was built in the early period, is the enlarged version made during the Roman period. The three-levelled theatre faces west. Two central walkways three feet and 10 inches in width divide the three levels from each other. There are 25 rows of seating benches in the first level, 33 in the second level and 22 in the third level. The long thin shape of the 80-row theatre is dictated by the contours of the land on which it is constructed, and it gives the impression of being very steep. The stone theatre of Pergamon was built in 3 B.C. It acquired its present shape after approximately 38 years of work which began in 197 B.C. Even though German archaeologists claim that, “The entrance to the theatre is below from the ‘terrace of the big theatre’ situated at the front”, this view should be questioned. There must have been walkways opening onto both of the central walkways and continuing along the terraces on the support walls. Without these walkways, which either have not survived until today or have been lost, the limited number of radial stairways would not have been able to deal with the volume of people at entry and exit times. It is incongruous that advanced Roman engineering would make the audience climb up above the level of the orchestra.

At the end of the 250-metre terrace just below the theatre steps lead up to the Dionysus Temple. The vaulted support walls carrying the wooden stage edifice as well as this long terrace consist of five levels in places. The holes into which the upright posts of the wooden stage were inserted, as seen in the early period theatres, have survived to date. It was necessary to build the stage edifice out of wood as part of it had to sit on the filled area on top of the support walls. If the stage edifice were made out of stone and elevated to the level of the wooden stage edifice, the pressure of the high stone building on the filled floor could have caused subsidence in the lower floor. In addition, if the stone stage edifice had been built low, it would not have allowed the sound to echo in an open-air theatre with 80 rows of seating benches.

Even though the orchestra of a theatre is normally encircled by the cavea, in the case of this theatre only close to half of the hemisphere is surrounded with rows of benches for spectators. If the entire hemisphere of the orchestra had been surrounded with the 80-rowed cavea, it would have been the biggest theatre in Anatolia with a seating capacity in excess of 30,000. The width of the orchestra is 39 feet and 9 inches.