Eleven Eastern Mediterranean Cities from Tiryns to Mystras

Tiryns reached its height between 1400 and 1200 BC as a Mycenaean center whose walls earned the Homeric epithet mighty walled Tiryns. It sits 20 kilometers south of Mycenae, and it was deserted by the time Pausanias visited in the 2nd century AD.

The site lies about 120 meters below sea level where the Jordan and Jezreel valleys meet, and excavations found eighteen successive ancient towns. It was an Egyptian administrative center in the Late Bronze Age and later the leading city of the Decapolis as Scythopolis.

Colonists from Megara founded Byzantium around 667 BC at the entrance to the Black Sea, where its position let it control the passage to the Mediterranean. Constantine I refounded it in 330 AD as an imperial residence, so this small Greek port is the root of the city that later became Istanbul.

Sardis was the capital of the Lydian Empire from the 7th century BC and reached its peak under King Croesus, with a citadel on Mount Tmolus and walls twenty meters thick. It was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2025 as the home of coinage.

The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the tomb of Mausolus built between about 353 and 350 BC, was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and gave us the word mausoleum. The city was the birthplace of Herodotus and fell to Alexander the Great in 333 BC.

Archelaus I founded Pella in the early 4th century BC as the new capital of Macedon, and both Philip II and Alexander the Great were born there. Its Hippodamian grid and pebble mosaic floors survive, and its importance passed to nearby Thessalonica after the Roman conquest of 168 BC.

Philip II of Macedon renamed the earlier settlement of Crenides as Philippi in 356 BC. It was the site of the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC, and UNESCO inscribed it in 2016 for its Roman architecture and its importance to early Christianity.

Tarsus was the capital of the Roman province of Cilicia and the setting of the 41 BC meeting between Mark Antony and Cleopatra. It is also the birthplace of Paul the Apostle, and Cleopatra's Gate and St. Paul's Church still stand in the modern city of about 350,000 people.

Herod the Great built this port between about 22 and 9 BC and dedicated it to Caesar Augustus, using pozzolana concrete for his artificial Sebastos harbor. It was the capital of Roman Judaea for roughly 650 years before the Mamluks destroyed it in 1265.

Constantine the Great founded Constantinople in 330 on the site of Byzantium, and it was the largest and wealthiest city in Europe from the mid-5th to the early 13th century. The Theodosian Walls protected it for nearly 900 years, until the Fourth Crusade sacked it in 1204 and the Ottomans took it in 1453.

Mystras was the capital of the Byzantine Despotate of the Morea in the 14th and 15th centuries and drew thinkers such as Gemistos Plethon. Constantine XI Palaiologos was its despot before he became the last Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, and the town was inscribed by UNESCO in 1989.