Story
The story of Side
The name Side means "pomegranate" in an old Anatolian language. Greeks arrived during the migrations of the 7th century BC, yet the townspeople kept speaking a language of their own until the 3rd century BC, an Indo-European tongue that has still not been fully deciphered. Side surrendered to Alexander in 334 BC and, thanks to powerful fleets, grew into a centre of science and culture in the 2nd century BC.
Under Rome it became the region's trading hub, enriched above all by the slave trade. The Syrian king Antiochus VII was educated here and took the name Sidetes. Excavations have revealed traces of a great fire and many earthquakes, and in the 12th century the geographer al-Idrisi described a dead city, "Burnt Antalya".
The village at the tip of the peninsula was founded in 1895-97 by migrants from Crete, and over time it spread across the whole peninsula.
This story is compiled from Wikipedia and other open sources; dates and numbers are checked against the source. The text is shared under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. Source ↗
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