It’s not often that you can visit a well-preserved site from antiquity and have it all to yourself. In the rich archaeological crossroad of Western Türkiye’s Balıkesir province, you can indeed at a small site that faces the sea. Lying right off a modern highway along the Aeneas Route of ancient sites, the ruins of Antandros are tucked so tightly into a wooded slope of sacred Mount Ida that you could easily drive right by.
But find the city and you’ll be rewarded with a series of marvelous 4th-century mosaics in the site’s Roman Maritime Villa. The first settlement of Antandros dates to the 20th century BC. Some big ancient names have all described different origin stories to the Greek city, from Herodotus, Thucydides and Aristotle, to Strabo in his Geographica .
The vital fact is that the city long controlled the timber trade—specifically the oriental pine tree and Valonia oak—and thus shipbuilding until modern times. Most famously, it’s here where Virgil has Aeneas and his surviving Trojan companions journeying from Troy over the Ida mountains to build his fleet before sailing off on the long voyage to Italy. Today, Türkiye promotes the site as part of the Aeneas Route, a multi-nation endeavor to trace the Aeneid story to its modern locations.
According to Homer, Hera and Zeus wed in a ceremony in Mount Ida (also known in Turkish as Kaz Dağları). Archaeologists only began extensive excavations of Antandros some 25 years ago, principally of villas that a.
