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Anazarbo

Dilekkaya, Anavarza

Anazarbo is Anazarbos, a city on the middle Pyramos in the Cilician plain beneath a towering castle hill, at Anavarza. The name probably came from that hill, not from a founder called Anazarbos or Zarbos, as the historian Ammianus and others claimed; one suggestion links it to an Iranian word for invincible, a title of Mithras. In 19 BC it was renamed Caesarea in honour of Augustus, and the physician Dioscurides came from here. In the third century it overtook Tarsus as the leading city of Cilicia, yet the map gives it no picture, which may point to an older source, unless a copyist simply left it out.

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