City
Aregea
Yumurtalık, ehemals Ayas
Listen to the story
Aregea is a copyist's slip found nowhere else, for the city was really Aegeae, a harbour on the Gulf of Issus in Cilicia, today Yumurtalık in Turkey, known in the Middle Ages as Ayas. The map marks it with a pair of towers. The Greek geographer Strabo still called it a small town with an anchorage, but under Rome it grew into an important seaport and, in the third century, a base of the Syrian fleet. Its famous sanctuary of Asclepius was destroyed on Constantine's orders in 326 and replaced by a church, yet decades later the orator Libanius still came here seeking a cure.