City
Missos
Samsun
Listen to the story
Missos is a copyist's slip: the opening letter of Amissos, a rarer Greek spelling of Amisos, has dropped away, and that old name lives on in Samsun, the Turkish port on the Black Sea. Greeks from Miletus and Phocaea founded the harbour town, Athenian settlers renamed it Piraeus in the fifth century BC, and King Mithridates the Sixth made it one of his residences. The map gives it a pair of towers about the same size as those of Sinope, the city with which ancient writers so often named it in the same breath.