State Agora of Side

The State Agora is a separate public square within the ruins of ancient Side, distinguished in descriptions of the site from the city's main commercial agora, which held a round Temple of Tyche and Fortuna. Side itself was a Pamphylian port city founded around the seventh century BC that prospered first under Greek and later under Roman and Byzantine rule, built on a narrow peninsula on Turkey's Antalya coast. The State Agora is associated with the city's administrative and civic life rather than its trade, and it lies among the dense core of surviving Roman-period public buildings at Side, including a monumental fountain, the city walls, and the colonnaded streets connecting the site's bathhouses and basilicas. Together with the commercial agora, the theatre, and the harbour temples, it forms part of the extensive civic centre that makes Side one of the more completely preserved ancient cities on the Turkish Mediterranean coast.