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Antalya Hotels Holiday |  |
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Manavgat Hotels HolidaySIDE DISTRICT & ACCOMMODATION
The agora, the city's centre of commercial and cultural activity, lay along an arcaded street. It can be entered today from immediately opposite the museum. This square space was surrounded on all four sides by porticoes. Rows of stores can still be observed running behind the north-east and north-west porticoes. An interesting vaulted building lies in the agora's south-west corner adjacent to the theatre, this served as the city's latrium or public toilets and is the most highly ornamented and best preserved example in Anatolia. - HOTELS IN SIDE-
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Side, ancient Pamphylia's largest port, is situated on a small peninsula extending north-south into the sea. Strabo
and Arrianos both record that Side was settled from Kyme, city in Aeolia, a region of western Anatolia. Most probably, this colonization occurred in the seventh century B.C. According to Arrianos, when settlers from Kyme came to Side, they could not understand the dialect. After a short while, the influence of this indigenous tongue was so great that the newcomers forgot their native Greek and started using the language of Side. Excavations have revealed several inscriptions written in this language. The inscriptions, dating from the third and second centuries B.C., remain undeciphered, but testify that the local language was still use several centuries after colonization. Another object found in Side excavations, a basalt column base from the seventh century B.C. and attributable to the Neo Hittites, provides other evidence of the site's early history. The word "side" is Anatolian in origin and means pomegranate. Next to no information exists concerning Side under Lydian and Persian sovereignty. Nevertheless, the fact that Side minted its own coins during the fifth century B.C. while under Persian dominion, shows that it still possessed a great measure of independence. 
Sewers carried away the waste from this establishment, which had a 24-toilet capacity, while in front of the building ran a channel carrying only purified water.In order to satisfy their need for a plentiful water supply, the people of Side went to almost superhuman lengths. Water from the head of the Melas river (today's Manavgat Çayı) reached Side after an adventuresome 30 kilometer journey on two-storied arched aqueducts, passing through channels carved out of cliffs, and vaulted tunnels and across valleys before it was collected in city cisterns, from which it was distributed in clay pipes. Side has been excavated by Turkish archaeologists since 1947, and excavations continue occasionally.
