Samsat (Samosata) — Commagene Capital

Samsat, known in antiquity as Samosata, was the capital of the Kingdom of Commagene and one of the region's most important settlements for thousands of years.

History

Thanks to its strategic position on the Euphrates it saw continuous settlement from the Commagene period through Roman, Byzantine, Islamic and Ottoman times; in the Roman era it was the headquarters of Legio XVI, and the famous satirist Lucian of Samosata (AD 120-192) was born here. The ancient mound of Samosata and the historic town around it were submerged beneath the Atatürk Dam reservoir in 1989, and its inhabitants were moved to the new Samsat town rebuilt on the lakeshore.

The Drowned Capital and the Museum

For this reason Samsat is the region's most poignant stop of cultural memory, 'the drowned capital': the centre of the civilisation that created Nemrut's magnificent god-king statues has become a story that can no longer be seen but survives in museum collections and in the lake's vista. The Commagene statue heads, mosaics, tablets, seals and everyday objects recovered in rescue excavations before the reservoir filled are displayed in the Adıyaman Museum, so Samsat's story is largely completed by a museum visit.

Ancient Samosata: Capital and Garrison

Ancient Samosata was the capital where the Commagene kings' mint stood and which struck its own coinage; its walls, palace and mound had seen uninterrupted settlement since the 1st millennium BC. Its role in the Roman period as the key garrison city of the Euphrates frontier (limes), home to Legio XVI Flavia Firma, also explains the source of the military power that built the Cendere Bridge. The sharp-witted satires of Lucian of Samosata show how connected this 'provincial' city was to the intellectual centres of the ancient world.

Samsat Today: Visiting

Today the new Samsat district is visited for its lakeside setting, its fishing and its quiet rural fabric. In agency programmes Samsat is usually one of the thematic stops linked with the Atatürk Dam and the Adıyaman Museum, telling the GAP and Commagene layers of the region; it has niche importance for history- and culture-minded groups rather than mass day tourism. From the lakeshore, visitors imagine the traces of the ancient capital that once rose here and experience the tragic, fascinating historical layering of the region. Today the visitor can contemplate at once the melancholy of the mound lost beneath the water and the transformation GAP brought to the region; Samsat is one of the rare places where both loss and gain can be read in the same view.