Sömek in Cilicia

 

 

     
 

 

The Athena relief  
   

The village of Sömek is located about 15 kilometres from the Mediterranean coast in the mountainous hinterland of Kızkalesi. Probably in the 2nd century a relief was carved into a rock in the north of the village in honour of the goddess Athena.

 
   

 
The relief is easy to overlook  
   

The relief is carved into the rock at a height of about 1.50 metres above the ground. It has a total height of 1.30 metres. In a niche, which is closed by a shell at the top, there is the image of a woman who was identified as the goddess Athena, among other things by the inscription.

 
   

 

The inscription next to the figure

 
   

Between the lance held on the left and the female figure the inscription is engraved in a narrow field in 13 lines. In it the goddess is called Αθηνα Κρισοα (Athena Krisoa), whereby the epithet Κρισοα derived from a place name refers to a local variant of the deity; the associated place Κρισοα could not be localized yet. However, it must have certainly been in the north of the rough Cilicia.

 
   

 
   
   
The warrior relief of Efrenk

 
   

 
The warrior relief of Efrenk  

 

 

About 600 meters northwest of the Athena relief lies the warrior relief of Efrenk in a rock face next to a steep path leading to the Lamos River. The relief is worked about five meters above the street level into the vertical rock face. It is 1.90 metres high. It shows a standing warrior frontally framed by a Naiscos.

 

 

 
 

 

 

The legs are badly damaged. The raised right arm rests on a vertical lance, on the left side he carries a sword, whose handle he holds with the angled left arm. He is dressed in a short chiton with a belt whose bulging folds are clearly visible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the left pilaster, an eight-line inscription is carved approximately at the height of the belt. The two ancient historians Josef Keil and Adolf Wilhelm, who visited Cilicia in 1891 and 1925, published a report in 1931 in which they reported illegible remains of an actual tomb inscription located to the left and right of the head of the figure at the relief base.
The letter forms date the inscription to the middle Roman imperial period. By comparing posture and clothing, the Turkish archaeologist Serra Durugönül, who studied Cilician rock reliefs in the 1980s, dates the relief to the 2nd century AD.

 
     
     
Photos: @chim    
Translation aid: www.DeepL.com/Translator    
Source: Wikipedia and others