Page 130 - Sarpedon’dan Keykubad’a Bir Zamanlar Antalya

Antalya’s First Female Mayor From Perge
‘Plancia Magna’

A woman has also been present in the patriarchal order:
Plancia Magna. She was from Perge. She undertook very useful
works both for the city she lived in and for the country of Pam-
phylia. She is the only daughter of the noble Plancii family of
Italian descent. Her father, M. Planciun Varus, was a senator
and provincial governor. Her husbant was C. Lulius Cornutus
Tertullus from the lulii Corniti family, another famous family of
Perge. However, she did not use the power of her father or hus-
band in her works. Plancia Magna has always shown the portrait
of an intelligent and strong woman who exists under her own
power. So much so that she always expressed this emphatically
in the inscriptions she had written after the great works she had
undertaken; “Plancia magna spent her own money”, “spent a
lot”, “she spent it without her husband’s control”. She is such
a strong and honorable woman, Plancia Magna. She has done
so much for the city of Magna and donated so much that her
name is referred to as the “Daughter of the City” in the inscrip-
tions where she was honored even 70 years after her death. So
much so that Magna has always been a female administrator
who has all the known titles of great administrators. For Perge,
she is both a “Sister of Artemis” and “the top manager of the
city”(Özdizbay 2012; 2020).
Perge’s daughter ruled her beloved city for three terms. She
accomplished great things in these three periods. She carried
out one of her greatest works in the period before Hadrian’s visit
to Pamphylia. Before the emperor came to the city, in order to
honor him, she changed the architectural structure of the court-
yard inside the towers and turned it into a courtyard where the
statues of the mythological founders of the city are located. At
the north exit of this courtyard, a great three-entrance arch simi-
lar to Hadrian’s Arch at the Castle Gate was built in the name of
the great emperor Hadrian.

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