Page 35 - Sarpedon’dan Keykubad’a Bir Zamanlar Antalya

From Muri to Myra, The City of Artemis
“Three-blessed and myrrh-breathing
city of Nicholas the mighty,
servant of God”

Blessed city that smells of myrrh.
Demre, one of the most beautiful sea-
side towns of Antalya in history, was
mentioned in this way. Myra, was
named from the myrrh oil, of which
city has the highest production. To-
day, the city with its Mersin trees was
named with this name by the people
Fig. 19: Commiphora myrrha. of that time.
Myrrh got its name from Myrrha, the mother of Adonis, the most
beautiful of men whom Aphrodite fell in love with.
According to the legend, Myrrha, the beautiful the girl of King of
Syria, was punished by the goddess for not worshiping the god-
dess Aphrodite enough. The goddess gives him a fatherly de-
sire that he cannot resist. Thereupon, with the help of her nanny,
Myrrha, who was with her father for forty days and forty nights,
wanted to kill her when her father recognized her on the last night.
However, the gods turned the beautiful girl into a myrtle tree so
that she does not die. So beautiful that the oil of this tree has been
healing people for centuries (Erhat 1996).
Even today, Demre, which has a large number of myrtle trees,
was called Myra in history because it was a very important myrtle
oil producer. So much has myrrh oil been an important source of
in come for the city in the past that people worshipped it like a
goddess and identified it with the city’s vegetation goddess Arte-
mis (Çevik ve Bulut 2011; Çevik 2015, Çevik 2016).
Today, the fact that many bottles for myrrh oil as well as oil
workshops were found during the excavations carried out by
Prof. Dr. Nevzat Çevik in Myra, is the biggest proof that Demre
was a very important myrrh oil production centre in the past (Çevik
ve Bulut 2011; Çevik 2015, Çevik 2016).

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