Midas Yazılıkaya Archaeological Site

Midas Yazılıkaya lies at the southern end of Yazılıkaya Valley, just west of the village of the same name in Eskişehir's Han district. The Phrygians built their settlement on a plateau of soft volcanic tuff, roughly 650 metres long and 320 wide, rising some 60 to 70 metres above the valley floor.

Where the Phrygian capital Gordion was the political centre of the kingdom, the City of Midas was its religious heart. The Phrygians carved monumental sacred structures straight into the rock, and that is what you come to see: façades and niches cut from the living stone, the so-called Unfinished Monument and the smaller Arezastis monument.

The site has drawn foreign travellers since William Martin Leake identified the main monument in 1800. Later visitors, among them the Laborde brothers, Charles Texier and William Ramsay, added to the picture of highland Phrygia. Today it is a quiet, open-air place best explored on foot.