Morphology of the podium house for the multi-layered history of Apollonia ad Rhyndacum (Gölyazı)

Gölyazı (Apollonia ad Rhyndacum) is located 35 km west of the city of Bursa, within the boundaries of the Nilüfer Municipality. Most of the existing literature concentrates on the archaeological remains located on the island and peninsula of Gölyazı, studies on the evolution of the urban form are instead very scarce. This paper is part of an ongoing research aimed at filling in the gap in the existing literature by reconstructing the formation process of the urban organism, and it focuses on the northern urban tissue along the waterfront, which is one of the most significative parts for the understanding of the entire built organism. In this part of the small town several Anatolian houses were built on top of the remains of the Hellenistic city walls, retaining some restraints given by the substratum. One house was built on top of an earlier monumental structure, interpreted as a temple podium, which was later incorporated into the city fortifications (Aybek & Öz, 2004). We considered this structure and the surrounding urban tissue as one of the main polarities in the urban layout. The typological comparison of a selected number of Anatolian houses, the analysis of the urban grid and its main attractors, together with the close interpretation of the above-mentioned podium does shed light on the understanding of the waterfront’s formation process and therefore of the entire urban organism.