In 2023, my husband and I spent a few weeks travelling in Greece and Türkiye. We visited many wonderful places, some of which I’ve written about, some not. Among those I haven’t covered yet is Bergama, and with August being the month I dedicate to Isis, it felt like the right time to share my visit to an ancient Roman temple dedicated to Egyptian gods.
Bergama is the modern name for Pergamon, once a rich and powerful centre of Greek and later Roman culture. We had breakfast in the courtyard of our very old, very charming hotel, from which we could see the Red Hall, then drove down the street and around the corner into town.
The Red Hall sits right in the middle of a busy, ordinary stretch of modern Bergama. There’s no dramatic approach, no long climb to a hilltop sanctuary. It’s just there, enormous and red brick, hemmed in by shops and traffic, waiting.
What is the Red Hall?
The Red Hall, known locally as Kızıl Avlu (also called the Red Basilica), is a massive temple complex built in the second century CE, during the reign of the emperor Hadrian. Hadrian is best remembered today for his wall in Britain, and for his lifelong fascination with Greece and Egypt. He travelled more than almost any other emperor, and he tended to leave a temple wherever he went.
This one is vast. The sacred precinct once stretched some 270 by 100 metres, with the temple itself measuring 60 by 26 metres and walls still standing 19 metres high, even now, with the roof and eastern wall long gone. Even in ruins, it is imposing in a way photographs don’t quite capture. You feel small standing in it, which was, presumably, the point.
Roman statues wearing Egypt
The Red Hall has long been read as a temple to Egyptian deities, largely because of one detail: its two side courtyards were once ringed by colossal, double-life-size figures serving as columns. These weren’t just decorative flourishes. Each pillar was a pair of figures carved back-to-back, actually holding up the roof.
Judging by 107 surviving fragments, at least ten such pillars once stood in the courtyards. The bodies are white marble in Greek-style robes; the faces and skin are a separate, darker grey-black marble, fitted on. That two-tone choice echoes an old technique used for cult statues: acrolithic images, where a wooden core, blackened by age and centuries of ritual handling, had marble hands, feet, and face attached. These figures may have carried that same aura, ancient and venerable, by design.
Every figure, male and female alike, wears the nemes, the pharaoh’s royal headcloth, reserved in actual Egyptian art for kings and gods alone. Some faces are fully human. Others wear the heads of animals: two lion-headed figures, and one each of jackal, crocodile, and ibis, standing in for Sekhmet, Anubis, Sobek, and Thoth. Nothing quite like this exists in real Egyptian temple art, and nothing quite like it exists anywhere else in Roman art either. This was Egypt as the Romans imagined it, built for a Roman audience, and even the Romans hadn’t built anything like it before.
One figure has been fully reconstructed at 8.5 metres tall, funded by the Studiosus Foundation and built from the same materials as the original: white marble from the island of Marmara, veined pink-red stone, and black-grey marble from Afyon. She’s Sekhmet, lion-headed, and standing beside her gives a real sense of how lavish and colourful this courtyard once was, before its brick was fully clad in stone.
Isis, Serapis, or someone else entirely
Scholars have argued for decades over which god or gods this temple actually honoured, and the debate remains very much alive and unresolved. A surviving inscription names a whole cluster of deities: Serapis, Isis, Harpocrates, Osiris, Apis, Helios, and the Dioskouroi. A separate inscription names Serapis alone, and a small terracotta head of Isis was found nearby. One papyrus fragment from Egypt calls Isis “she who rules in Pergamon.” I’ll admit my allegiance here: I’m Team Isis.
There’s also a more contrarian theory worth knowing. Classicist Andrew Findley has argued that despite all the Egyptian styling, there’s actually very little hard proof, no inscriptions, no ritual objects, tying the Red Hall itself to an Egyptian cult. What he points to instead are altars scattered elsewhere in the surrounding city, dedicated to Hadrian under the god-title Olympios, evidence of a strong cult of Hadrian nearby. Findley suggests that the Red Hall may have primarily been a temple of the Roman Imperial Cult, one that borrowed Egyptian imagery to lend Hadrian’s divine standing an added layer of prestige, since Hadrian was known to associate himself with Serapis elsewhere in the empire.
Other researchers who’ve spent years excavating and cataloguing the site directly disagree with Findley. Classicists Anna-Katharina Rieger and Winfried Held, reviewing the standard German study of the building, are confident Hadrian personally commissioned it; the materials and building techniques clearly point to Rome, and some of the Egyptian details can even be traced to specific buildings in Egypt that Hadrian visited. But both push back hard on calling it a temple built to worship Hadrian, saying the evidence for that specific claim just isn’t there. Held even points out a problem with the theory: whatever stands in altars elsewhere in the city, inside the Red Hall itself there’s no trace of Zeus, the god behind the title Olympios. The temple’s own statues are entirely Egyptian gods. If this building was really meant to honour the emperor, the one god you’d expect to find here is missing.
The priests here may have tended an altar to Isis, to Serapis, to a deified Hadrian, or to some working blend of the three, and the figures in these courtyards were built for that worship, evoking Egypt on purpose, for people who wanted its gods close by.
A temple built for secrets
The building’s layout supports the interpretation that this was a mystery temple, somewhere initiation and ritual secrecy mattered. Unlike a Greek temple, where the whole building counted as the god’s house, worship here was confined to one half of the hall, closed off from the public by a deep water channel running its full width. Only priests could cross into that inner sanctum, where a cult statue at least 10 metres tall once stood, nearly the size of the lost Statue of Zeus at Olympia.
There’s a hole in the statue’s stone base that would have let a priest climb inside. A system of passages beneath the temple connects to a stairway ending directly under that statue. These passages were apparently abandoned partway through construction and never finished, but one archaeologist has proposed what they were built for: a priest, hidden inside the statue, speaking as the voice of the god. Similar hollow statue heads have been found elsewhere in the Roman world, with a channel running from the neck straight up through the open mouth, built for this kind of ritual ventriloquism. Whether it was ever used here or not, the fact that it was built at all tells you something about the kind of experience this temple was meant to produce.
Water mattered here. The entire complex sits directly on the River Selinus. Roman engineers diverted the river through two enormous tunnels beneath the precinct and built an almost 200-metre-wide bridge that still stands today, supporting parts of modern Bergama and its traffic.
Water reappeared within the sanctuary in an elaborate system of basins and channels. These included a walk-in basin fitted with clay pipes for filling and draining, of the kind typically associated with purification rites, and a ritual water basin near the entrance that may have functioned as an automatic holy-water dispenser — a device the ancient engineer Heron of Alexandria is known to have designed specifically for Egyptian temples.
From there, the interpretations become more intriguing. One theory holds that the main channel through the temple was designed to catch and hold winter rainwater, echoing the Nile’s annual flooding. Initiates may even have passed through the subterranean passages beneath the temple before being presented, quite theatrically, to the crowd waiting in the main hall. The Roman writer Apuleius, in his novel The Golden Ass, describes a similar initiation into the mysteries of Isis, in which he is brought before an image of the goddess after having “approached the confines of death” and seen the gods above and below. Some scholars have wondered whether a sanctuary like the Red Hall might help us understand the kind of ritual setting he was describing.
The entire precinct was enclosed by walls at least 13 metres high, in the same tradition as older Greek mystery sanctuaries such as Eleusis, which were built specifically to keep outsiders from seeing what happened inside. It was designed, from the ground up, to feel sealed off and secret.
One site, many lives
The Red Hall has seen many kinds of worship and survived them all. At some point during the Christian era, it was gutted by fire, then rebuilt in the 5th century as one of the region’s largest churches, with its floor raised nearly two metres above the old Roman floor. Some scholars believe it may be the very church addressed to the Pergamene community in the Book of Revelation, and traces of a synagogue have also been found within the wider complex. The church was likely destroyed again in 716–717, during an Arab siege of the region, and after Pergamon fell to Turkish forces in 1336, the building was converted for Islamic use. One of its twin rotundas is still an active mosque today; the other spent part of the nineteenth century as the machinery room of an olive oil factory, its interior walls still stained black with soot. Pagan, Christian, Muslim, industrial, one structure holding all of it in sequence.
“Juicy and strange” is how I described the Red Hall in my notes at the time of my visit. My husband and I more or less had the place to ourselves that morning, which felt like a small privilege. I came to the Red Hall for Isis. I walked the paths, prayed, and made a humble offering of water. It is, after all, an archaeological and cultural site.
Afterwards, we walked along the street. I found a lotus pendant in a little antique shop directly across from the Red Hall. I don’t know its age or maker, but that doesn’t matter to me. The design draws on the blue lotus of ancient Egyptian art, with its associations with the sun, regeneration and rebirth, and uses colours reminiscent of the glass, carnelian and lapis lazuli found in ancient Egyptian jewellery. And it’s special to me because of where I found it. It’s a tangible reminder of the strange meeting of Egyptian, Greek and Roman religions at Bergama, and I wear it in honour of Isis.
According to Anatolian Archaeology, the Red Hall has been undergoing extensive restoration since March 2025, led by excavation director Professor Yusuf Sezgin, as part of Türkiye’s wider “Heritage for the Future” conservation programme. It’s expected to reopen to the public sometime in 2026 with a new visitor centre and proper walking paths. If you’re planning a visit, it’s worth checking ahead of time.