Apollonia is one of those ruins you visit while thinking about another city. It was the port of Cyrene, the great Greek metropolis inland, and for more than a thousand years it did that quiet job: receiving ships, exporting silphium and olive oil from the Cyrenaican plateau, and serving as a gateway to the Mediterranean. But over time Apollonia stopped being a mere harbour annex and became a city in its own right, eventually becoming, under the Byzantine name Sozusa, the capital of the whole province.
Today the site stretches alongside the modern town of Susa, with the sea washing in and out between fallen columns: a large part of the ancient harbour was submerged by the slow sinking of the Cyrenaican coast since Antiquity, so much of Hellenistic Apollonia is explored, quite literally, by looking down through the water. On dry land there survive a Greek theatre with twenty-eight rows of seats, three early Christian basilicas and the remains of a Byzantine palace with more than a hundred rooms.
This page describes that heritage in the detail it deserves. But it has to be said as clearly as the history is told: Libya is at Level 4, «Do Not Travel», for practically every Western foreign ministry, and Cyrenaica — where Apollonia is — also requires a specific entry permit and has its own instability on top of that of the rest of the country.
Apollonia was born around the 7th century BC as the port of Cyrene, the colony founded by Greeks from Thera just twenty kilometres inland. For centuries it was that great city's outlet to the sea, the shipping point for the prized Cyrenaican silphium, until it became an independent polis in the late Hellenistic period. The Romans incorporated it into the province of Crete and Cyrenaica, and under the Byzantine Empire, by then called Sozusa, it reached its greatest political weight: in the 6th century AD it became, according to various sources, capital of the province of Libya Superior, or Pentapolis, with a ducal palace of more than a hundred rooms excavated between 1959 and 1962. The Crete earthquake and tsunami of 365 AD badly damaged the city and its port, which has been slowly sinking beneath the sea ever since due to the tilting of the Cyrenaican coast. The Arab conquest of 643 AD put an end to urban life; the modern settlement of Susa grew up centuries later next to the ruins.
Read the full history ↓Libya's Greek half: the Pentapolis founded by settlers from Thera, the cradle of the resistance against Italy and the country's greenest plateau, today also the centre of eastern Libya's rival administration.
Read the history of Cyrenaica and the green east →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
When settlers from the island of Thera founded Cyrene, around 631 BC, they chose an elevated site some 20 kilometres from the coast. It was protected and fertile but had no direct access to the sea. The fix came almost at once: a port was built on the nearest stretch of coast to link the city with the Mediterranean. Settlers, goods and news from the Greek world arrived that way, and Cyrenaica's great export left by the same route. That export was silphium, a plant now extinct whose commercial value matched that of the most expensive spices of antiquity.
That port was Apollonia, named in honour of Apollo, the protector deity of Cyrene and of all Greek colonisation in the region. For the next few centuries Apollonia was run as a dependency of Cyrene, with no political autonomy of its own. It was the seaward arm of a city whose wealth and prestige were decided up on the plateau, not on the coast.
Being subordinate, however, didn't stop the settlement from growing in its own right. It sat on a sheltered natural cove with a safe anchorage, which made it a hub of constant sea traffic. By the Hellenistic period its population and urban infrastructure already rivalled in size those of other cities of the Cyrenaican Pentapolis, the group of five major Greek cities in the region.
At some point in the late Hellenistic period, probably between the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, Apollonia stopped being a mere administrative dependency of Cyrene. It became an independent polis with its own institutions and government. This is when the great Greek theatre was built facing the sea, with its twenty-eight rows of seats. It is one of the best-preserved performance buildings in all of Cyrenaica, and solid proof that the city by then had a cultural and institutional life of its own.
Rome brought Cyrenaica into its orbit, formally as a province from 74 BC and later joined to Crete. Apollonia stayed the region's main port, now part of the trade routes of the Roman Mediterranean. The city gained the usual fittings of a prosperous imperial town: sizeable baths, reinforced walls, houses with mosaics, and a necropolis outside the walls with rock-cut tombs in the Graeco-Roman tradition.
The great theatre went through a telling change in this period. It was remodelled under the emperor Domitian, at the end of the 1st century AD, so it could host gladiator fights. This was a common adaptation in Greek theatres across the Empire, and it shows how far Apollonia had taken on Roman habits of public spectacle without losing its original Greek architecture.
The biggest turning point in Apollonia's history came under the Byzantine Empire. The city changed its name to Sozusa, meaning “the one who saves” or “the saved one”, probably a reference to a Christian cult of salvation, and it reached an administrative peak it had never known before. By the 6th century AD, under Justinian or shortly before, the sources say Sozusa had become capital of the province of Upper Libya, or Libya Pentapolitana. In that role it displaced cities with a longer pedigree, such as Cyrene and Ptolemais.
The physical evidence of that political weight is the so-called Palace of the Dux, the residence of the provincial governor. The British archaeologist Richard Goodchild identified more than a hundred rooms there in his excavations of 1959 to 1962. It is one of the best-documented Byzantine administrative buildings in all of North Africa, and its size shows how important the city had become.
Meanwhile, Apollonia-Sozusa was Christianised quickly. The city came to have at least three large basilicas, known today as the Central Church, the Eastern Church and the Western Church. Each had its own three-aisled plan, colonnades and paving. That is a remarkable number of Christian churches for a city of its size, and it confirms that the city was a bishop's seat of some standing in the church hierarchy of the Pentapolis.
On 21 July 365 AD, an earthquake of extraordinary magnitude with its epicentre near Crete set off a tsunami that devastated coastlines across the eastern Mediterranean, from Alexandria to Greece. Apollonia faced the open sea and suffered severe damage to its port and to much of its waterfront. Ammianus Marcellinus, a Roman historian of the time, described the event as a cataclysm that drove the sea onto dry land and then dragged it back with devastating force.
That single blow came on top of a much slower geological process that was just as decisive: the tectonic tilting of the Cyrenaican coast, which has been gradually lowering the shoreline in this area since antiquity. Underwater archaeology has measured the result as a drop of about 3.7 to 3.8 metres between the ancient harbour structures and today's sea level. Much of Apollonia's Hellenistic and Roman port is now literally underwater. It is so well preserved that it has become one of the world's reference sites for underwater harbour archaeology.
The city partly recovered from that damage and stayed active throughout the Byzantine period. The final blow came with the Arab conquest of Cyrenaica, completed around 643 AD. After Byzantine rule fell, organised urban life in Apollonia-Sozusa gradually came to an end over the following decades. The site was left deserted until much later, in modern times, when the fishing village of Susa grew up beside the ruins.
Modern archaeological interest in Apollonia took hold in the mid-20th century. It was part of the large British and Italian campaigns that systematically documented the cities of Cyrenaica, first under colonial rule and later under the independent Kingdom of Libya. From 1959 to 1962 the British archaeologist Richard Goodchild led the excavation of the Palace of the Dux, a key study of Byzantine administration in North Africa.
The most distinctive contribution, however, came from the sea. In 1958 and 1959, Nicholas Flemming, a researcher from the University of Cambridge, carried out a systematic survey of the submerged harbour structures off Apollonia. He produced detailed maps of the underwater quays, breakwaters and buildings. That pioneering underwater work precisely documented the tectonic sinking of the Cyrenaican coast and made Apollonia an international case study of sea-level change in antiquity.
The Susa Museum was also set up, bringing together material recovered over the various excavation campaigns: pottery, inscriptions and architectural pieces. Together with the open-air ruins, its collection lets you trace the city's whole story, from the original Greek port to the Byzantine provincial capital. As with the rest of Libya's heritage, the current condition of the site and museum, and access to them, can't be fully verified given the conflict the country has been going through since 2011. There is no record, though, of Apollonia suffering direct damage from fighting.
