Ancient restoration techniques in a seismic city of Roman Turkey, Hierapolis in Phrygia

The topic of this paper is the restoration technique in Antiquity, on the base of new data collected during the activities of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Hierapolis of Phrygia (Turkey). This important Hellenistic and Roman city was founded on a extremely active fault that originated famous thermal phenomena. During its history, Hierapolis was affected by catastrophic earthquakes: many times its inhabitants had to reconstruct and restore their public monuments. The analytical study of architectural blocks made possible to get a better understanding of the restoration techniques employed. In details, the paper will discuss different Roman monuments of Hierapolis, in order to offer a preliminary typology of the most frequent restoration measures.