The site of Aezanis, today the modest Turkish village of Çavdarhisar, boasts one of the finest preserved Roman temples in the Mediterranean world. Excavations how this ancient Phrygian sanctuary to the Anatolian mother goddess and weather god at Aezanis were dramatically transformed in the reign of Hadrian (AD 117-138) when the city was enrolled in the Panhellenion, an ancient equivalent of the United nations. Imperial and local patronage transformed the city’s religious life, and so the economic and social identity, into a Greek one. By the study of the coins, and the surviving monuments it is possible to document these changes as a model of how most cities in Asia Minor reinvented themselves as Greek cities loyal to the Roman order.
