Towns in Oklahoma, where I grew up, are planned on a grid rather than natural topography, creating a curious tension between the concrete lines and the eroding bright red soil underneath. This urban grid is punctuated by religion, now visible in the attraction of the mega ‘extra-urban’ churches that create new communities across municipalities, while older traditional ‘inner-city’ churches often belong to a greying congregation. Perhaps this is what attracted me to this topic in the ancient world where, despite the obvious differences, the power of urban religion to redefine social identities and reshape sacred landscapes was at least as dynamic and complex. This is what this book is about.

Sanctuaries in the ancient Greek world have long been examined by scholars through the urban-rural dichotomy, yet Hellenistic Asia Minor poses a separate set of questions and concerns, as older ‘country’ shrines were drawn into the developing urban sphere. Overarching issues of social and political cohesion appear to have been more important in this era than boundaries, as communities were reorganized along the template of the Greek city. Such concerns rise to the surface on close examination of a wide range of data, rather than the imposition of a monolithic model. This book offers a holistic approach, a framework of analysis that embraces a wide variety of sources and highlights both patterns and variations in developing relationships between sanctuaries and cities. Applied here to four such relationships as an initial probe, this framework can help identify the dynamics and agencies at work in many other cases as well. Hopefully it will be used by many and will undergo refinement in the process.

At the base of this book is my doctoral research and dissertation at the University of Groningen which could not have appeared without the help, influence and insights of many others. In the first place, I would like to thank Onno van Nijf for his unfailing support. Our collaboration has been fruitful and we are now co-directing the project Connecting the Greeks – multiscalar festival networks in the Hellenistic world (funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)), that has emerged in part from the research presented here. I would also like to thank Peter Attema and Martijn van Leusen, who both shaped my view of landscape and sparked my desire to learn to work with geographic information systems (GIS). I am indebted to Felix Pirson, who inspired my approach to the visuality of landscape, further resulting in the project Commanding Views – monumental landscapes and the territorial formation of Pergamon, 3rd to 2nd c BC (NWO and the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University). At Brown, Lynn Carlson patiently guided me through the complexities of viewsheds and visual analyses in ArcGIS; the maps and viewsheds in this volume were generated by myself using ArcGIS 10.5.1.

The photos were taken on various trips to Turkey, sponsored by the Netherlands Institute in Turkey, with thanks to the director Fokke Gerritsen, and Felix Pirson, of the German Archaeological Institute, division Istanbul, and the generosity of the Dutch Philologische Studiefonds, and the Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture (ICOG). Martijn van Leusen and the Groningen Institute of Archaeology generously lent support with the mobile ArcGIS environment. All of the photos from fieldtrips are published by permission of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and the directors of current fieldwork where applicable. In this context I am especially grateful for the hospitality and generosity of several teams. I would like to thank Olivier Henry, Lars Karlsson, and Pontus Hellström, also for the many excellent discussions of Labraunda and their provision of fieldwork reports ahead of publication. I am grateful to Ahmet Tırpan for hosting my stay in Turgut in 2009, and sharing results from Lagina, and to the current director, Bilal Söğüt, who kindly extended his permission to use these images. I have appreciated his insights and those of co-director Zeliha Gider concerning Lagina, as well as Aytekin Büyüköser, now directing fieldwork in the area around Panamara, who has also given his permission to use the imagery from the site even though it awaits excavation. I look forward to following these projects in the future, and seeing how many of the interpretations suggested here will survive new discoveries.

Much of this book matured during a post-doctoral fellowship at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, at Brown University. This period was made possible by a grant from NWO, and I am grateful for their continued support in offering this volume as an open access publication. I have also immensely benefited from the discussions on religion and urbanism of the community at the Max-Weber-Kolleg, University of Erfurt, and am grateful for the generous fellowship that allowed me to finalize the manuscript. The editors and copy-editors at Brill of the Religions of the Graeco-Roman World series, and the anonymous reviewers, all deserve special thanks for their careful eye and many useful suggestions, all of which have made this a much better book. Thanks are also due to Pim Schievink, who helped with the indices and copy editing of the final version. I take full responsibility for any remaining errors.

My interest in the Hellenistic world was sparked by Ko Feije, an inspiring and whimsical mentor, and a great source of encouragement. Irina Diakonoff, Jan Jaap Hekman, and Marianne Kleibrink are also responsible in part for my continued pursuit of archaeology, rather than studying it for only a year as a source of inspiration for artwork – plans change. Many others have also encouraged me along the way, more than can be mentioned here, but special attention goes to Elly Weistra, Yolanda Brandt and Diederik Kraaijpoel†, as well as Mary Hollinshead, Gary Reger, Marietta Horster, and Sue Alcock. My parents both constantly offered their moral support in every way they could, and although my mother did not live to see the final publication, her deep love of the English language may surface, albeit faintly, through the words of this book. None of this, however, would have come to anything without the endless patience of my husband, who let me drag him up and down the hills of Turkey and endured my ramblings, frustrations, and sometimes long absences as this volume came to completion. I dedicate this book to him.