Abydos, Hellespont

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Abydos, an ancient city of Mysia, in Asia Minor, situated at Nara Burnu or Nagara Point on the Hellespont. Across Abydos lies Sestus on the European side marking the shortest point in the Dardanelles, scarcely a mile broad. The strategic site has been a prohibited zone in the twentieth century.

Abydos was first mentioned in the catague of Trojan allies (Iliad ii.836). It probably was a Thracian town, as Strabo has it, but was afterwards colonized by Milesians, with the consent of Gyges, king of Lydia ca. 700 BC. Darius burnt it in 512; here Xerxes built two bridges of boats and crossed the strait in 480 BC when he invaded Greece.

Abydos, a member of the Delian League, passed to the Achaemenids.King Agesilaus of Sparta crossed while returning to Greece in while Alexander the Great threw a spear to Abydos while crossing the straight and claimed Asia as his own. It is celebrated for the vigorous resistance it made against Philip V of Macedon in 200 BC (Polybius 16.29-34), and is famed in myth as the home of Leander. It minted coins from the early fifth century BC to the mid-third century AD.

The town remained till late Byzantine times the toll station of the Hellespont, its importance being transferred to the Dardanelles, after the building of the "Old Castles" by Sultan Mehmet II (c. 1456).