Hittite PantheonSacred Site
Nerik (Oymaağaç Höyük)
The holy city of the Storm-god of Nerik in the north of the Hittite lands, where the Illuyanka story was recited at the Purulli festival; identified with Oymaağaç Höyük near Vezirköprü.
About Nerik (Oymaağaç Höyük)
The Storm-god's northern city
Nerik was one of the oldest and holiest cult centres of the Hattian and Hittite world, the seat of the Storm-god of Nerik, who was regarded as a son of the Storm-god of Hatti. The Illuyanka tales present themselves as the words of Kella, a priest of the Storm-god of Nerik, and link the serpent myth to the Purulli festival celebrated there.
Lost and restored
For much of the Hittite period Nerik lay in territory overrun by the Kaška, a people of the Black Sea hinterland, and the Hittite kings could not reach it; its cult was maintained from other towns. Hattusili III, in the thirteenth century BCE, recovered and rebuilt the city and made much of its restoration in his own texts.
Oymaağaç Höyük
Since 2005 a German-Turkish excavation at Oymaağaç Höyük, in the Vezirköprü district of Samsun Province, has uncovered a large Hittite temple and cuneiform tablets mentioning Nerik, and the site is now widely identified as the ancient city. The coordinates given here are those of the mound.
On the map
Nerik (Oymaağaç Höyük) among other places of the Hittite Pantheon.
Sources and further reading
Source notes
These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.
- Illuyanka tales, CTH 321, trans. H. A. Hoffner Jr., Hittite Myths
About this entry
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
Coordinates mark where the myths place a site, or where the tradition locates it today. Mythic realms are left off the map or marked as symbolic placements.