Turkey Christian Sites for Pilgrims

1. What Remains of Christian Asia Minor

Christian Asia Minor is the land the New Testament calls Asia, Galatia, Cappadocia, Pontus, Cilicia and Bithynia, and almost all of it lies inside the modern Republic of Turkey. Paul was born there, most of his journeys crossed it, the letters of Revelation were addressed to seven of its cities, and every one of the seven ecumenical councils that Catholics and Eastern Orthodox both recognise was held on its soil. What survives on the ground is a mixture of excavated ruin, working parish, converted building and living monastery, and a pilgrim who understands which is which will travel far better.

The scale is worth stating plainly. Anatolia was one of the most thoroughly Christianised regions of the ancient world for roughly a thousand years. Its bishops shaped the Creed, its monks shaped the liturgy, and its cities produced Ignatius, Polycarp, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom and Nicholas of Myra. Today the Christian population of Turkey is a very small minority scattered across a handful of communities. The gap between those two sentences is the thing a pilgrimage here has to hold in view.

Population figures for Christians in Turkey are estimates. The communities publish their own numbers and the annual International Religious Freedom Report of the United States Department of State collects them. No official Turkish census records religious affiliation in a way that would settle the question, so this guide describes the communities qualitatively rather than quoting a figure.

Four Kinds of Site, and Why the Difference Matters

Sites in Turkey fall into four categories, and each one asks something different of the visitor. Archaeological sites such as Ephesus, Laodicea and Sardis are excavations run by the state, with ticketed entry and no worshipping community attached. Converted buildings such as Hagia Sophia and the Chora church are historic churches now in use as mosques, and a Christian visitor enters as a guest of another religion's place of prayer. Living Christian sites such as the church of St George in the Phanar, the Catholic parishes of Istanbul and Izmir, and the Syriac monasteries of Tur Abdin have congregations, a liturgical calendar and a clergy who can be asked. Shrines such as the House of the Virgin Mary near Ephesus sit in between, cared for by the Catholic Church and visited by Christians and Muslims alike.

Getting the category right is the difference between a pilgrimage and a coach tour. At an excavation the useful act is to read the relevant passage of Scripture aloud. At a converted building it is to keep the customs of the house and pray silently. At a living community it is to attend the liturgy and, if the community is small and pressed, to leave something behind. For the theology underneath all of this, see our guide to what a pilgrimage is, and for the wider map of Christian destinations see the overview of Christian pilgrimage sites.

2. The Route at a Glance

Turkey is large, and no single trip covers everything. The country divides into four practical blocks for a Christian traveller: the Aegean coast around Izmir, the interior around Cappadocia, Istanbul with Nicaea and Chalcedon in reach of it, and the south from Tarsus through Antakya. Most pilgrimages take two of the four. The table below gives the anchors and the Christian claim of each.

A first visit usually pairs the Aegean coast with Istanbul, because Ephesus and Hagia Sophia are the two anchors most people come for and Nicaea can be reached from Istanbul in a morning's drive. A second visit adds Cappadocia, which needs three days of its own to be worth anything. The south, Tarsus and Antakya and Demre, tends to come last, and Antakya in particular calls for a different frame of mind, described in section 13.

3. Ephesus: The Archaeological Site

Ephesus is one of the most extensively excavated classical cities on the Mediterranean, and it carries a dense concentration of New Testament ground: Paul's long stay, the apostle John, the first of the letters of Revelation and an ecumenical council all attach to the one place. The site sits just outside the town of Selcuk in Izmir province, and it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2015. Paul spent about three years there according to Acts 20:31, longer than at any other city on his journeys, and the letter to the Ephesians, the letter of Revelation 2:1-7 and the traditions about the apostle John all attach to the place.

Ephesus was inscribed on the World Heritage List by UNESCO in 2015. The inscription and its boundaries are published in the World Heritage List entry for Ephesus.

What a visitor actually walks is a marble street running downhill from the upper gate to the harbour, with the civic buildings at the top and the theatre and library at the bottom. The great theatre is the one place on the site where the New Testament event and the surviving stone line up exactly. Acts 19 records the riot of the silversmiths, stirred up by Demetrius because Paul's preaching was damaging the trade in silver shrines of Artemis, and the crowd shouting for two hours in the theatre. The theatre is still there, and it still seats a crowd.

The Temple of Artemis and What the Riot Was About

The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and one column now stands in a marshy field between the site and Selcuk, which is close to everything that is left of it. The scale of the cult explains the economics of the riot. Ephesus lived partly on pilgrimage, and the silver shrines Demetrius made were the souvenirs of it. The account in Acts shows the gospel colliding with a religious economy, and the town clerk who eventually disperses the crowd does so by pointing out that the courts are open and the assembly is legal.

The Church of Mary and the Council of 431

The ruined double church on the northern edge of the site, usually called the Church of Mary, is the traditional location of the Council of Ephesus in 431. That council condemned the teaching associated with Nestorius, Archbishop of Constantinople, and confirmed the title Theotokos, God-bearer, for the Blessed Virgin Mary. The doctrinal point is about Christ. To call Mary the Mother of God is to say that the one born of her is a single person who is truly God and truly man, so that what is said of the man may be said of the Son of God.

Nestorius and the tradition that follows him should be stated as they state themselves. The Assyrian Church of the East, which honours Nestorius and never accepted the council of 431, holds that Christ is one prosopon of union in two natures and two hypostases, and has always denied that this means two Sons or two persons in the modern sense of the word. Its own members reject the label Nestorian as a name given to them from outside. Catholics and Assyrians signed a Common Christological Declaration in 1994 in which both sides confessed the same faith in the Son of God become man and recognised that much of the ancient dispute turned on the different senses each tradition gave to its Greek and Syriac terms. Our guide to the Assyrian Church of the East sets out that history in full.

The Catholic position remains what Ephesus defined. Mary is Theotokos because her Son is one divine person, and the Catechism teaches the title in exactly those terms. Standing in the roofless nave where the bishops argued is a good place to notice that the Marian dogma was defended in order to protect the doctrine of the Incarnation.

4. The Basilica of St John at Selcuk

The Basilica of St John stands on Ayasuluk hill in the town of Selcuk, about three kilometres from the main Ephesus excavation, and it was built in the sixth century under the emperor Justinian over a tomb venerated from early times as the grave of the apostle John. The church was one of the largest in the Byzantine world, laid out as a cross with six domes, and enough of the walls, columns and the marble tomb platform survive that the plan reads clearly from the ground.

The tradition behind the building is old. Writers of the second century, including Irenaeus and Polycrates of Ephesus, connect John with Ephesus and place his death there in old age. Eusebius quotes Polycrates in the Ecclesiastical History to that effect. The Church has never defined the point, and a smaller stream of ancient testimony argues for an early martyrdom, so the honest description is a strong and early tradition rather than a settled fact. Our guide to St John the Apostle and Evangelist works through the evidence.

A visitor who has come from the ruins below usually finds this the more prayerful of the two sites, because it is quieter and because the tomb gives a focus. The ascent up the hill also passes the Isa Bey Mosque of 1375 and reaches the Byzantine citadel at the top, which puts three layers of the town's history within a few hundred metres.

Why Ephesus Held So Much at Once

Ephesus concentrated an unusual amount of Christian memory because it was the administrative capital of Roman Asia and a major port until its harbour silted up. Paul used it as a base, the letters of Revelation put it first among the seven, John is buried there by tradition, a council met there, and a Marian shrine developed on the hill above. The silting that killed the harbour is also the reason the ruins survived. The city was abandoned rather than built over, so the marble street stayed where it fell.

5. The House of the Virgin Mary

The House of the Virgin Mary, called Meryem Ana Evi in Turkish, is a small stone building on the wooded slope of Bulbul Dagi about seven kilometres above the Ephesus site, cared for by the Catholic Archdiocese of Izmir and visited by Christian pilgrims and by Muslims who honour Mary as the mother of Isa. The Catholic Church has never declared that Mary lived or died there, and no decree exists that settles the question. Popes have visited and prayed in the chapel, which permits and encourages the devotion without deciding the history.

How the House Was Found

The building was located in 1891 by priests of the Lazarist congregation based at Smyrna, working from the topographical descriptions in the recorded visions of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, an Augustinian sister of Westphalia who died in 1824 and who never travelled. Emmerich described a small house of a particular shape on a hill within sight of the sea near Ephesus, with details of the terrain, and the searchers used the description as a map. Excavation of the building showed masonry of late antique date reused in later construction, and a local Christian population from the mountain villages had reportedly kept up an annual visit to the place.

Anne Catherine Emmerich was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2004. The visions attributed to her belong to the category of private revelation, which the Church may permit the faithful to read with profit and which no Catholic is required to believe. The 1891 search and the excavation reports are documented in the published records of the Archdiocese of Izmir.

Jerusalem or Ephesus

Two ancient traditions locate the last years of the Blessed Virgin. The older and better attested places her dormition at Jerusalem, and the Tomb of the Virgin in the Kidron valley and the Church of the Dormition on Mount Zion both belong to it. The Ephesian tradition rests on John's presence at Ephesus and on the word from the cross entrusting his mother to the beloved disciple in John 19:26-27. The Church has left both traditions standing. Pope Pius XII, in defining the Assumption in 1950, deliberately declined to state whether Mary died before being assumed, and the definition names no place. A pilgrim can pray at the Ephesus house with a clear conscience while holding that the question of where Mary ended her earthly life remains open. Our guide to the Holy Land pilgrimage sites covers the Jerusalem side of the same tradition.

This Is Not an Apparition Site

The House of the Virgin Mary is a shrine attached to a claim about where Mary once lived, and no apparition is alleged there. The distinction matters because Marian shrines get lumped together in travel writing. On 17 May 2024 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, under which the Church ordinarily does not declare an apparition supernatural and instead issues one of six determinations, the most favourable being a nihil obstat that permits devotion without declaring supernatural origin. Those norms govern apparition claims. They have no bearing on Ephesus, because nothing at Ephesus has been submitted as an apparition. Our guide to Marian apparition sites and their approval status sets out the framework and applies it case by case.

6. The Seven Churches of Revelation

All seven cities addressed in Revelation 2 and 3 lie in western Turkey, within a loop that can be driven from Izmir in three or four days. Ephesus is at Selcuk, Smyrna is Izmir itself, Pergamum is Bergama, Thyatira is Akhisar, Sardis is Sart, Philadelphia is Alasehir and Laodicea is on the ridge outside Denizli. Six are archaeological sites of very different scale, from the enormous terraces of Pergamum to a few standing arches at Philadelphia, and Smyrna is a working city where a Christian presence has never entirely disappeared.

The letters themselves are the property of another page. What Christ says to each church, the meaning of the lampstands, the Nicolaitans, the lukewarm water of Laodicea and the crown of life promised to Smyrna are all handled in our guide to the seven churches of Revelation. Read that first and treat this section as the map that goes with it.

What the Geography Adds

Standing on the sites changes how some of the images land. Laodicea sat between the hot springs of Hierapolis and the cold water of Colossae, and its own supply arrived tepid through a stone aqueduct whose calcified pipes are still visible on the site, which gives the rebuke of Revelation 3:15-16 a local edge. Pergamum's altar terrace and its temple of Asclepius stand behind the phrase about the throne of Satan in Revelation 2:13. Sardis had a citadel thought impregnable and was taken twice by surprise, which sharpens the warning to be watchful in Revelation 3:2-3.

Smyrna deserves a stop for Polycarp. He was bishop of the city, a disciple of John according to Irenaeus, and he was burned in the stadium at Smyrna in the middle of the second century. The Martyrdom of Polycarp is the earliest surviving account of a Christian martyrdom outside the New Testament, and it records his refusal to swear by the genius of Caesar with the line that he had served Christ for eighty six years and would not blaspheme his King. The stadium is gone under the modern city. The agora of Roman Smyrna is excavated and open in the middle of Izmir, and the Catholic church of St Polycarp stands in the same city.

7. The Pauline Road Through Anatolia

Paul crossed Anatolia repeatedly, and the sites of his journeys form a second route through the country that is quieter and less visited than the coast. Acts 13 and 14 record the first journey out of Antioch through Cyprus to Perga in Pamphylia, then inland to Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe, and the same towns are revisited on the later journeys. Most of them are excavated sites with modest remains and very few visitors, which makes them good places to read Acts slowly.

• Perga, near modern Aksu outside Antalya, where John Mark left Paul and Barnabas and went back to Jerusalem (Acts 13:13).
• Pisidian Antioch, at Yalvac in Isparta province, where Paul preached the long synagogue sermon of Acts 13:16-41 and where he and Barnabas turned to the Gentiles after opposition (Acts 13:46).
• Iconium, the modern city of Konya, where the preaching split the town (Acts 14:1-6).
• Lystra, near Hatunsaray, where the crowd took Barnabas for Zeus and Paul for Hermes and then stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city (Acts 14:11-19), and the home town of Timothy (Acts 16:1).
• Troas, on the north Aegean coast, where Paul saw the vision of the man of Macedonia calling him over (Acts 16:9-10), and where Eutychus fell from the window during the long night sermon (Acts 20:9).
• Assos, a spectacular hilltop site south of Troas, where Paul rejoined the ship after walking overland (Acts 20:13-14).
• Miletus, south of Ephesus, where Paul summoned the elders of the Ephesian church and told them they would not see his face again (Acts 20:17-38).

The farewell at Miletus is the emotional centre of the whole Anatolian circuit, and the site is large, marshy and usually empty. Reading Acts 20:17-38 aloud in the theatre there is one of the more affecting things a pilgrim can do in Turkey. The Konya archaeological museum and the Yalvac museum both hold material from the Pauline sites, and Konya also carries a substantial later Christian history under its Seljuk and Ottoman layers.

8. Tarsus, the City Paul Came From

Tarsus, in Mersin province on the plain of Cilicia, is the birthplace of the apostle Paul, who tells the tribune in Acts 21:39 that he is a Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no ordinary city, and tells the crowd in Acts 22:3 that he was born there and brought up in Jerusalem at the feet of Gamaliel. Tarsus was a university town in the Roman period with a reputation for philosophy, which is part of the background to Paul's ability to argue in Greek terms before Greek audiences.

What survives is modest. A stretch of Roman road, a section of the ancient street excavated below the modern level, a Roman gateway traditionally called Cleopatra's Gate, and a well in a courtyard shown as the well of St Paul's house. The identification of the well is traditional rather than proven. The principal Christian building is a nineteenth century church that is maintained by the Turkish authorities as a museum, and Catholic groups have long celebrated Mass there by arrangement with the local authorities and the Catholic vicariate, notably during the Pauline Year proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI for 2008 and 2009, which brought a large flow of pilgrims to Tarsus.

A pilgrim should come here for the biography rather than the architecture. Tarsus is where the tentmaker learned his trade, where the citizenship that saved his life at Jerusalem and got him to Rome came from, and where Barnabas found him and pulled him into the mission at Antioch. Our guide to St Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles covers the life those places belong to.

9. Cappadocia and the Rock Churches

Cappadocia is a volcanic landscape in central Anatolia where soft tuff has been carved into houses, dovecotes, monasteries and hundreds of churches, many of them painted. The Goreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1985. For a Christian visitor the region offers two things at once: the physical remains of a large monastic culture, and the homeland of the theologians who gave the Church its language for the Trinity.

Goreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia were inscribed on the World Heritage List by UNESCO in 1985. The inscription is published in the World Heritage List entry for the site.

The Cappadocian Fathers

Three fourth century bishops from this region are known together as the Cappadocian Fathers. Basil the Great was bishop of Caesarea, the modern Kayseri, and died in 379. His younger brother Gregory was bishop of Nyssa. Their friend Gregory of Nazianzus, called the Theologian in the Eastern churches, briefly presided at the Council of Constantinople in 381. Between them they defended the full divinity of the Holy Spirit against those who accepted the divinity of the Son but stopped short of the Spirit, and they gave the doctrine of the Trinity the settled formula of one ousia in three hypostases.

Basil also wrote the ascetic rules that shaped Eastern monasticism and built a complex of hospital, hospice and workshops outside Caesarea, which later writers called the Basileias, for the sick and the poor. Our guide to St Basil the Great, Cappadocian Father covers the life, and our guide to the doctrine of the Trinity covers the theology the Cappadocians settled. Very little of fourth century Caesarea is visible today, so the Fathers are met in Cappadocia through the landscape and the monastic remains rather than through their own buildings.

Goreme and the Painted Churches

The open air museum at Goreme holds the densest group of rock-cut churches, several with painted programmes from roughly the tenth and eleventh centuries. The Dark Church, the Church with the Buckle and the Apple Church carry cycles of the life of Christ in good condition, protected by the darkness that gives the first of them its name. Other churches in the valleys around Goreme, at Cavusin, in the Ihlara valley and around Soganli, are unstaffed and often unlit, and a torch turns them from empty caves into painted chapels.

The iconography rewards attention. These are Byzantine programmes laid out by the standard logic: Christ Pantocrator in the dome, the Virgin in the apse, the great feasts around the vault, the Deesis with Mary and John the Baptist interceding, and rows of saints at eye level where a worshipper stands. Some faces have been scratched out, damage of various dates and causes. The rule for reading an Eastern church, that the building is a diagram of the cosmos with Christ at the top and the communion of saints filling the walls, is set out in our guide to the Eastern Orthodox Church.

The Underground Cities

Derinkuyu and Kaymakli are the two largest of the excavated underground complexes, running many levels below the surface with ventilation shafts, wells, stables, storerooms, chapels and rolling stone doors that seal a passage from the inside. Popular accounts often present them as refuges built by Christians hiding from persecution. The archaeology is more cautious. The complexes were dug and enlarged over a long period, some parts predate Christianity in the region, and they served as seasonal storage and as refuges during raids of many kinds. Chapels cut into them show that Christians used them. A guide who tells you they were built to hide from Rome is telling you a story rather than a finding.

Cappadocia is also the one place in Turkey where the sheer number of churches makes the historical point without argument. This was Christian country, densely and ordinarily, for centuries, in villages that had a chapel the way villages elsewhere had a well. Meteora in Greece offers a comparable experience of monastic landscape still in use, described in our guide to the Meteora monasteries.

10. Istanbul: Hagia Sophia and the Phanar

Istanbul is the ancient Constantinople, capital of the Roman empire in the East for more than a thousand years and the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to this day. Three of the seven ecumenical councils met in the city: Constantinople I in 381, which completed the Creed, Constantinople II in 553, and Constantinople III in 680 and 681. The Quinisext council of 692 met in the domed hall of the imperial palace and issued disciplinary canons attached to the two preceding councils. The Eastern Orthodox receive those canons as part of the sixth council. Rome never accepted them as a body, and Catholics do not count Quinisext among the ecumenical councils. The Historic Areas of Istanbul were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1985.

The Historic Areas of Istanbul were inscribed on the World Heritage List by UNESCO in 1985. The inscription is published in the World Heritage List entry for the site.

Hagia Sophia

Hagia Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom, was built for the emperor Justinian by Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus and dedicated in 537. Its dome, roughly thirty one metres across and floated on pendentives over a square, was without precedent, and it set the scale against which Byzantine church building was measured for centuries afterwards. The building served as the cathedral of Constantinople until 1453, when the city fell to the Ottomans and the church was converted to a mosque. It was made a museum in 1935 and returned to use as a mosque in 2020.

A Christian visitor today enters a working mosque and keeps the customs of the house: shoes off, modest dress, women's heads covered, and no loud prayer or liturgical gesture. The mosaics that remain are partly screened during prayer times. Praying silently in a building where the Divine Liturgy was celebrated for nine hundred years is entirely possible, and it asks a certain amount of interior discipline.

Hagia Sophia is also where the Great Schism acquired its symbolic date. On 16 July 1054 legates of the Roman see led by Cardinal Humbert laid a bull of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia against Patriarch Michael Cerularius, who excommunicated the legates in return. Pope Leo IX, who had sent them, had died three months earlier, which is one reason historians treat the act as legally defective and the schism as a slow separation rather than a single rupture. On 7 December 1965 Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras issued a joint declaration removing those excommunications from the memory of the Church. Our guide to the Great Schism of 1054 tells the story in full, and our guide to the Filioque covers the doctrinal question underneath it.

The Chora and the Other Churches

The church of the Holy Saviour in Chora, called Kariye in Turkish, holds one of the finest surviving late Byzantine mosaic and fresco cycles, made in the early fourteenth century under Theodore Metochites. The narthex mosaics run through the infancy of Christ and the life of the Virgin, and the funerary chapel carries a fresco of the Anastasis in which Christ hauls Adam and Eve bodily out of their tombs, which is the classic Eastern image of the Resurrection. Like Hagia Sophia the building was a church, then a mosque, then a museum. A decree of 2020 designated it for use as a mosque again, and it reopened for prayer in 2024.

Other Byzantine survivals across the city include the church of St Saviour Pantokrator, the small church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, and the Byzantine land walls of Theodosius which still run for kilometres across the peninsula. The Basilica Cistern under the old city is Justinian's water supply for the palace quarter.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate at the Phanar

The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople has its seat in the Phanar district on the Golden Horn, in a modest walled compound whose patriarchal church is dedicated to St George. The Ecumenical Patriarch holds a primacy of honour among the autocephalous Orthodox churches, and the see has been in Constantinople since the fourth century. The compound is open to visitors, the Divine Liturgy is celebrated there, and the contrast between the historical weight of the office and the small scale of the buildings is the most instructive thing in Christian Istanbul.

The theological school on the island of Halki, which trained clergy for the Patriarchate, has been closed since 1971, and its reopening has been raised repeatedly in international discussion. Our guides to the Greek Orthodox Church and to the autocephalous Orthodox churches explain how the Patriarchate relates to the rest of the Orthodox world. Relations between Rome and Constantinople since 1965 are traced in our guide to ecumenism.

11. Nicaea, Now Iznik

Nicaea is the modern town of Iznik in Bursa province, on the eastern shore of Lake Iznik, roughly two hours by road from Istanbul once the ferry or the bridge is used. The First Council of Nicaea met there in 325 and produced the creed that Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans and most other Christians still recite. The Second Council of Nicaea met there in 787 and settled the veneration of images. The Roman and Byzantine walls still ring the town, and the church of Hagia Sophia stands at the central crossroads.

What Happened in 325

The council was convened by the emperor Constantine to settle the teaching of Arius, a priest of Alexandria who held that the Son was the first and greatest of God's creatures, made before time and through whom all things were made, and therefore not eternal in the way the Father is eternal. Arius framed it as guarding the oneness of God. The council answered with the word homoousios, of one substance with the Father, and confessed the Son as begotten and not made. Athanasius, then a young deacon of Alexandria, spent much of the following half century defending that word through repeated exiles, as our guide to St Athanasius and the Arian crisis describes.

The creed recited at Mass on Sundays is the fuller form completed at Constantinople in 381, which is why it is properly the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. Standing in Iznik and saying it through is the plainest possible use of the site. The seventeenth centenary of the council fell in 2025 and drew Catholic and Orthodox attention back to the town, and Pope Leo XIV travelled to Turkey in late November 2025 and marked the anniversary at Iznik together with the Ecumenical Patriarch.

The papal journey to Turkey and the commemoration at Iznik in late November 2025 are documented in the Holy See's published itinerary and communications for that visit. Our guide to Pope Leo XIV covers his pontificate.

What Happened in 787

The Second Council of Nicaea ended the first phase of the iconoclast controversy, in which emperors had ordered the destruction of religious images on the grounds that venerating them broke the commandment against graven images. The council distinguished the worship, latreia, that belongs to God alone from the honour, proskynesis, given to an image, and taught that the honour passes to the one depicted. The argument turns on the Incarnation. The invisible God has taken visible flesh, so he can be depicted. That council is the seventh and last ecumenical council recognised in common by Catholics and Eastern Orthodox.

What There Is to See

The walls, with their gates and towers, are the most complete Roman and Byzantine circuit in the region and can be walked. The building called Hagia Sophia of Iznik in the centre of town is a church of Justinian's period, rebuilt after earthquakes, which served as a mosque, then a museum, and has been in use as a mosque again since 2011. Fragments of mosaic floor and wall painting remain visible inside. Tradition associates the council of 787 with this church rather than the council of 325, which met in the imperial palace, and the palace site is thought to lie under the water at the lake's edge.

In 2014 a team led by an archaeologist from Bursa Uludag University identified the remains of a basilica submerged a short distance offshore in Lake Iznik, and the find has been widely reported and further surveyed. Proposals connecting it to the council church have been made and are debated. A pilgrim should treat the submerged basilica as a genuine and important discovery whose identification is not settled.

12. Chalcedon, Now Kadikoy

Chalcedon is Kadikoy, a busy district on the Asian side of Istanbul reached by a short ferry crossing of the Bosphorus. The Council of Chalcedon met there in 451, in the church of St Euphemia, and produced the definition that Christ is one person in two natures, divine and human, which are united without confusion, without change, without division and without separation. Nothing of the council church survives above ground, and the district today is a place of ferry terminals, bars and bookshops.

The visit is therefore an act of memory rather than a sightseeing stop, and it is worth making because Chalcedon is the point where the Christian East divided in a way that has never been healed. The Oriental Orthodox churches, the Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian and Malankara churches, did not receive the council. Their position, stated as they state it, is that the formula of Cyril of Alexandria, one incarnate nature of God the Word, is the correct expression of the union, that speaking of two natures after the union risks dividing Christ, and that they equally condemn Eutyches and any suggestion that the humanity of Christ was absorbed or diminished. They call themselves miaphysite and reject the label monophysite as a caricature.

Modern dialogue has moved a long way. In 1973 Pope Paul VI and Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria signed a common declaration confessing the same faith in the mystery of the Word incarnate. In 1984 John Paul II and the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius Zakka I Iwas made a similar declaration and provided for pastoral cooperation. Joint commissions have repeatedly concluded that the two families hold the same christological faith in different terminologies. Formal communion has not been restored, and the Catholic Church continues to hold the Chalcedonian definition as binding. Our guides to the Oriental Orthodox churches, the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Armenian Apostolic Church set out each body in its own terms.

13. Antioch, Now Antakya

Antioch on the Orontes is the modern city of Antakya in Hatay province, close to the Syrian border, and it is where the followers of Jesus were first called Christians (Acts 11:26). The church there was the first substantially Gentile congregation, Barnabas and Paul taught it for a year, and it was Antioch that sent them out on the first missionary journey after fasting and prayer (Acts 13:1-3). Peter is associated with the city by an old tradition, and Paul records the confrontation with him there over table fellowship with Gentiles in Galatians 2:11-14.

The Antiochene Inheritance

Ignatius was bishop of Antioch and was taken to Rome for execution early in the second century, writing seven letters on the road that are among the earliest Christian documents outside the New Testament. In the letter to the Smyrnaeans he uses the phrase katholike ekklesia, the catholic Church, which is its first surviving occurrence, and his letters press the unity of the local church around its bishop and the reality of the Eucharist. John Chrysostom preached in Antioch for years before being taken to Constantinople at the end of 397 and enthroned as archbishop early in 398, and the great series of homilies on Matthew, on Genesis and on the statues came out of that Antiochene ministry, as our guide to St John Chrysostom describes.

Antioch also gave its name to a school of biblical interpretation that emphasised the literal and historical sense of the text against the more allegorical habits of Alexandria, and it gave its name to five patriarchates that still exist. The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch both now have their seats in Damascus, the Maronite Patriarchate of Antioch is at Bkerke in Lebanon, the Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarchate is in Damascus and the Syriac Catholic Patriarchate is in Beirut. Three of those five are in full communion with Rome. Our guides to the Eastern Catholic churches and the Maronite Church explain that arrangement.

The Cave Church and the 2023 Earthquakes

The church of St Peter is a rock-cut hall on the slope of the mountain above the town, with a masonry facade added in the Crusader period, long shown as a place where the earliest Antiochene community gathered. Below it the old city held the Greek Orthodox church of Saints Peter and Paul, a Catholic parish, a synagogue and the Habib-i Neccar mosque, all within a few streets of each other.

The earthquakes of 6 February 2023 devastated Antakya. The Greek Orthodox church collapsed, the Catholic church and the synagogue were wrecked, the mosque was severely damaged and much of the old town was lost, along with a very large number of lives across the region. The cave church on the hillside was damaged. Reconstruction is under way and will take years.

A pilgrim should go to Antakya knowing this. The right posture there is presence and practical support for a community that has been reduced and scattered. Ask the local Catholic vicariate or the Orthodox community what is open and what would help before arriving with a plan.

14. Myra, Demre and St Nicholas

Myra is the modern town of Demre on the Lycian coast in Antalya province, and its church of St Nicholas draws large numbers of visitors. Nicholas was bishop of Myra in the fourth century. Almost nothing about him is documented in contemporary sources, the surviving biography was written centuries later, and the stories that made him famous, the dowries thrown through a window to save three girls from destitution, the sailors delivered from a storm, the intervention to stop an unjust execution, come from that later tradition. He is honoured as a saint across the Catholic, Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox worlds, and by way of the Dutch Sinterklaas he became Santa Claus.

The claim that Nicholas attended the Council of Nicaea and struck Arius belongs to a much later legend. His name appears in some lists of the Nicene fathers, and those lists are late and unreliable. Our guide to St Nicholas, the real Santa Claus works through what is documented and what is not.

The church at Demre is a Byzantine building of several phases, with mosaic floors, fresco fragments and a stone sarcophagus traditionally identified as the tomb. The relics are not there. In 1087 sailors from Bari removed them and took them to Italy, where they remain in the basilica of San Nicola, and Venice claims a further portion taken by its fleet during the First Crusade. Myra was also a stop on Paul's voyage to Rome, where the centurion transferred the prisoners to an Alexandrian grain ship (Acts 27:5-6), and the nearby harbour of Patara, where Paul changed ships on an earlier voyage (Acts 21:1), is the town from which Nicholas is traditionally said to have come.

15. The South East: Tur Abdin and the Armenian Sites

The south east of Turkey holds the country's oldest continuously functioning Christian institutions and its most substantial Armenian remains. Tur Abdin, the limestone plateau around Mardin and Midyat, is the historic heartland of the Syriac Orthodox Church, and Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, is still the liturgical language there. The region carries a dense concentration of ancient churches and monasteries, some ruined, several still inhabited.

• Mor Gabriel, also called Deyrulumur, near Midyat, traditionally founded in 397 and one of the oldest working monasteries in the world, with a community, a school and a bishop.
• Deyrulzafaran, the Saffron Monastery outside Mardin, seat of the Syriac Orthodox patriarchs until 1932.
• Mor Hananyo, Mor Yakup and the village churches of the Tur Abdin plateau, many of them with distinctive transverse-nave plans and elaborate carved stonework.
• Ani, near Kars on the Armenian border, a ruined medieval Armenian city whose cathedral was built by the architect Trdat and completed at the turn of the eleventh century, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2016.
• Akdamar, the church of the Holy Cross on an island in Lake Van, built between 915 and 921 for King Gagik I, with an unusual exterior relief cycle of Old Testament scenes carved across the walls, restored and reopened in 2007.
• Sumela, a Greek Orthodox monastery built into a cliff face in the mountains south of Trabzon on the Black Sea, with painted rock churches, abandoned in 1923 and since restored as a monument, where the Divine Liturgy has been celebrated on occasion by permission since 2010.

The Archaeological Site of Ani was inscribed on the World Heritage List by UNESCO in 2016. Foundation dates for Mor Gabriel and Deyrulzafaran are those given by the Syriac Orthodox Church, which maintains both houses.

Akdamar and Sumela both host liturgy occasionally by arrangement with the Turkish authorities, and a pilgrim who wants to attend one of those services should plan through the relevant church rather than a general operator. The region is a long way from the pilgrimage circuits of the west coast, and it is where a visitor is most likely to meet Eastern Christianity as a living inheritance rather than a ruin.

16. The Christians Who Live There Now

Christians in Turkey are a very small minority made up of several distinct communities, each with its own hierarchy, language and history. Knowing which is which is the difference between visiting a country's Christian past and meeting its Christian present.

The Communities

The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople serves the Greek Orthodox faithful, now concentrated in Istanbul and on the islands of Gokceada and Bozcaada, a community reduced over the twentieth century by the population exchange of 1923 and by later departures, and now very small. The Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople heads the Armenian Apostolic community, which maintains parishes, schools and a hospital in Istanbul. The Syriac Orthodox have both the monasteries and villages of Tur Abdin and a growing city presence, and the church of Mor Ephrem at Yesilkoy in Istanbul, consecrated in October 2023, was described by the Syriac Orthodox community and by Turkish officials at its opening as the first new church built in the history of the republic.

Catholics in Turkey are organised in several jurisdictions at once: the Latin apostolic vicariates of Istanbul and Anatolia, the archdiocese of Izmir, an Armenian Catholic archeparchy, a Chaldean archeparchy at Diyarbakir and a Syriac Catholic exarchate. Protestant congregations, both historic foreign chaplaincies and newer Turkish-speaking churches, exist mostly in the large cities. Our guide to the Eastern Catholic churches explains how the Catholic communion holds Latin and Eastern jurisdictions in the same territory.

The Pressures

The communities operate under real constraints. The Halki theological school has been closed since 1971, which limits the training of Orthodox clergy in the country. Property and foundation questions have generated long legal disputes, including litigation over the lands of Mor Gabriel. Bishop Luigi Padovese, the Catholic apostolic vicar of Anatolia, was killed at Iskenderun on 3 June 2010 by his driver, and the Catholic community there has continued its work since. These facts belong in a pilgrim's field of view, stated soberly and without political commentary, because they describe the condition of the people whose churches the pilgrim is visiting.

17. Building the Route

Building a Christian route through Turkey means choosing a theme and accepting that the country is too big for one trip. Four themes work well, and each produces a coherent journey of about a week.

The Four Themes

The New Testament route runs along the Aegean: Ephesus, the House of the Virgin Mary, the Basilica of St John, Miletus, Smyrna, and then the loop of the seven cities of Revelation, finishing at Laodicea. This is the route for a group reading Acts and Revelation.

The councils route takes Istanbul, Iznik, Kadikoy and then Ephesus, which covers all seven ecumenical councils between four locations. This is the route for anyone who wants to understand where the Creed came from, and it pairs naturally with our guide to the Eastern Orthodox Church and to the Great Schism of 1054.

The monastic route takes Cappadocia and then, for those willing to travel, Tur Abdin. This is the route for the history of prayer, the Fathers, the rules, the painted chapels and the daily office still sung in Aramaic.

The Pauline route follows the journeys: Tarsus, Perga, Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, Troas, Assos, Miletus and Antakya. This is the least developed for tourism and the most rewarding for anyone who wants to feel the distances Paul covered on foot.

Practical Shape

Distances in Anatolia are long and the interior is high, cold in winter and very hot in July and August. Spring and autumn are the workable seasons for walking excavations. Almost all the archaeological sites are open ground with little shade and uneven marble underfoot, so footwear matters more than anything else on a packing list. Sites are ticketed and administered by the state, and specific prices, hours and permissions change, so check them close to the date with the operator or the site authority rather than relying on any guide, including this one.

Groups intending to celebrate Mass should arrange it in advance through the relevant Catholic jurisdiction, the vicariate of Istanbul or of Anatolia or the archdiocese of Izmir depending on the region, and should not assume that a historic building will be available for liturgy. Bringing a chaplain is normal for organised pilgrimages. At converted buildings now in use as mosques, the appropriate practice is silent personal prayer and observance of the customs of the place.

If You Cannot Travel

Most people who read about Ephesus will never stand in it, and the Church has never taught that a journey is required for anything. Pilgrimage is one of the expressions of popular piety that surround the sacramental life of the Church without replacing it (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1674), and the Catechism describes pilgrimages as occasions for renewal in prayer (CCC 2691). Reading Acts 19 and 20 with a plan of Ephesus in front of you, praying the Creed slowly with Nicaea in mind, and learning what the Cappadocians argued are all available at home. Our guide to making a virtual pilgrimage sets out how to do that seriously.