The seven churches of Revelation, also spoken of as the seven churches of early Christianity or of Anatolia, belonged to cities in what is now Türkiye. Three of those cities are covered by guides on this site that place them among the seven: Pergamon, whose ruins rise above the town of Bergama in İzmir province; Thyateira, buried under the district town of Akhisar in Manisa province; and Philadelphia, under the town of Alaşehir, also in Manisa. Below is what a visitor finds at each of them today, followed by the church remains that can be seen at Ephesus and Laodikeia, two more ancient cities with guides here.
Pergamon: the Red Courtyard and the city on the hill
Bergama is the largest district of İzmir province by area, about 103 kilometres north of the city of İzmir, in the Bakırçay basin. The modern town grew up on the same slope as ancient Pergamon, so Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine buildings stand among its streets. UNESCO inscribed the whole setting in June 2014 as Pergamon and its Multilayered Cultural Landscape, a name chosen because the protected area is a terrain of settlement built up over three thousand years rather than one ruin.
The building tied to the church of Pergamon is the one people in Bergama call the Kızıl Avlu, the Red Courtyard, in the middle of the Roman lower town. It takes its name from its brick walls and the large enclosed court in front of it. It was most likely put up in the second century AD under Hadrian and dedicated to the Egyptian gods Serapis and Isis, and the two round structures beside it hold cult altars whose gods have not been identified. Because the Selinos stream ran across the site, tunnels were dug beneath it so that the temple and its court would not be cut apart, and these channels still carry water. In the early Byzantine period the sanctuary was adapted and kept in use as one of the seven churches of Anatolia.
The rest of Pergamon explains why the city mattered. Its peak came between 280 and 133 BC, when the Attalid kings ruled one of the strongest Hellenistic states in Anatolia from here. Eumenes II built the Altar of Zeus, the royal palace, the city walls and a library holding two hundred thousand book rolls. In 133 BC the last king left his kingdom to Rome by will, and Pergamon carried on as a provincial metropolis, a rival of Smyrna and Ephesus. In the upper city you can see the Temple of Athena and a theatre built for ten thousand spectators. About three kilometres from the acropolis lies the Asklepieion, a healing sanctuary whose surviving buildings are mostly Roman, including a theatre for 3,500 and the round temple of Asklepios, modelled on the Pantheon in Rome around AD 150. Finds from the site are in the Bergama Museum.
Thyateira: in the centre of Akhisar
Akhisar, on the İzmir–İstanbul road, sits directly on top of ancient Thyateira, a place whose history begins in the Early Bronze Age. In antiquity it was known for weaving, and because the roads of the region crossed there it carried both commercial and military weight. Visitors come today because the church of Thyateira was one of the seven churches of early Christianity. The excavated ground is in the centre of the town, and people in Akhisar also call it Tepe Mezarlığı, the Tepe cemetery.
The city also gave its name to a battle. In AD 366 Procopius, a commander from Cilicia who had rebelled in a bid for the Roman throne, led the legions that had joined him against the troops loyal to Valens, brother of Valentinian I. Valens's side won the battle of Thyateira, and Procopius was taken prisoner and put to death.
Philadelphia: Alaşehir and the church of St John
Philadelphia lies beneath Alaşehir, on the northern slopes of the Bozdağlar, 110 kilometres from Manisa. The town rose to importance under the Pergamene king Attalos II Philadelphos, whose name it carries, and in Roman times its many temples and festivals earned it the nickname of the little Athens. It remained important through the Byzantine centuries and was given walls in the eleventh century, after the Turkish incursions began. Philadelphia is one of the seven churches of Revelation.
The monument most visitors look for is the church of St John, built in the sixth century in the early Byzantine period and standing inside the modern town. Three of its massive piers are still upright, and its builders reused a good deal of carved stone from older buildings, column drums included. The heart of the ancient city is the rise known locally as Toptepe. Excavation there in the early 1980s partly exposed a theatre, a temple and a stadium, but the work stopped and those remains are now difficult to pick out on the ground. The same digs found the East Gate of the Byzantine walls, a main entrance between a semicircular tower and a rectangular one, which was blocked during the Turkish incursions and never opened again.
Church remains at Ephesus and Laodikeia
At Ephesus, in İzmir province, the walking route through the marble city passes the theatre and the gymnasia and reaches a pair of churches known as the twin churches. On Ayasuluk hill in Selçuk stands the Basilica of St John, raised over the grave of John, one of the apostles, and over the church built in his memory; a monument and a church with a timber roof were put up over the grave in stages. Seven kilometres from Selçuk, on Bülbüldağı and past the upper gate of Ephesus, is the House of the Virgin Mary, a Catholic shrine. Pilgrims visit it in the belief that the apostle John brought Mary, the mother of Jesus, to this stone house and that she lived in it until she was taken into heaven; the Catholic Church has made no pronouncement on whether the house was really hers.
Laodikeia lies six kilometres north of Denizli in the Lykos valley, the Çürüksu of today. The Seleucid king Antiochos II Theos founded it between 261 and 253 BC and named it after his wife Laodike, and it grew rich on textiles, marble, grain and livestock. Among the parts excavated and restored since 2003 are the Laodikeia church, under a protective roof, and the north church, along with Syria Street, the central agora and a stadium of 285 by 70 metres. The city was abandoned after a great earthquake in the reign of the emperor Phocas, between 602 and 610.
Before you go
Entry fees, opening hours and directions for each of these sites are on its own page, linked below. At Thyateira the excavated ground is in the middle of Akhisar, and at Philadelphia the church of St John stands within the modern town of Alaşehir.
