The places to see first in Hatay are in Antakya, the ancient Antioch: Roman floor mosaics, held in some of the largest mosaic collections anywhere, and St Pierre, a cave on the edge of town that tradition calls the first church of Christianity. Beyond the city, Samandağ to the south-west has a Roman tunnel cut through rock, the Armenian village of Vakıflı and the shrines of Hızır and Moses; to the north are İskenderun, Arsuz, the Belen pass and Payas; inland lie the mound of Alalah, lakes, caves and high pastures.
The mosaics of Antakya
Hatay's mosaics come largely from digs Princeton University ran between 1932 and 1939 around the city, at Harbiye, Seleucia Pieria, İskenderun and elsewhere. The finds were divided, and pieces from those seasons now sit in roughly twenty museums and private collections abroad. What stayed forms the core of the Hatay Archaeological Museum, one of the world's biggest homes for mosaics, its eight halls ordered by find place. The ministry reports that the building was partly damaged in the 2023 earthquakes and has put extra security staff and cameras there.
The Necmi Asfuroğlu Archaeological Museum, a short walk from St Pierre, began with a hotel project in 2009: digging in the city centre struck ancient remains, and they were left in the ground with the museum built over them. The mosaics lie on the floors where they were laid, among them a second-century villa floor showing Pegasus with three nymphs above the muses. Another floor, of 1,050 square metres, is claimed by the museum as the biggest mosaic in one piece anywhere.
The earlier museum building has become the Hatay City Museum, whose five galleries cover the province's faiths, trade, crafts, the courtyard house and the local kitchen.
St Pierre and the old town
East of the centre on the Reyhanlı road, St Pierre is a cave in the slope of Stauris. Tradition says the apostle Peter preached in Antioch between 29 and 40 AD, gathered his first followers in this cave, and that believers were first called Christian here. Columns and arches added in the 11th and 12th centuries made it a church of three aisles, later given a Gothic front. Look for the worn 4th and 5th century floor mosaics in the side aisles. The Pope named it a place of pilgrimage in 1963, Catholics gather here every 29 June, and it is on UNESCO's tentative list. About ten minutes east on foot is the veiled bust of Charon cut into the rock, which the ministry links to a plague in the 2nd century BC.
In the centre, walk Kurtuluş Caddesi. The Habib-i Neccar mosque, dated 1285 in the inventory, stands at its corner with Kemal Paşa Caddesi. Further along, the Catholic church hides down a dead-end lane beside the Sarımiye mosque, with the synagogue across the road, a trio the district authorities present as a sign of Muslim, Jewish and Christian coexistence. The Orthodox church on Hürriyet Caddesi, opened in 1900, still holds services.
Above town, the walls begun by Seleucus I Nicator around 300 BC once ran twelve kilometres. Most of what survives is Justinian's work from the sixth century, on the Habib Neccar slope about three kilometres from the centre.
Samandağ: the Titus Tunnel, Vakıflı and the Hızır sites
At Çevlik, five kilometres from Samandağ and reachable by minibus, the Romans cut a channel through the rock to steer floodwater away from the port of Seleucia Pieria. Vespasian began it, Titus finished it, and walking its 1,380 metres is the visit. The Beşikli Cave, a rock tomb with twelve graves, is near its seaward end.
Vakıflı, three kilometres from Samandağ, is described by the Culture Portal as the only village in Türkiye whose people are all Armenian. The villagers built their own museum, which keeps family diaries and photographs on microfilm and covers needle lace, silkworms and harisa. Plan for the feast of the Virgin Mary, which Vakıflı keeps on the second Sunday of August.
Two sites carry the local story of Hızır and Moses: a holy rock near the sea about 3 km from Samandağ, which visitors walk around, and at Hıdırbey the Musa tree, said to have grown from Moses' staff, its trunk 21 metres around. On a mountain between Antakya and Samandağ stands the 6th-century monastery of St Simon, built around the pillar he is said to have lived on for forty years.
İskenderun, Arsuz and the Belen pass
İskenderun has two working churches: Aziz Nikola, an Orthodox church of 1870 on Şehit Pamir Caddesi, and the İtalyan Katolik Latin Kilisesi on Mithat Paşa Caddesi, founded by Capuchin friars in the early 1600s. Down the coast, Arsuz is the beach town, where the Amanos mountains meet the sea; it has the Mario Hanna church of 1778, the remains of a Hellenistic harbour eight kilometres south, and an inland wooded pool linked with the Virgin, where a ceremony is held on 14 August.
The Belen pass lies under one of the main bird migration routes of the western Palaearctic, and its nature park is a known spot for watching buzzards, eagles, cranes and storks. In Belen, Mimar Sinan built a mosque complex for Süleyman in 1553. Off the Antakya–İskenderun road, Bakras castle crowns a steep hill above Ötençay; the Crusaders gave it up to Saladin in 1183.
Payas and Dörtyol
At Payas, Sinan also built the Sokollu Mehmet Paşa complex, dated 1574: a mosque, a madrasa, a bathhouse, a market of forty-five shops and a large domed caravanserai. Payas castle, with eight towers and a ditch, stands just west of it and guarded caravans and the harbour in Ottoman times; the poet Namık Kemal was held there. The Cin tower watches from a nearby hill. In Dörtyol, the İlk Kurşun Museum tells the story of the Milli Mücadele through wax figures, weapons and documents.
The Amik plain and the interior
The Atchana mound covers ancient Alalah, settled from around 3400 BC, with seventeen building levels and a palace raised by Yarım-Lim in the 18th century BC. Yenişehir lake in the Amik area has restaurants along the water. Near Hassa, a natural monument protects three large lava tube caves. The ruins of the Barlaam monastery stand on Keldağ in Yayladağı. For high pasture and picnics, Alan Yaylası lies 18 km from Kırıkhan and Batıayaz 14 km from İskenderun. At Erzin, Tekkoz protects beech stands the Directorate calls the southernmost in the world.
