St Pierre is a natural cave on the western slope of Stauris Mountain, an arm of Habib-i Neccar, east of Antakya on the Antakya–Reyhanlı road, that was turned into a church. Tradition holds that Peter, one of the twelve apostles, came to Antioch to preach somewhere between 29 and 40 AD, made this cave his church and gathered his first congregation here, and that it was here that the community of believers was first called Christian. On those grounds Türkiye's tourism agency calls it the first church of Christianity and describes it as the first cave church in the world.
That makes it a place of pilgrimage rather than only a monument — the Pope declared it one in 1963 — and the practical consequence is a date: Catholics hold a service here every year on 29 June. UNESCO added the site to its tentative list for World Heritage in 2011.
In the 11th and 12th centuries columns and arches were added to the cave, turning it into a three-aisled church, and the front was rebuilt in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with a Gothic facade. Of the fabric, the parts worth looking for are the mosaics in the floor of the side aisles, of the 4th and 5th centuries AD and partly destroyed. Inside there is an altar, a small marble figure of St Pierre set in a niche, and holy water, and a tunnel runs out of the building — an escape route for the congregation if the church were attacked.
About ten minutes' walk east of the church, reached by a footpath, is a second thing entirely: a relief of Charon, the ferryman of the dead, who in Greek myth carried souls across the Styx to the underworld. It is a bust, veiled, and reads as an unfinished portrait. The ministry's account is that it was cut into the rock at the point of the mountain that commands the city in the 2nd century BC, to protect the people against an outbreak of plague and prevent further deaths.
Visiting hours
- Visiting hours
- 08:30–17:00 (all year)
When to go
- Climate
- Across Hatay as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 8.1 °C in January to 27.9 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in April, May, June and October; rainfall is heaviest in January (197 mm) and lightest in July (16 mm). Long-term means for 1940-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
