Antioch

• 1. Introduction

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  Antioch was founded on the 22nd of May 300 BC, according to the chronicler John Malalas, at the moment Seleucus I Nicator performed a sacrifice to Zeus on a site along the Orontes River. An eagle is said to have carried off the sacrificial meat and dropped it at exactly this spot, marking where the city would rise. That founding myth captures something real about Antioch: from the first moment of its existence, it was the kind of place where divine approval and raw political ambition were inseparable. What was this city? Who built it, and why? How did a settlement planted on a Syrian floodplain become the third-largest city in the Roman Empire, the cradle of Christianity, and one of the ancient world's great cosmopolitan centers? And what brought it so low that today the ruins of that immense metropolis lie buried metres deep beneath a modern Turkish city?

• 2. The Chosen Site

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  The southwest Amuq plain, where Seleucus placed his city, had been inhabited for thousands of years before Antioch existed. Tell Kurdu, the earliest excavated site in the area, was occupied from the Halaf-Ubaid periods through the Chalcolithic. Bronze Age regional powers such as Tell Atchana and Tell Tayinat had been influential well into the Iron Age, and ceramic finds show commercial ties with city-states of Archaic Greece, including Corinth, Rhodes, and Athens.

  The plain was watered by three rivers. The Kara Su and Afrin rivers flowed into the Lake of Antioch at the plain's center. The Orontes, flowing north from Syria, skirted the southern edge and then cut westward through the mountains to reach the Mediterranean Sea. The land was extraordinarily productive: wheat, barley, olives, olive oil, and wine were farmed alongside crops that gave Antioch a specific local reputation, including the quality of its cucumbers, cabbages, and medicinal plants such as Oenanthe. Cypress wood and building stone were abundant. The lake, the river, and the sea provided seafood.

  Antioch was built at 90 meters above sea level, hemmed between the slopes of the 560-meter-tall Mount Silpius and the left bank of the Orontes. An island in the river was also urbanised. The geography was both gift and curse. The Orontes was likely navigable up to the city in antiquity, making trade possible. But during the rainy season, the river and the streams descending from Mount Silpius regularly flooded the city and surrounding farmland. Centuries of attempts to manage the water through drains, conduits, aqueducts, and dams ultimately failed. The island in the river disappeared under accumulated sediment, and the city itself was buried metres deep. Antioch also sits astride the northern Dead Sea Rift fault line near the Marash Triple Junction, and the source records more than sixty notable earthquakes, around ten of which exceeded magnitude 7.

  The walls of Antioch were rebuilt at least eight times between the city's foundation and the Crusader era. The original enclosure covered around 90 hectares. By 540 AD that area may have grown to 500 hectares. Roads radiated from the walls in every direction, including toward the renowned suburb of Daphne, 8 kilometers south of the city at what is now Harbiye.

• 3. A City Built for Power

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  Seleucus I Nicator founded Antioch not simply for commerce but as a declaration of dominance. His victory over Antigonus I Monophthalmus at the Battle of Ipsus in 301 BC had given him control of northern Syria, but many people in the region remained loyal to the defeated general's son Demetrius. To consolidate his grip, Seleucus ordered four cities founded between 301 and 299 BC: Seleucia Pieria and Laodicea on the coast, paired with Antioch and Apamea inland. The settlement was so intense that the connecting zone between the coast and the Euphrates came to be known as the Seleucis.

  Ancient sources dispute whether Seleucus named Antioch after his father or his son, both bearing the name Antiochus. The historian Glanville Downey noted the logic clearly: if Seleucia Pieria was named for Seleucus, Apamea for his wife, and Laodicea for his mother, then Antioch was named for the father. The older sources, including Strabo and Appian, support the same conclusion.

  The original city was laid out in imitation of the Alexandrian grid plan by the architect Xenarius. Two great colonnaded streets intersected at the center. Successive rulers added to the plan: Antiochus I Soter enclosed a second walled area to the east, Seleucus II Callinicus built a third walled area on the island in the Orontes, and Antiochus IV Epiphanes added a fourth quarter, earning the city the name Tetrapolis. From west to east the whole complex measured about 6 kilometers in diameter.

  Antioch became the capital of the western Seleucid Empire under Antiochus I, with Seleucia its eastern counterpart. Its paramount importance as a political center dates from the Battle of Ancyra in 240 BC, which shifted the Seleucid center of gravity away from Anatolia. The city served as the Seleucid capital from 240 BC until 63 BC, when it passed to Rome. Local politics were turbulent: the population rose against Alexander Balas in 147 BC and against Demetrius II Nicator in 129 BC. Demetrius reportedly punished the city with fire and sword. In 83 BC the Antiochenes even invited Tigranes the Great to occupy the city, so fractious were relations with their own rulers.

• 4. Rome's Eastern Capital

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  Julius Caesar visited Antioch in 47 BC and confirmed its freedom. The Roman emperors who followed saw it as a more strategically placed eastern capital than Alexandria, which was geographically isolated in Egypt. Successive emperors invested heavily in the city's fabric. Agrippa and Tiberius enlarged the theatre; Trajan finished their work. Antoninus Pius paved the great east-west artery with granite. Hadrian's aqueduct was considered the finest of its kind. The Roman client king Herod, most likely Herod the Great, erected a long stoa on the east side of the city.

  Antioch may have been home to over 500,000 inhabitants at its peak, making it the third largest city in the Roman Empire after Rome and Alexandria. One of the most celebrated additions to the city was the Circus of Antioch, a chariot racing venue probably built during the reign of Augustus. Modelled on the Circus Maximus in Rome, it measured more than 490 meters long and 30 meters wide and could house up to 80,000 spectators.

  The city's prosperity suffered catastrophically in 115 AD when a massive earthquake struck during Trajan's stay there. The emperor was forced to shelter in the circus for several days as the city convulsed around him. The population fell to less than 400,000 and many sections of the city were abandoned. In 256 AD a Persian raid under Shapur I struck even harder: some 100,000 inhabitants were killed while the survivors were deported to Shapur's newly built city of Gundeshapur. The city was recaptured by the emperor Valerian the following year.

  Even in calmer periods, Antioch's relationship with its rulers was complicated. When Titus visited in 71 AD, a crowd demanded the expulsion of Jews from the city. Titus refused, noting that their country had been destroyed and no other place would accept them. The crowd then sought to revoke the Jews' political privileges by asking Titus to remove bronze tablets inscribed with their rights. Titus declined a second time.

• 5. Cradle of Christianity

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  Between 252 and 300 AD, ten assemblies of the church were held at Antioch. The city had long attracted early Christian missionaries because it held a large population of Jewish origin in a quarter called the Kerateion. The Christian New Testament asserts that the name "Christian" first emerged here. Among the earliest missionaries was Saint Peter, according to the tradition upon which the Patriarchate of Antioch still grounds its claim for primacy.

  Antioch became one of the five original patriarchates of the church, alongside Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Rome. Today five churches use the title of patriarch of Antioch for their prime bishops: one Oriental Orthodox, the Syriac Orthodox Church; three Eastern Catholic, namely the Maronite, Syriac Catholic, and Melkite Greek Catholic Churches; and one Eastern Orthodox, the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch. Most have since moved their seat to Damascus, though the Maronite Church, which relocated to Bkerké in Lebanon, continues the Antiochene liturgical tradition and the use of the Syro-Aramaic language in their services.

  John Chrysostom recorded that when Ignatius of Antioch was bishop, the free adult population of the city numbered 200,000. In a letter dated to 363 AD, the orator Libanius described the city as containing 150,000 inhabitants, suggesting a decline from the first century. Chrysostom also stated, in homilies on the Gospel of Matthew delivered between 386 and 393, that in his own time there were 100,000 Christians in Antioch.

  Emperor Constantine, who had decriminalised Christianity in 313, began construction of the Domus Aurea, or Great Church, in 327. It served for the next two centuries as the leading church of Antioch, standing until the Persian sack in 538. Antioch also gave its name to a specific school of Christian thought, distinguished by a literal reading of scripture and an insistence on the human limitations of Jesus. Diodorus of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia led this school. The principal local saint was Simeon Stylites, who lived an extremely ascetic life atop a pillar for 40 years, some 65 kilometers east of the city.

• 6. Julian's Unhappy Visit

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  When Emperor Julian arrived in Antioch in 362 on his way to campaign against the Sasanian Empire, he entered the city not to cheers but to wailing and screaming, because his arrival coincided with a lament for Adonis, the doomed lover of Aphrodite. The historian Ammianus Marcellinus described the city's population as a mixed pagan and Christian one that had learned to live together with some harmony.

  Julian had high hopes for Antioch, regarding it as a rival to Constantinople itself. He was disappointed at almost every turn. He ordered the bones of the 3rd-century martyred bishop Babylas removed from the vicinity of the temple of Apollo at Daphne, believing they were suppressing the oracle there. The result was a massive Christian procession through the city. Shortly after, the temple burned down. Julian suspected the Christians, ordered stricter investigations than usual, and shut up Constantine's Great Church before the inquiry established that the fire was accidental.

  The Antiochenes hated Julian in return. His troops, gorged on sacrificial meat, made drunken nuisances of themselves on the streets while the city's hungry citizens looked on. Julian earned the nickname "axeman" for his personal involvement in the sacrifices. His unfashionably pointed beard became the subject of lampoons. Valens, who succeeded Julian, took a different approach: he endowed Antioch with a new forum, added a statue of his brother and co-emperor Valentinian I on a central column, and reopened the Great Church of Constantine.

• 7. Crusades and Collapse

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  In 1098, Crusader forces captured Antioch after a siege lasting eight months, making it the center of the Principality of Antioch. The decades that followed were marked by a rapid succession of regencies, power struggles, and external threats. In 1100, Tancred became regent after his uncle Bohemond I was taken prisoner at the Battle of Melitene. Tancred expanded Antioch's territory by conquering Byzantine Cilicia, Tarsus, and Adana in 1101.

  Louis VII of France arrived in Antioch on the 19th of March 1148, welcomed by Raymond of Poitiers, uncle to Louis's wife Eleanor of Aquitaine. Louis refused to help defend against the Turks and instead continued his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In 1156 Raynald of Châtillon attacked Cyprus after accusing the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Comnenus of breaking financial promises to him. Manuel then raised an army and forced Raynald to surrender, demanding the installation of a Greek patriarch and the surrender of the citadel. The following spring, Manuel made a triumphant entry into Antioch.

  In 1254, Bohemond VI of Antioch married the then 17-year-old Sibylla of Armenia, effectively placing Antioch under Armenian rule while Bohemond resided in Tripoli. The Armenians drew up a treaty with the Mongols, extending their territory into Seljuq lands to the north and the Aleppo region to the south.

  On the 18th of May 1268, the Mamluk sultan Baibars captured Antioch. He had promised to spare the inhabitants, then broke that promise, killing or enslaving nearly the entire population upon their surrender. The Mamluk armies killed or enslaved every Christian in the city. Prince Bohemond VI was left with nothing but the County of Tripoli. By 1432, only about 300 inhabited houses remained within the walls of what had once been the third city of the Roman Empire, mostly occupied by Turcomans.

• 8. What the Ground Remembers

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  Between 1932 and 1939, archaeologists excavated Antioch under the direction of a committee that included representatives from the Louvre Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Worcester Art Museum, Princeton University, Wellesley College, and later the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University and its affiliate Dumbarton Oaks. The team failed to find the major structures they had hoped to unearth, including Constantine's Great Octagonal Church and the imperial palace.

  What they did find was remarkable in a different way. The principal Princeton excavations in March 1932 recovered nearly 300 mosaics, originally displayed as floor coverings in private homes during the second through sixth centuries AD, as well as in baths and public buildings. The majority date to the fourth and fifth centuries. They depict animals, plants, mythological beings, and scenes from daily life. One mosaic includes a border showing a walk from Antioch to Daphne, with many ancient buildings visible along the route. The mosaics are now displayed in the Hatay Archaeology Museum in Antakya, with a collection also held at the Princeton University Art Museum and institutions of other sponsoring bodies.

  In April 2016, construction in the northern edge of Antakya exposed a Greek mosaic from the 3rd century BC showing a skeleton lying down with a wine pitcher and a loaf of bread, alongside the inscription: "Be cheerful, enjoy your life." Described as the "reckless skeleton" or "skeleton mosaic", it is thought to have come from the dining room of an upper-class home.

  The city that produced this mosaic, that heard the name Christian for the first time, and that sheltered the bones of Bishop Babylas, still lends its name to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch. The city also draws Muslim pilgrims today to the Habib-i Nejjar Mosque, which is believed to contain the tomb of Habib the Carpenter, mentioned in surah Ya-Sin of the Quran.