The Book of Revelation opens with messages to seven churches in the Roman province of Asia (Revelation 1:11; chapters 2–3), all in what is now western Türkiye. They are listed here in the order Revelation addresses them. The messages speak to Christian communities; the ruins shown are those of their cities, and in most cases not buildings those communities used.
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Ephesus was one of the great Greek and Roman cities of the Aegean coast, near modern Selçuk. Its ruins include the Library of Celsus and a theatre that could hold about 24,000 people, and UNESCO inscribed the site on the World Heritage List in 2015.
BIBLICAL SITE
The Agora of Smyrna, in the Konak district of modern İzmir, preserves the heart of the late Hellenistic and Roman city. First built by the Greeks in the fourth century BC, it was ruined by an earthquake in AD 178 and rebuilt on the orders of the emperor Marcus Aurelius.
BIBLICAL SITE
Pergamon rose on a 335-metre hill above the Caicus plain in north-western Anatolia. Under the Attalid kings it became one of the major cultural centres of the Greek world, and its acropolis held the Great Altar, whose sculpted frieze is now displayed in Berlin, a library and a Hellenistic theatre cut into the hillside for about 10,000 spectators.
BIBLICAL SITE
Thyatira lies beneath the modern town of Akhisar in Manisa Province, and its excavated remains at Tepe Mezarlığı are in the town centre. King Seleucus I gave the city the name Thyateira in 290 BC.
BIBLICAL SITE
Sardis, near the village of Sart in Manisa Province, was the capital of the kingdom of Lydia, where kings such as Croesus ruled an empire reaching to the Halys river. Cyrus the Great took the city around 547 BC.
BIBLICAL SITE
Philadelphia, today Alaşehir in Manisa Province, was founded in the second century BC by the Attalid kings of Pergamon and named after Attalus II Philadelphus, "the one who loves his brother". It stood on the road between Sardis and Laodicea and was prone to earthquakes; after a severe one in AD 17 the emperor Tiberius relieved it of taxes.
BIBLICAL SITE
Laodicea on the Lycus was a wealthy Roman city on the trade routes of Phrygia, near modern Denizli, about 17 kilometres west of Colossae and 10 kilometres south of Hierapolis. An earthquake destroyed it in AD 60, in Nero's reign, and its citizens rebuilt it with their own means, declining imperial help.
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