Sardis

History: Sardis

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. In Hellenistic times it gained a gymnasium, a theatre and a great temple of Artemis, and Jews settled there under King Antiochus III built a synagogue whose community lasted through much of late antiquity. After a devastating earthquake in AD 17, Rome granted ten million sesterces and a temporary tax exemption to help it recover.

Sardis had an early Christian community and is one of the seven churches addressed in the Book of Revelation, whose message warns that the church has "a name that you are alive, but you are dead" (Revelation 3:1). It later became the seat of the metropolitan bishop of the province of Lydia, formed in 295, but never fully recovered after Persian forces sacked it in the seventh century. UNESCO added Sardis to the World Heritage List in 2025.

An interesting detail

In the Lydian period the city was protected by walls twenty metres thick.