By Hasan Gülday — Licensed Professional Tour Guide, Thyatira / Modern Akhisar, Turkey
Thyatira is, in the modern day, the most suprising of the seven cities to visit in a negative direction. I am being honest with my readers from the first sentence 🙁 There is almost nothing left to see. The ancient site is buried under modern Akhisar, a busy commercial town of about 100,000 people, and the only piece of the ancient city which is openly visible is a small fenced excavation in the city centre, surrounded by traffic and tea houses and shoe shops. If you arrive in Akhisar expecting an Ephesus, you will be disappointed.
But Thyatira’s importance in the Apocalypse is not visual. It is something else. It is the town with the longest letter in the seven. The longest. In a series of relatively short letters, the message to this small commercial town runs to twelve verses, more than any of the others. Why?
That is the real question I want to walk through in this article.
An Unusual Founding
Thyatira was a strange city even by the standards of Asia Minor. It was not a great Greek city in the classical sense. It was a Macedonian military colony, founded in the early 3rd century BC by the Seleucid king Seleucus the first as a garrison town to control the road from Pergamon to Sardis. The first inhabitants were Macedonian veterans of Alexander’s wars and their families. The city was a frontier outpost, a place where you parked old soldiers and gave them small farms.
The location is on a low hill in the Lycus valley, on the route which links the Aegean coast to the inland plateau. Strategic for an army. Convenient for trade. But not particularly beautiful. There is no acropolis. There is no harbour. There are no spectacular natural features. It is a flat, useful, working town.
The Trade Guilds
What Thyatira had, in great quantity, was guilds. Guild towns are an ancient phenomenon. Thyatira was probably the most extreme example in Asia Minor.
We have inscriptions from Thyatira mentioning guilds of dyers, leatherworkers, linen-weavers, wool-workers, potters, bakers, slave-traders, bronzesmiths, coppersmiths, tanners, perfume-makers, and more. The whole social and economic life of the city was organized around these professional associations. Each guild had its own meeting hall, its own patron deity, its own annual feasts, its own internal courts for resolving disputes between members.
The most famous guild of Thyatira was probably the dyers. The town was known across the Roman world for its purple dye, made from the madder root, which was cheaper than the real Tyrian purple from sea-snails but produced a similar deep red colour. Thyatiran purple was the everyday purple of the Roman middle class. Tyrian purple was for the truly rich.
This is why, when in Acts 16, Saint Paul meets a businesswoman in Philippi who is selling purple cloth, Luke specifically tells us that she was Lydia, of the city of Thyatira, a seller of purple. Lydia was running a Thyatiran branch operation in northern Greece. Her professional network would have stretched all the way back to her hometown. She is the very first European convert mentioned in the New Testament, and she came from Thyatira. The town’s commercial reach is part of the New Testament story, even though her name does not appear in the Apocalypse.
I think Lydia is, indirectly, very important for understanding the church of Thyatira. She is the first known Thyatiran Christian. The community in her hometown probably traced itself back, in some way, to her network. Christianity entered Thyatira along the same purple-dye trade routes that Lydia had used.
The Guild Problem
Now we come to the difficult part. The guilds of Thyatira were not just professional associations. They were religious organizations. Every guild had patron gods, regular sacrifices, annual festival meals where the meat had been ritually slaughtered for these gods. Every guild meeting included a libation, a small cup of wine poured out for the patron deity. Every guild banquet involved meat that had been blessed in pagan rites.
For a Christian working in Thyatira, this was a problem. If you were a dyer, you had to belong to the dyers’ guild to legally practice the trade. If you belonged to the guild, you were expected to attend the banquets. If you attended the banquets, you ate sacrificed meat and you witnessed the libations to the patron gods. If you refused, you risked being expelled from the guild, which was the same as losing your job.
In a Roman city like Thyatira, this was a daily problem for the Christian community. Either you compromised, and you went to the banquets, and you ate the meat, and you survived professionally — or you refused, and you were thrown out of the guild, and you lost your living. There was no easy middle way.
This is the local context for the strangest figure in the letter to Thyatira: the prophetess called Jezebel.
Who Was Jezebel?
The letter to Thyatira mentions a woman, given the symbolic name of Jezebel, after the wicked queen of Israel in the Old Testament, who was teaching inside the Christian community of Thyatira. She was apparently calling herself a prophetess. And she was teaching, in the words of Christ in the letter, that the Christians could eat things sacrificed to idols, and commit fornication.
We have to be careful with this. This is the language of a moral judgement from Christ on a specific local situation. We do not know the woman’s real name, we do not know the full content of her teaching, and we should not assume that she was openly encouraging immorality. The most likely interpretation, in my view, is that she was offering a theological justification for compromise with the guild system. It is fine to attend the banquets. It is fine to eat the meat. The idols are nothing, so the meat is just meat. We are free in Christ.
Saint Paul himself had said something similar in his letter to the Corinthians, in 1 Corinthians chapter 8. Idols are nothing, food is food, in principle the Christian is free. But Paul had also added a strong warning. Even if the idol is nothing, the act of public participation in idol-worship is a betrayal of the witness. He used a careful balance.
Jezebel, apparently, did not use the careful balance. She used the principle of freedom to allow full compromise. The result was that the Thyatiran Christians could keep their professional positions, their guild memberships, their banquets, their incomes — and could also, in their private prayers, claim to follow Christ. This was a comfortable theology for a working town.
This is why the letter to Thyatira is so long. Because the spiritual problem of the city was so subtle, so embedded in the daily economic life of the place, that Christ had to take more time to address it.
What Survives Today
If you go to modern Akhisar, this is what you will see. A small fenced area in the central square, with a few foundations of a Roman colonnade, the base of a Roman gate, and some inscribed stones. That is essentially everything. The area is called Tepe Mezarlığı in Turkish, the Hill Cemetery, because in Ottoman times it was used as a graveyard. Excavations have been carried out here over many years but most of the ancient city is under the modern streets and cannot be reached.
I do not lie to my groups. When we visit Akhisar, we go, we walk around the small fenced area, we read the letter to Thyatira aloud, we have lunch, and we move on. The visit takes about an hour at most.
But — and this is important — the visit is still meaningful. Because the spiritual lesson of Thyatira is exactly about what is buried under the ordinary. Thyatira was a town where the Christian witness was buried under daily commercial compromises. Today the ancient Thyatira is buried under modern shoe shops and traffic. There is a small symbolic match in this.
For lunch in Akhisar, my recommendation is the local çiğ köfte, the spicy raw meat dish, which is excellent in this region. There is a small place near the central square. Acılı yapın, make it spicy, the locals will say with pride. Acı, in Turkish, means both spicy and bitter, and in this context it has a small joke inside it.
Akhisar is also famous for its olives and its olive oil. If you have time, you can visit a local olive oil press and taste the new oil, especially in November and December when the harvest is fresh. The smell of an old Anatolian olive press, with the wooden rollers and the dark fragrant oil running into the basins, is one of the smells which connects modern Turkey directly to the ancient world. The same press technology, more or less, has been in use here for two thousand years.
The Bronze Feet
I want to mention one more detail before closing.
The letter to Thyatira opens with an unusual description of Christ. He is the Son of God, who hath his eyes like unto a flame of fire, and his feet are like fine brass. This image of bronze feet appears nowhere else in the seven letters.
Why bronze, in particular?
Thyatira had a famous guild of bronzeworkers. Their inscriptions and their dedications are well documented. The town produced a particular kind of high-quality bronze, called chalkolibanon in Greek, which is mentioned by name in the letter. This is one of the very rare technical Greek terms in the Apocalypse, and it is used here because it was a specifically Thyatiran product.
So when Christ identifies himself, in the letter to this town of guilds, with the language of the local bronze guild, he is making the address very specific. He is saying: I know your trade, I know your products, I know your guilds. I am also a craftsman of sorts. My feet are made of the same bronze you make. The Christ of the letter to Thyatira is not a distant heavenly figure. He is, in this letter, almost a colleague.
Time To Visit Thyatira. Hire Biblical Tour Guide
When I read the letter to Thyatira, I always think about what it means to keep your faith in a working town where the social pressure to compromise is constant. The Christians of Thyatira were not facing the spectacular pressure of the Smyrnaean persecution. They were facing the slow daily pressure of the guild banquets. The first kind of pressure produces martyrs. The second kind of pressure produces, often, quiet compromisers. The second kind is harder to resist, because it never has a single dramatic moment. It is just one banquet after another, one cup of wine after another, one small inconsistency at a time.
This is the deep relevance of Thyatira for the modern Christian. We do not, most of us, live under the threat of execution. We live under the slow pressure of a thousand small social compromises. And the question of where we draw our line, how much we eat at the local banquet, when we say no — this question is the Thyatiran question.
There is no spectacular answer to it. There is only the long letter, with its repeated warning, and its small final promise of the morning star. We will read all of this in the article on the letter itself.
The next stop is Sardis, the city of past glory, the city that fell asleep on its own watch. The road north-east, into the heart of old Lydia, the country of king Croesus and the river of gold.
Contact me to hire a Biblical tour guide to see Thyatira and other Churches of Revelation from the Bible. There is more to experience! See you soon, Hasan Gülday.
