When I lead pilgrimage groups around western Turkey, three names of women keep coming back to our conversations again and again: Mary the mother of Jesus, Thecla of Iconium, and Lydia of Thyatira. None of them were among the Twelve Apostles, none of them wrote a letter of the New Testament, and yet without these three women the early Christian church in Asia Minor would look completely different from what we know today.
What surprises my guests the most is how much of this story took place on the soil of modern Turkey. We sometimes think of the early church as something which happened “somewhere else”, in Jerusalem or in Rome. But Asia Minor — the lands today we call Turkey — was the second home of Christianity from the very first generation. And the footsteps of Mary, Thecla, and Lydia are running through it from the Aegean coast to deep into the Anatolian plateau.
In this article I want to walk with you, in writing, through the lives and the places of these three remarkable women.
Mary in Ephesus — The Mother Who Stayed in Asia Minor
The story of Mary’s last years in Ephesus begins on the cross. As the Gospel of John tells us, Jesus, in his final moments, looked at his mother and at the disciple “whom he loved”, and said: Woman, behold thy son… Behold thy mother. And from that hour the disciple took her unto his own home.[^1] The early Christian tradition has always identified this beloved disciple with John the Apostle. And as we know from Eusebius and other early church historians, John spent the last decades of his life in Ephesus, where he wrote his Gospel and where he died and was buried, on the hill we today call Ayasuluk in Selçuk.[^2]
If John came to Ephesus, and Mary was given to John, then Mary came to Ephesus too. This is the simple logic which placed our city, since the earliest centuries of Christianity, at the centre of the story of Mary’s later life.
The exact location of her house, however, was forgotten for many centuries. It was only rediscovered in 1881, in a very strange way. A German Augustinian nun named Anne Catherine Emmerich, who lived between 1774 and 1824 and never travelled to Asia Minor in her entire life, described in her visions a small stone house on a wooded mountain near Ephesus, with a specific arrangement of rooms, a fireplace, a spring of fresh water nearby, and a view towards the sea.[^3] After her death her descriptions were published, and in 1881 a Lazarist priest from İzmir, Father Julien Gouyet, decided to go and look for the place. He found it, almost exactly as she had described, on the slopes of Mount Koressos, today known as Bülbüldağı. A second expedition in 1891 confirmed his discovery, and the small house, Meryem Ana Evi in Turkish, has been a place of pilgrimage ever since.
Three popes — Paul the sixth in 1967, John Paul the second in 1979, and Benedict the sixteenth in 2006 — have come to pray inside this house. It is one of the very few places in the world where Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim pilgrims pray side by side, because Mary, Meryem Ana, is also honoured very deeply in the Quran.
The city’s connection to Mary became official church history in the year 431 AD, during the Third Ecumenical Council of the Christian world, the famous Council of Ephesus. It was here, in a basilica still standing in ruins next to the ancient harbour, that the bishops gathered and declared Mary to be Theotokos, “God-bearer”, the Mother of God.[^4] It was no accident that this council, which decided one of the most important doctrines about Mary, was held in the same city where she had spent her last years.
I love to take my guests up to the House of the Virgin Mary at the end of an Ephesus tour, after the noise of the marble streets, when the air becomes cooler and the trees take over. People are usually quiet on that mountain. Whatever you believe, you feel something there.
Thecla of Iconium — The Woman Who Walked Out of Her Own Wedding
The second woman of our story is much less famous in the Western world today, but in the early church she was almost as celebrated as the apostles themselves. Her name is Thecla, and her story comes to us from a second-century text called The Acts of Paul and Thecla, a work which was widely read across Asia Minor for over a thousand years.[^5]
Thecla was a young woman from Iconium, the city we today call Konya in central Turkey. According to the story she was engaged to be married, when one day Saint Paul came to her city and started preaching in the house next door. Thecla, listening from the window of her own home for three days and three nights, became so moved by his words about a virgin life dedicated to Christ that she broke off her engagement, refused to marry, and decided to follow Paul.
Her family was furious. Her own mother and her fiancé denounced her to the Roman authorities. She was condemned to be burned alive in the theatre of Iconium. But, according to the text, a sudden rain put out the fire and saved her. She then went with Paul to Pisidian Antioch (near today’s Yalvaç), where she was attacked again, this time she was thrown to the wild beasts in the amphitheatre. Even the lioness refused to harm her, and she survived once more.
Eventually Thecla travelled to Seleucia in Cilicia, the modern town of Silifke on Turkey’s southern coast, and lived there in a cave, healing the sick and teaching the people about Christ. Her cave became one of the most important pilgrimage sites of the early Christian world.[^6] When the Spanish nun Egeria made her great pilgrimage through the Holy Land and Asia Minor between the years 381 and 384 AD, she made a special detour to Seleucia just to pray at the shrine of Saint Thecla. In her travel diary she describes the many monastic communities of men and women living around the holy site, and she records giving thanks to Christ for being allowed, as she puts it, an unworthy woman, to stand in such a place.[^7]
Thecla is called Protomartyr, the first woman martyr, and Isapostolos, “equal to the apostles”. For early Christians of Asia Minor she was the model of a woman who chose her own faith against the will of her family, against the Roman state, and even against the social expectations of her own city. The cave of Saint Thecla at Meryemlik, near Silifke, can still be visited today, and the great basilica which the Emperor Zeno built around it in the fifth century is still standing in ruins for the visitors to see.
Lydia of Thyatira — The Asian Merchant Behind Europe’s First Church
The third woman in our story crossed the Aegean and changed the geography of Christianity forever. Her name was Lydia, and she came from Thyatira, the city we today call Akhisar, only two hours by car from İzmir.
Thyatira was famous in the ancient world for two things: its powerful merchant guilds, and its purple dye industry.[^8] The city had access to the murex shellfish from the coast and also to a special root called madder, which was producing a deep red-purple colour. This purple cloth was the most luxurious textile of the Roman world, worn by senators, by emperors, and by the very wealthy. Anyone who was trading in this cloth was a person of significant wealth and status.
The Book of Acts tells us that Lydia, “a seller of purple from the city of Thyatira”, was already a “worshipper of God” — meaning she was a Gentile woman who respected the God of Israel without being a full Jewish convert.[^9] She had travelled across the Aegean Sea to the Roman colony of Philippi, in Macedonia, probably for her purple business. There, on a Sabbath day, she went outside the city walls to a riverside place where Jewish women were gathering for prayer. And there she met Paul.
What happened next is one of the quietest and most important moments in the whole New Testament. Paul preached, the text says that “the Lord opened her heart to listen”, and Lydia was baptized together with her whole household. Then she insisted that Paul, Silas, and their companions stay in her home. Her house in Philippi became, by all reasonable counting, the very first house church on European soil.
I always remind my guests of one detail when I tell this story. Lydia was not Greek, not Roman, not European. She was an Asian woman from Thyatira, from Asia Minor. The first Christian baptized in Europe was a woman of our own region. Without Lydia, without the house she opened, without this Asian woman who said yes to Paul on the bank of a Macedonian river, the entire history of Christianity in Europe would have been different.
And we should not forget that Thyatira itself, her home city, would later become one of the famous Seven Churches of Revelation, addressed by name in the second chapter of that mysterious book.[^10] The Christian community which Lydia surely supported when she was returning home from Philippi grew, in only a few generations, into one of the most important early churches of our region.
Three Women, One Land
When I look at these three lives together — Mary, Thecla, Lydia — I see something I think we should pay more attention to.
All three of them were women in a world which was not built for women’s voices. All three of them made decisions which their families, or their society, would have preferred them not to make. And all three of them lived, taught, suffered, or were honoured on the soil of Asia Minor. The land we today call Turkey is not only the country of seven churches and ancient ruins. It is also the land where some of the most important women of the early church walked, and prayed, and changed history.
I find it very meaningful that for two thousand years the pilgrims of every background — Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, sometimes even Muslim — keep coming back to these places to remember them. Ephesus, Iconium, Pisidian Antioch, Seleucia, Thyatira. The map of early Christian women in Asia Minor is large, and it is still here under our feet.
Walk These Footsteps with an Ephesian Tour Guide
If this story moves you, the best thing I can tell you is, come and see these places by yourself. The House of the Virgin Mary in Ephesus, the Basilica of Saint John in Selçuk, the ruins of Thyatira in Akhisar, the cave of Saint Thecla in Silifke — they are not in books, they are here, two hours, three hours, sometimes a half-day’s drive from each other. We can build a pilgrimage tour together that connects them in the way that fits your own time and your own interests.
For more than fifteen years now I have been guiding pilgrim groups, family travellers, and curious solo visitors through these stories and these stones. To plan a tour or simply to ask a question, you can contact me through theephesus.com or toursaroundturkey.com. Come and unravel the hidden mysteries of Christian Asia Minor with me. See you soon, Hasan Gülday.
Notes
[^1]: Gospel of John, 19:26–27, King James Version.
[^2]: Eusebius of Caesarea, Historia Ecclesiastica (Ecclesiastical History), Book III, chapters 23 and 31, written around 324 AD. Eusebius preserves the testimony of earlier writers such as Polycrates of Ephesus and Irenaeus of Lyon, both of whom confirmed John’s residence and burial in Ephesus.
[^3]: Anne Catherine Emmerich, The Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, transcribed by Clemens Brentano and published posthumously in 1852. The German nun’s visions describing the house, the surrounding landscape, and Mary’s last years are the document which led the Lazarist priest Julien Gouyet (in 1881) and later the expedition of Sister Marie de Mandat-Grancey with the Lazarist priests of İzmir (in 1891) to locate the house on Mount Koressos near Ephesus.
[^4]: The Acts of the Council of Ephesus, 431 AD. The decisive sessions, presided by Cyril of Alexandria, condemned the teaching of Nestorius and confirmed the title Theotokos for Mary. The council was held in the Church of Mary (sometimes called the Church of the Council) in Ephesus, the ruins of which are still visible today next to the ancient harbour.
[^5]: The Acts of Paul and Thecla, an apocryphal Christian text most likely composed in Asia Minor around 160–180 AD. The fullest modern English translation is available in J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
[^6]: Stephen J. Davis, The Cult of Saint Thecla: A Tradition of Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2001), is the most thorough modern study of how Thecla’s veneration spread from Seleucia across the entire Mediterranean.
[^7]: Egeria, Itinerarium Egeriae (Pilgrimage of Egeria), chapter 23, written between 381 and 384 AD. The Latin text is preserved in a single eleventh-century manuscript discovered at Arezzo, in Italy, in 1884. A modern English translation by John Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels (London: SPCK, 1971; revised editions following), is widely used.
[^8]: Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia (Natural History), Book IX on the murex purple, and Book XXII on the use of madder root in Asia Minor. Inscriptions found in Thyatira itself also mention a guild of purple-dyers, the porphyrobapheis, confirming the city’s reputation as a centre of this luxury trade.
[^9]: Acts of the Apostles, 16:11–15 and 16:40, on Lydia’s meeting with Paul, her baptism, and her hospitality to the apostles in Philippi.
[^10]: Book of Revelation, 2:18–29, the letter to the church in Thyatira. The same city, Lydia’s home, appears here roughly a generation after her conversion as one of the seven churches of Asia Minor addressed by John on the island of Patmos.
