Sealed Under Turkish Mud, a Well-Preserved Byzantine Chapel

A fantastic find as reported today in New York Times:

DEMRE, Turkey — In the fourth century A.D., a bishop named Nicholas transformed the city of Myra, on the Mediterranean coast of what is now Turkey, into a Christian capital.

One wall of the chapel has a cross-shaped window that, when sunlit, beams its shape onto an altar table.

A vibrant fresco that is unusual for Turkey was perfectly preserved.

Nicholas was later canonized, becoming the St. Nicholas of Christmas fame. Myra had a much unhappier fate.

After some 800 years as an important pilgrimage site in the Byzantine Empire it vanished — buried under 18 feet of mud from the rampaging Myros River. All that remained was the Church of St. Nicholas, parts of a Roman amphitheater and tombs cut into the rocky hills.

But now, 700 years later, Myra is reappearing.

Archaeologists first detected the ancient city in 2009 using ground-penetrating radar that revealed anomalies whose shape and size suggested walls and buildings. Over the next two years they excavated a small, stunning 13th-century chapel sealed in an uncanny state of preservation. Carved out of one wall is a cross that, when sunlit, beams its shape onto the altar. Inside is a vibrant fresco that is highly unusual for Turkey.

The chapel’s structural integrity suggests that Myra may be largely intact underground. “This means we can find the original city, like Pompeii,” said Nevzat Cevik, an archaeologist at Akdeniz University who is director of the excavations at Myra, beneath the modern town of Demre.

Mark Jackson, a Byzantine archaeologist at Newcastle University in England, who was not involved in the research, called the site “fantastic,” and added,“This level of preservation under such deep layers of mud suggests an extremely well-preserved archive of information.”

Occupied since at least the fourth century B.C., Myra was one of the most powerful cities in Lycia, with a native culture that had roots in the Bronze Age. It was invaded by Persians, Hellenized by Greeks, and eventually controlled by Romans.

Until the chapel was unearthed, the sole remnant of Myra’s Byzantine era was the Church of St. Nicholas. (The bishop, also known as Nicholas the Wondermaker, was a native Lycian of Greek descent.) First built in the fifth century A.D. and reconstructed repeatedly, it was believed to house his remains and drew pilgrims from across the Mediterranean. Today, Cyrillic signs outside souvenir shops cater to the Russian Orthodox faithful.

But Myra attracted invaders, too. Arabs attacked in the seventh and ninth centuries. In the 11th, Seljuk Turks seized the city, and the bones thought to be those of Nicholas were stolen away to Bari, in southern Italy, by merchants who claimed to have been sent by the pope.

By the 13th century, Myra was largely abandoned. Yet someone built the small chapel using stones recycled from buildings and tombs.

One wall of the chapel has a cross-shaped window that, when sunlit, beams its shape onto an altar table.

Decades later, several seasons of heavy rain appear to have sealed Myra’s fate. The chapel provides evidence of Myra’s swift entombment. If the sediment had built up gradually, the upper portions should show more damage; instead, except for the roof’s dome, at the surface, its preservation is consistent from bottom to top.

“It seems incredible,” said Engin Akyurek, a Byzantine archaeologist with Istanbul University who is excavating the site. He and his team dug down 18 feet to the base of chapel, where they discovered a few artifacts from the early 14th century. (At the time, Turks were gaining control of Anatolia, and after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 the Ottomans ruled for nearly five centuries.)

In the layers of mud between the 14th-century ground level and the late-Ottoman level — which is just shy of the modern surface — they discovered nothing at all.

Ceramics unearthed at the chapel and at St. Nicholas Church indicate that Myra remained unoccupied until the 18th century. And while a sunken city “may sound romantic,” said Dr. Jackson, the British scholar, “this mud promises to have preserved a treasure trove of information on the city during an important period of change.”

How classical cities transformed into Byzantine cities during the Christian era, especially between 650 and 1300, is a subject of much scholarly debate.

“Each city was different,” Dr. Jackson said, “and so we need high-quality, well-excavated evidence in order to contribute to the debate about the nature of urban change in this period.”

The fresco in the excavated chapel is especially striking. Six feet tall, it depicts the deesis (“prayer” or “supplication” in Greek). This is a common theme in Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox iconography, but the Myra fresco is different.

Where typically these depictions show Christ Pantocrator (Christ the Almighty) enthroned, holding a book and flanked by his mother, Mary, and John the Baptist, whose empty hands are held palms up in supplication, at Myra both John and Mary hold scrolls with Greek text.

John’s scroll quotes from John 1:29: “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” Mary’s is a dialogue from a prayer for the Virgin Mary in which she intercedes on behalf of humanity, asking Jesus to forgive their sins. Dr. Akyurek said this scroll-in-hand version had been seen in Cyprus and Egypt, but never in Turkey.

The chapel is part of a larger dig that includes the Roman amphitheater — largely reconstructed in the second century after an earthquake leveled much of Lycia — and Andriake, Myra’s harbor, about three miles south. Long a major Mediterranean port, Andriake was where St. Paul changed ships on his way to Antioch (now Antakya). Finds there include a workshop that produced royal purple and blue dye from murex snails and a fifth-century synagogue, the first archaeological evidence of Jewish life in Christian Lycia.

Much of Myra is under modern buildings in Demre, so archaeologists are unsure where they will dig next. They are buying property from local residents to prevent illegal excavations, though judging from the paucity of artifacts found so far, looters might be disappointed: the last residents of Myra seem to have looked at the rising floodwaters and packed their bags before they left.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre: Two Online Resources

Via Bible X:

ATS pro Terra Sancta have a couple of publications that they have placed online related to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

The Holy Sepulchre: The Pilgrim’s New Guide. This is a small book containing some attractive pictures and helpful diagrams. You can access it here. I have included a screen capture of one of the book’s diagrams below.

The Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. This short four-page flyer can be accessed here.

Fourth Century Christianity in Carinthia

Bread and Circuses:

Exciting news in the Austrian press about what is likely to be the oldest traces of Christianity in Carinthia, in Virunum. A church dating to the 350s was found a couple of years ago, but further excavation suggests that there was a bishop’s palace there – in other words that it was a much significant centre of Christianity than first thought. From Kleine Zeitung:

“Vor sechs Jahren haben wir bereits eine Bischofskirche aus dem vierten  Jahrhundert entdeckt.” Doch nach einer exakten Analyse der Daten könne  man nicht mehr nur von einer Kirche ausgehen. Die Ausmaße auf dem  spätantiken Areal nahe Maria Saal scheinen größer als bisher angenommen. “Wir haben eine weitere Kirche und sechs Klerikerwohnungen entdeckt.”  Zudem vermuten die Archäologen eine dritte Kirche auf der anderen Seite  der Hauptstraße. “Anhand des Grundrisses könnte es sich dort eine  weitere Kirche befinden”, sagt Dolenz. Ob es so ist, wird sich Ende  Oktober herausstellen. Denn dann sollen die neu gewonnenen Erkenntnisse  durch geomagnetische Untersuchungen untermauert werden.

There is more at Orf.at with a good number of photographs.

 

Excavating Early Scottish Christianity

Excavations on the Scottish island Eigg have uncovered a seventh century C.E. structure thought to be the monastery founded by St. Donnan, one of the first missionaries in Scotland. Also known as Donnan of Eigg, the priest traveled through northwest Scotland before settling on Eigg, where he was martyred in 617 C.E. The site features Pictish pottery in the graveyard as well as an oval enclosure and ditch, a characteristic of contemporary monasteries, which maintained a separation between sacred and exterior spaces. The Eigg History Society received funding from the Heritage Lottery to locate the monastery, and archaeologist John Hunter announced in The Scotsmanthat the findings surpassed his expectations. Donnan, the patron Saint of Eigg, evangelized the island and the Scottish archaeology discoveries memorialize and bear witness to a major figure in the dissemination of Christianity on the British Isles.

Scottish archaeology at Eigg has exposed a structure related to the seventh century C.E. St. Donnan, an evangelizing figure in early Scottish Christianity.

Read more in The Scotsman

Source

 

Ruins a Memento of Iraqi Christians’ Glorious Past

Iraq (AP) — A hundred meters (yards) or so from taxiing airliners, Iraqi archaeologist Ali al-Fatli is showing a visitor around the delicately carved remains of a church that may date back some 1,700 years to early Christianity.The church, a monastery and other surrounding ruins have emerged from the sand over the past five years with the expansion of the airport serving the city of Najaf, and have excited scholars who think this may be Hira, a legendary Arab Christian center.

“This is the oldest sign of Christianity in Iraq,” said al-Fatli, pointing to the ancient tablets with designs of grapes that litter the sand next to intricately carved monastery walls.

The site’s discovery in 2007 and its subsequent neglect are symbolic of a Christianity that has long enriched this country, and is now in decline as hundreds of thousands have fled the violence that followed the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

At the same time, the circumstances of the find reflect a renaissance for Najaf, a holy Shiite Muslim city. The airport expansion that revealed the ruins was needed because Najaf attracts multitudes of pilgrims.

The ruins left in the baking heat are within the airport perimeter and relatively safe from vandals and looters. The site’s stone crosses and larger artifacts have been moved to the National Museum in Baghdad.

For al-Fatli, it’s all very tantalizing. “I know if we were to work more, we will find more and similar churches,” he said.

But there is no money to mount a proper dig, he laments. In a country where bombings constantly kill people and much of the populace lacks reliable electricity or clean water, archaeological preservation is a low priority.

Today, the Christian portion of Iraq’s population of 31 million has fallen from 1.4 million to about 400,000, according to U.S. State Department data.

Caught in the sectarian violence of 2005 to 2008, massacred by Muslim militias as heretics, “We were in the worst of times,” says Younadam Kanna, a Christian member of Iraq’s parliament. He says the exodus has slowed but the future for Christians remains uncertain.

Still, he says, for those who remain, the discoveries at Hira provide some hope.

“It shows we can live together in peace with Muslims — because we did for centuries before,” he says. “When Islam first came to Iraq, the Christians here welcomed them.”

Legend traces Christianity in Iraq to Thomas, one of the Twelve Apostles who fanned out to spread Christ’s word after the Crucifixion.

Historians believe Hira was founded around 270 A.D., grew into a major force in Mesopotamia centuries before the advent of Islam, and reputedly was a cradle of Arabic script.

Lying 160 kilometers (100 miles) south of Baghdad, it was lost to Iraq’s southern desert for centuries after Christians were driven out of the area by Muslim rulers.

Erica Hunter, a professor of early Christianity at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, says historical evidence shows that by the early third century, the faith was well established in what is now southern Iraq by the Lakhmid dynasty, an Arab kingdom whose final ruler converted to Christianity.

For centuries Hira was an important center of the Church of the East, sometimes known as the Nestorian church, whose modern offshoot, the Assyrian Church of the East, is still followed in Iraq. Hira, also called al-Hirah, lay near the Sea of Najaf, since vanished, and was renowned as an idyllic retreat.

Archaeological finds have been traced in the 1900s, but the evidence is limited.

Hunter, one of the few scholars to explore the other sites linked to Hira, studied the Syriac inscriptions found by a Japanese-led team in the 1980′s. Other traces of Hira include two churches excavated in 1934 by an Oxford University team. Several church sites were mapped by German archaeologists in the 1980s before the 1991 Gulf War curtailed new exploration.

Hunter is cautious about claims the newly discovered ruins are Iraq’s oldest church, but adds, “They certainly must be very, very early,” perhaps dating to the fourth century dating.

What is clear is that Christianity at Hira continued to thrive alongside Islam until at least the 11th century, hundreds of years after the Muslim conquest of the area.

“In fact Muslim historians talk of 40 monasteries in the vicinity of Hira,” Hunter said in a telephone interview from London

Eventually the region’s Muslim rulers began persecuting the Christians, and Hira’s churches were abandoned. Most remaining Iraqi Christians today are clustered in Baghdad, Mosul, Kirkuk and the self-ruled Kurdish north of Iraq.

Al-Fatli, himself a Shiite, thinks of those 40 lost monasteries as he surveys the desert around the abandoned Najaf excavation. For now, though, Christianity’s lost city in Iraq will remain mostly a mystery.

But lawmaker Kanna says there’s still time to uncover it. After all, like the remains, Christians in Iraq have endured for some two thousand years.

“This is our country. We will be here,” he says. “We’ll be here not only for one more century, but for many centuries to come.”

Source (and some more pics are there).

 

The Earliest Christian Graffito?

Writes  Prof Larry Hurtado:

In my previous posting I briefly described Roger Bagnall’s new book, Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East, and I mentioned his lead chapter on a body of graffiti from ancient Smyrna. Among the items he discusses in this chapter, I was particularly (predictably!) intrigued with one that Bagnall confidently claims must be Christian (pp. 22-23).  Here are the basic data:

• The graffiti in question are on plastered surfaces in the basement of a city structure, and there are multiple layers of plaster laid on across time.
• One graffito includes a date, which Bagnall correlates to 125/126 CE.
• The layer of plaster beneath the layer on which this dated graffito is written is partially exposed, and on this exposed plaster is “a most remarkable graffito, incised into the plaster rather than written with ink or charcoal.”   This graffito reads:

ισοψηφα

κυριος  ω

πιστις  ω

• The first word, ισοψηφα, means “of equal value/number”, indicating that the graffito is an example of “isopsephy”, the ancient practice of comparing words of equal numerical value (by adding up the value of their letters).  The letters of each of the two words, κυριος (“Lord”) and πιστις (“faith”), = 800, which is expressed by the omega after each one (the omega = 800).
• The distinguishing centrality of these two Greek words in early Christian vocabulary (as well as the interest in 8 and multiples of 8) combine to prompt Bagnall’s judgment that the graffito “can only indicate a Christian character” (22).
• As this graffito is on a layer of plaster just beneath the layer with the dated graffito, it must be dated earlier than 125 CE, perhaps some years earlier.  This would make this certainly the earliest identifiable Christian graffito, and perhaps also likely the earliest artifact of Christian writing.

Perhaps because Bagnall doesn’t have a TV production company behind him, we haven’t seen this item in the daily news.  But, while we wait to see what scholars make of the Talpiot tombs, and whether in fact we have a fragment of a 1st-century copy of the Gospel of Mark, here we have a published artifact that has strong claims for anyone interested in the origins of Christianity…

More here, but we’ll have to wait for the book, or so it would seem.

 

The Archaeology of Christianity

MSNBC:

An estimated 2 billion Christians around the world celebrate the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. While those believers take the stories of Jesus as told in the New Testament on faith, archaeologists have scoured the Holy Land and beyond in search of clues about the real life of Jesus and his followers. Click the “Next” arrow above to learn about eight of their finds…

To start, go here.

Archaeological Discoveries at Tal Hasaka

Hasaka, Northeastern Syria- Syrian archeological expedition, that was working at the site of Tal Hasaka in Northeastern Syria, unearthed during its fourth excavation season a church and a cemetery dating back to Christianity Era.

Head of the expedition Abdul-Masih Baghdo said the church is 22.50 m long and 14.50 m wide, located to the south of a cathedral which was discovered during the past three seasons. The church was built with basalt stones, with its walls painted with gypsum.

Baghdo pointed out that the church can be entered from the southern part of Tal Hasaka through an entrance leading to a lobby, adding that the first part of the church can be accessed through 3 entrances, 1 m wide each.

“The first part includes a 8.60 m long and 12.90 m wide temple, separated from a lobby with two 1.10-m-diameter basalt columns,” he went on saying.

Baghdo continued that “Next to the church’s northern wall there is a chair made of basalt stones and bricks pained with gypsum, believed to belong to an important religious figure.”

A seat for a lower ranking clergyman, he added, was found to the south of the southern wall, and to its west, a number of seats were unearthed.

Baghdo also noted that in the middle of the eastern side of the temple was the second part of the church, which is the sanctum sanctorum, 5.10 m long and 2.10 m wide, pointing out that the entrance façade is decorated with two semi-circular stone columns.

In the northern side of the cathedral, he added, an 18 m long 8 m wide cemetery was found with its ground pained with gypsum. It includes 3 temples decorated with semi-circular columns and 18 tombs.

He added that the cemetery is part of the religious compound earlier discovered in Tal Hasaka.

Source

Good to see archaeological work is still continuing in Syria!