REMEMBERING ANTIOCH
The catastrophic earthquake of Feb. 6 in southeastern Turkey and northern Syria has brought back personal memories of the affected areas from my recent travels there. Southern Turkey and the Levantine coast of Syria are biblical lands, and Antakya was the ancient Greco-Roman city of Antioch, the capital of Seleucia, founded in the Fourth Century BC by Seleucus I Nicator, one of Alexander the Great’s generals and later taken by the Romans in 63 AD. Antioch at its peak was one of the great cities of the Classical world, rivaling Alexandria and Constantinople in influence, and thought to have numbered half a million people before the great earthquake of 115 AD, from which the Roman emperor Trajan and his successor Hadrian barely escaped with their lives.
Antioch was an important center of early Christianity, and Peter, Paul and Barnabas all spent time there spreading the story of Jesus in the latter decades of the First Century AD, before the New Testament was written. They communicated the “oral tradition,” including their eyewitness accounts, and found a fertile seedbed there among Greek-speaking Jews as well as Greeks and Romans who welcomed the new religion as a “marriage” of Jerusalem and Athens. From Antioch, Paul and Peter traveled to Greece and Italy, and it was in Antioch that the name “Christian” was first given to the followers of Jesus.
There is in Antakya today an ancient Christian church, the Church of St. Peter, carved into a mountainside where a large cave offered protection to the Christian community during times of persecution. The Crusaders built a façade for the church during the First Crusade, in the eleventh Century, and I fear that the recent earthquake will have damaged it; but I know that the contents of the cave will be intact, having survived many earthquakes. On the Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul, June 29, there is always a large gathering at the cave in Antakya to honor the two apostles. I hope that there will be a gathering this year.
By a fluke of history, Antakya today belongs to Turkey even though it is historically a Syrian city. Following the First World War, France administered Syria/Lebanon, including Antakya. In 1938, on the eve of World War II, France ceded the area of the Hatay, which included Antakya, to Turkey, and it remains the capital of the Hatay province of Turkey. It has always been a place of pilgrimage, and although much of its classical glory fell to ground in past earthquakes, its people are not without hope as Jews from Israel, and Christians and Moslems work together in compassionate response to affliction that knows no boundaries and is no stranger to the region.