Ancient City’s Churches Hold Clue to Its Past

Why would an ancient city of no more than 1,000 residents on the rugged southern coast of Turkey have five churches?

That is the question that intrigues archeologist Robert Hohlfelder of the University of Colorado, who has spent the last four summers studying the seaside community of Aperlae, a 2,400-year-old port now largely submerged under six feet of water.

Hohlfelder’s team had previously found three churches in Aperlae, but their expedition in June revealed two more--an unusually large number for such a small group of people.

Certainly, the churches were a sign of wealth, Hohlfelder said--a prosperity apparently produced by manufacture and export of Tyrean purple dye, one of the most valuable products of the early Christian era.

But even for a wealthy community, five churches might be a bit excessive, he said. Perhaps, he speculated, the answer might lie in the then-common practice of making pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Palestine. Over the decades, tens of thousands of the richest and most powerful citizens of the Roman Empire traveled to Jerusalem to walk in the footsteps of Jesus and to worship on the Mount.

Considering Aperlae’s key location on the Turkish coast and the period in which it flourished, he said, the many churches suggest it was a way station on that pilgrimage. Travelers could have stopped to replenish their supplies, and the churches could have helped them replenish their souls.

Nestled between the Taurus Mountains and the shore of the Mediterranean, Aperlae could have been the final landfall for ships bound from Italy to the Holy Land.

If Aperlae were a way station, pilgrims “would stop and pick up supplies, water and wood, whatever they needed,” said archeologist Robert Stieglitz of Rutgers University. “I guess they would go to church, too. Five churches on a site that small is very unusual.”

Leaving Aperlae, the ships would have skirted the southern coast of Cyprus, Hohlfelder speculated, then veered east to Israel to complete their pilgrimage. Returning ships would sail north past Lebanon, Syria and the southern coast of Turkey--including Aperlae--in order to take advantage of prevailing winds and currents, Hohlfelder added.

Such pilgrimages were made fashionable by Helena, the mother of Roman Emperor Constantine, who ruled from AD 306 to 337. She and Constantine encouraged construction of churches throughout the Roman Empire, which then included Turkey. The rich and the devout regularly made such journeys from the 4th to the 7th centuries.

It had not been clear where they stopped along the way. Hohlfelder and Robert Lindley Vann of the University of Maryland now say that Aperlae was one of the major ports of call.

Although much of Aperlae is now buried in the debris of earthquakes that have rocked Turkey through the centuries, it was not a “lost city.” In fact, it was hidden in plain sight. Foundations of many structures are visible through the clear waters of Asar Bay and walls and foundations march up the hillside above the water.

Aperlae was spotted in the early 1970s by a wealthy American yachtsman named Bob Carter, who did a quick survey and brought it to the attention of archeologists. But it was not until 1996 that the Turkish government issued a permit to Vann to explore the site. He recruited Hohlfelder.

That permit allows them to use only snorkeling equipment in the bay, not scuba gear, and the team is not allowed to conduct any excavations. Nonetheless, Vann and Hohlfelder have returned every summer since, walking and boating in from a nearby village, and have pieced together much of the city’s history.

The original mystery they faced was why the first colonists--Hohlfelder thinks they were war veterans from Macedonia--chose the site. A much better harbor lies nearby on the opposite side of the hammerhead-shaped peninsula where Aperlae is located. Strong winds blowing into Asar Bay in the mornings would have made it difficult for ships to leave the harbor.

Moreover, the site had no obvious source of fresh water and overland access was extremely limited.

The answer came in their early expeditions. In the summer of 1997, the team found at least three large brick tanks, or vivariums, in which murex snails were grown. The snails were used to make Tyrean purple dye. A gully near the city has more than 1,700 square yards of ground piled high with snail shells.

The snails grow all along the Turkish coast and were the only source of the vibrant purple dye that was a mark of aristocracy in the Roman Empire.

In Rome, only the emperor was allowed to wear purple clothing made using the dye. Senators could have clothing trimmed with purple. The dye was forbidden to everyone else in the imperial city.

Hohlfelder believes that Asar Bay must have been a particularly rich source of murex snails. “I’m convinced these tanks hold the key to the city’s existence,” he said. “It looks like the city was developed to take advantage of this natural resource.”

Survival of the city required fresh water, and the team says the residents relied on rainfall. Hohlfelder and Vann have found 32 cisterns that were used to collect rainwater. And they discovered two public baths this summer.

“These public baths would have required an extensive amount of water,” Hohlfelder said. “I think Aperlae may have had large underground cisterns in the center of the city. . . . We just haven’t found them yet.”

During this summer’s expedition, geographer Don Sullivan of the University of Denver located more than 100 agricultural terraces on the hills above the city. These terraces once grew enough olive trees, barley, wheat, vegetables, grapes and timber to make the city self-sufficient, and perhaps even an exporter, Sullivan said.

Most intriguing are the five submerged churches, each about 66 feet by 33 feet. One, says Hohlfelder, “looks like the structure has been added on to over the centuries. We think this church, which has an elaborate apse, may have supplanted a seaside temple.”

Apses are semicircular projections usually found at the east end of churches. “This apse has a unique design,” he said. Adjacent to it is a carefully constructed, multicolored mosaic, as well as large stone columns--probably part of a temple where sailors came to pray.

In June, Hohlfelder also discovered a “sea gate” that led travelers to the two churches that are now under water. The gate held a small water basin that was probably used by visitors for ritual cleansing before they entered the churches.

The first defensive wall surrounding Aperlae appears to have been built in the middle of the 3rd century when the Goths, a Germanic people, began spreading south over the Roman Empire and ravaging towns and cities. The Goths eventually built a more peaceful relationship with the Romans.

At the beginning of the 4th century, when relative calm returned to the region, the defensive sea walls were apparently pushed into the bay by residents to extend Aperlae’s shoreline, Hohlfelder said. But the walls went up again in the 6th century because of the decline of the Roman Empire and increased coastal marauding by pirates.

One of the last projects at Aperlae was to convert the Christian cathedral into a fortress in the 6th century. Then all activity ceased, possibly because of an earthquake.

“History comes to a screeching halt at Aperlae by the mid-7th century,” Hohlfelder concluded.

Maugh can be reached at thomas.maugh@latimes.com.