I first went to Laodikia on a hot June day with a group of friends.
We’d just finished an excellent lunch of Denizli Kebabı, which deserves its own separate article, and it’s fair to say I wasn’t in my most historically curious mood.
I thought I was going to find yet another ancient city on yet another hillside in a country that has housed more civilisations than one can remember.
Then we started walking along the colonnaded decumanus, as impressively constructed as the ones in Ephesus or Jerash, and I started to pay attention.
Soon, it became obvious. Laodikia was something else.
The site itself goes back to around 5500 BC and remained a major settlement until a great earthquake levelled the city in the early 7th century AD.
The city spreads across roughly five square kilometres, and what has been discovered so far points to a city that had everything:
Anatolia’s largest stadium. Two theatres, the North for 20,000 people and the South for 15,000. To give you an idea, London’s O2 Arena is roughly the same size as the North Theatre.
Baths everywhere, several agoras humming with trade, public fountains for getting the daily water and the gossip. Two monumental gates, a council building, temples, peristyle houses with courtyards open to the sky, latrines, churches, and grand colonnaded streets running through the middle of it all. And, necropolises wrapped around the city on every side.
It was a grand city all right.
The funny thing is, these are the parts that are discovered. The excavations are still ongoing, and the team believes most of the city is still waiting to be discovered.
Laodikia was built on the side of a valley, making full use of the hills around it. What I especially loved while walking through the ruins was the way some of the excavated areas were covered with transparent material, allowing you to literally walk on top of history.
The city’s name was a tribute to Laodice, wife of the Seleucid king Antiochus II, who rebuilt the city around 261 BC and named it after her. During his reign and in the centuries that followed, Laodikia was at its most glorious.
This was a rich city.
Obscenely rich.
So rich that when yet another earthquake levelled it in 60 AD, the city financed its own reconstruction without any Roman imperial assistance. They even struck their own coins, which were considered high-quality for the time. The money mainly came from banking, trade and medicine.
Although officially part of Rome, they did most things their own way. The city became the black sheep of the Lycus Valley, quite literally. The local wool was a glossy black, rare enough to become famous, and valuable enough to make a fortune.
Laodikia was also famous for its medical school and the eye salve they made from Phrygian stone powder.
Indeed, among the most exciting finds are the heads of Hygieia, goddess of health and the etymological ancestor of the word “hygiene,” and her father Asclepius, god of medicine. The excavation team dug them up from the same site, first the father, then the daughter. Both were carved in the late Hellenistic style, and both are evidence of something the city was rightly proud of: the Herophileion, a medical school famous across the ancient world.
A city obsessed with wellness, two thousand years before the concept existed.
The Seven Churches of Bible
Laodikia was the last stop on a circuit. The messages in the Book of Revelation were addressed, in order, to seven churches in what is now western Türkiye.
1. Ephesus
2. Smyrna (İzmir)
3. Pergamon (Bergama)
4. Thyatira (Akhisar)
5. Sardis (Sart)
6. Philadelphia (Alaşehir)
7. Laodikia (Denizli)
Seven cities, roughly a week’s travel apart on the Roman road system, each receiving a different rebuke or praise, and sometimes both.
Laodikia got the harshest one, not for persecution or heresy, but for being too rich, too comfortable and too complacent.
John of Patmos famously criticised the citizens of Laodikia for their spiritual mediocrity and obsession with material things:
> “I wish you were hot or cold. Because you are lukewarm, I will spit you out of my mouth.”
He was right, at least technically.
Laodikia had no reliable spring of its own. Water came in by aqueduct, from the hot mineral springs at nearby Hierapolis and the cold, clean sources at Colossae. By the time it travelled the distance and sat in terracotta pipes under the Anatolian sun, it arrived neither hot nor cold, but tepid.
I find this detail especially interesting. Centuries later, when Turkish tribes settled in the area, they named the valley Çürüksu, “bad waters,” and chose to build their villages on the other side of the valley, near Hierapolis, today’s Pamukkale, the spa town famous for its hot springs since Roman times. (And will be the subject of another blog post)
In the end, nothing single-handedly killed Laodikia. It just kept getting knocked down until it stopped getting back up.
Earthquakes came first. The region sits on a fault line, and the city was flattened and rebuilt so many times that the archaeology reads almost like tree rings, one destruction layer stacked on the next.
What finally finished it wasn’t one dramatic collapse but an accumulation of things: a devastating earthquake around 610 AD that destroyed the water systems, Arab raids pressing in from the east, and, eventually, a population that had simply run out of reasons to stay.
In the end, they didn’t fight for the city. They packed up and resettled a few kilometres away, in what is now Denizli, and left the plateau behind.
No dramatic siege. No burning city.
Just a place that got tired of standing back up, and a valley that has been holding its secrets ever since.
Not for long, though. Laodikia is slowly emerging from the earth once more, reclaiming its place in the Anatolian sun.
CherryPicks 