The Shrine at Seleucia

The great pilgrimage center of St. Thecla at Meriamlik (Hagia Thekla), on a hill outside Seleucia ad Calycadnum in Isauria — one of the most important shrines of late-antique Asia Minor. This file sets out the cave-sanctuary and the basilica complex, the imperial patronage of the emperor Zeno, the eyewitness account of the pilgrim Egeria (c. 384) and the deaconess Marthana she met there, and what survives of the site. The shrine is the strongest historical fact in the whole Thecla dossier.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Early Church / Equal-to-the-Apostles)

The Best-Attested Part of the Dossier

The single most important methodological point about the cult must be made before anything else: the shrine at Seleucia is better attested than any event in the Acts. We have a contemporary eyewitness pilgrim’s diary (Egeria, c. 384), a historian’s report of imperial building (Evagrius on Zeno), a fifth-century text composed at or about the site (the Life and Miracles), and standing archaeological remains. Where the narrative of Thecla’s life rests on a single apocryphal source, the cult of Thecla rests on a dense and independent body of evidence. This is the pattern the thin-sourced flagships of this repository repeatedly show — that the existence and shape of a cult can be established even where the underlying biography cannot (see St. Xenia: methodology, and What Can Be Known). The Seleucia shrine is the firmest ground in the dossier, and the rest of this file stands on it.

The Site: Meriamlik / Hagia Thekla

The cult center stood on a low hill about a mile and a half outside Seleucia ad Calycadmum (Seleucia of Isauria), the principal city of the rugged province of Isauria in southern Asia Minor — near modern Silifke, in Mersin Province, Turkey. The hill is today called Meriamlik (Meryemlik, “place of Mary”). The heart of the sanctuary was a cave-church — a rock-cut sanctuary venerated as the place of Thecla’s dwelling and, in the developed tradition, of her “living disappearance” into the earth (see The Life and Miracles). Around this cave grew, over the fourth and fifth centuries, one of the great pilgrimage complexes of the Christian East: monasteries of monks and of nuns, a resident community of consecrated virgins, hostels for pilgrims, baths and cisterns, and ultimately several basilicas (Stephen J. Davis, The Cult of Saint Thecla, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, esp. ch. 2; Troels Myrup Kristensen, “Landscape, Space, and Presence in the Cult of Thekla at Meriamlik,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 24.2 [2016]: 229–263).

Egeria’s Visit (c. 384)

The earliest and most vivid documentary witness to the living shrine is the pilgrim Egeria, a woman (probably from Gaul or Spain) whose travel diary, the Itinerarium Egeriae, records a journey through the Holy Land and Asia Minor c. 381–384. On her return she made a deliberate detour to venerate Thecla. The relevant passage (ch. 23) is worth reporting in detail, because it documents the shrine, the community, and the liturgical use of the Acts at a single stroke:

Egeria reached Seleucia of Isauria, called on the bishop, and then went out to “the holy church of Saint Thecla, which is situated outside the city on a rather flat eminence, about fifteen hundred paces from the city.” On the hill she found “very many cells of men and women” and a “great wall” enclosing “the church containing the very beautiful memorial [martyrium].” There she was reunited with “a very dear friend of mine… a holy deaconess named Marthana,” whom she had met earlier in Jerusalem, “who was ruling over the cells of apotactitae [renunciants] and virgins.” And she records the act of devotion that crowns the visit: “When I had arrived there in the name of God, prayer having been made at the martyrium, and the whole of the Acts of Saint Thecla having been read, I gave endless thanks to Christ our God” (Itinerarium Egeriae 23; trans. M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe; cf. J. Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels, 3rd ed., Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1999).

Three things in this passage are of the first importance. It is contemporary and eyewitness — the firmest kind of evidence in the dossier. It shows the shrine already a major center, with monastic communities of both sexes led, in the women’s part, by a deaconess (the order within which Thecla was venerated; see The Self-Baptism). And it documents that the Acts of Paul and Thecla were read aloud at the shrine as part of the pilgrim’s devotion — direct evidence for the liturgical use of the apocryphal narrative at the cult center.

Imperial Patronage: The Emperor Zeno

The shrine reached its greatest splendor under imperial patronage in the later fifth century. The church historian Evagrius Scholasticus (writing 593/4) reports that the emperor Zeno (r. 474–475, restored 476–491), when he had been driven from the throne by the usurper Basiliscus, received a vision of Thecla promising his restoration; on regaining power he “dedicated to the protomartyr Thecla a very large and beautiful sanctuary” at Seleucia, endowing it with lavish imperial offerings still in evidence in Evagrius’s own day (Evagrius, Ecclesiastical History 3.8). The great hilltop basilica — the largest of the churches on the site — is associated with this Zenonian building program, dated to roughly the 470s–480s, though construction at the complex spanned a longer period (Davis, Cult of Saint Thecla, ch. 2; Kristensen, JECS 24.2 [2016]).

[Disputed: the building history of the Seleucia complex. Evagrius (Hist. eccl. 3.8) credits the emperor Zeno (r. 474–491) with dedicating a great sanctuary to Thecla at Seleucia after a vision, and the large hilltop basilica is generally associated with his patronage (c. 470s–480s). The precise sequence and dating of the several churches and structures on the hill — the cave-church, the hilltop (“Domed”) basilica, and the others — are reconstructed from archaeology and remain debated in detail (Davis 2001; Kristensen 2016). The fact of major imperial patronage under Zeno is firm; the exact phasing is not.]

What Survives

The site is today largely ruined, but substantial remains attest its former scale. The great hilltop basilica survives chiefly as a standing apse and foundations; the rock-cut cave-church survives in part, with an associated cistern; and excavation has revealed further basilicas, a large bath, and extensive cisterns across the hill — the infrastructure of a major pilgrimage center serving large numbers of travelers (Davis, Cult of Saint Thecla, ch. 2; Kristensen, JECS 24.2 [2016]). The ruins, together with Egeria’s diary and the Life and Miracles, make the Seleucia cult one of the best-documented saint-cults of late antiquity — and the anchor of everything that can be said with confidence about the historical phenomenon of Thecla’s veneration.

References

Itinerarium Egeriae (Pilgrimage of Egeria/Etheria) 23. Trans. M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe (CCEL); J. Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels, 3rd ed. (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1999). (The shrine, the deaconess Marthana, the reading of the Acts.)
Evagrius Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 3.8 (the emperor Zeno’s vision and dedication). Trans. E. Walford (1846); ed. J. Bidez and L. Parmentier (London, 1898).
Davis, Stephen J. The Cult of Saint Thecla: A Tradition of Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. (The Seleucia shrine, ch. 2; the cult in Asia Minor and Egypt.)
Kristensen, Troels Myrup. “Landscape, Space, and Presence in the Cult of Thekla at Meriamlik.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 24, no. 2 (2016): 229–263.
Dagron, Gilbert. Vie et miracles de sainte Thècle. Subsidia Hagiographica 62. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1978. (The text composed at the shrine; introduction on the site.)