Anatolia

The magi, on this occasion, placed the heads of two sacrificed animals—one white and one black, a ram and a goat—on a rock serving as an altar, facing the immense sacred peaks of the Caucasus

What could the Good Shepherd motif have meant to early Christians, if they so frequently chose it as a single or prominent image above their final resting place?

The walls of Nicaea were built during the Roman imperial period, when it was an imperial city and the seat of a council. After falling into Ottoman hands in 1331, the walls remained almost entirely intact, stretching five kilometers, with nearly a hundred towers and four gates.

It is equally remarkable that at least this one Byzantine church has survived more or less in its original form out of the twenty that once stood in Nicaea, and out of the many thousands across the country

Only a few years ago, archaeologists from Bursa University discovered, from aerial photographs of Lake İznik and its surroundings near Nicaea, that ruins were emerging beneath the water — the remains of a large basilica