Tarsus, the birthplace of Paul

From the Catholic Charismatic Renewal at St. Lucia’s Cathedral, Colombo 13.

Wednesday, 23rd January 2008

Tarsus

Tarsus is a city and a large district in Mersin Province, Turkey, 15 km from Mersin and near Adana. With a history going back 7,000 years Tarsus has long been an important stop for traders to the Orient, a focal point of many civilisations including the Ancient Romans when Tarsus was capital of the province of Cilicia, scene of the romance between Mark Antony and Cleopatra and birthplace of Saint Paul.
Tarsus has a long history of commerce and is still a commercial centre today, trading , refining and processing that produce for export. Agriculture is an important source of income, half of the land area of district is farmland (1,050 km²) and most of the remainder is forest and orchard.
In historical times, the city was first ruled by the Hittites, Assyria and then the Persian Empire. Tarsos was the seat of a Persian satrapy from 400 BC onward. Indeed Xenophon records that in 401 BC, when Cyrus the Younger marched against Babylon, the city was governed by King Syennesis in the name of the Persian monarch.
Alexander the Great came through with his armies in 333 BC and came near meeting his death here after a bath in the Cydnus. By this time Tarsus was already Greek, and as part of the Seleucid Empire became more and more Hellenized; Strabo praises the cultural level of Tarsus in this period with its philosophers, poets and linguists. The schools of Tarsos rivalled Athens and Alexandria. 2 Maccabees (4:30) records its revolt in about 171 BC against Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who had renamed the town Antiochia on the Cydnus. In his time the library of Tarsus held 200,000 books, a huge collection of scientific works.
Pompey subjected it to Rome and Tarsus became capital of the Roman province of Cilicia the metropolis where the governor resided. To flatter Julius Caesar, it took the name Juliopolis; it was here that Cleopatra and Mark Antony met, the scene of the celebrated feasts they gave during the construction of their fleet. In 66 BC, the inhabitants received Roman citizenship.
Tarsus was the birthplace of Saint Paul (Acts 9:11; 21:39; 22:3), who took refuge here after his conversion (Acts 9:30), and was joined by Barnabas (Acts 11:25). It is probable that at the time a Christian community was already established, although the first bishop, Helenus, dates only from the third century.
Owing to the importance of Tarsus, many martyrs were put to death here, among them being Saint Pelagia, Saint Boniface, Saint Marinus, Saint Diomedus, Saint Quiricus and Saint Julitta.
At about the end of the tenth century, the Armenians established a diocese of their rite, which still exists; Saint Nerses of Lambroun was its most distinguished representative in the twelfth century.
A cave in Tarsus is one of a number of places claiming to be the location of the legend of the Seven Sleepers, common to Christianity and Islam.
The Tarsus region was annexed by the Forces of Rashidun Caliphate under the command of Khalid ibn Walid in the 637, retaining it until 965, when Nicephorus Phocas returned it to the Byzantine Empire for nearly a century. The area was lost to the Seljuk Turks, recaptured in 1097 during the Crusades and then disputed between Latins, Greeks, and Armenians of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia (Kingdom of Lesser Armenia); these last became definitively masters until about 1360, when it was captured by the Ramazanoğlu Turks. Finally the area was brought under the control of the Ottomans by Selim I in 1517.
In the Middle Ages Tarsus was renowned throughout the Middle East, a number of Arab writers praised it as a beautiful and well-defended city. In 1671 the traveller Evliya Çelebi records "a city on the plain, an hour from the sea, surrounded by strong walls two-storeys high, moated on all sides, with three distinct neighbourhoods inside the walls".
Tarsus was captured from the Ottomans in 1832 by the Mamluks of Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt, son of Muhammad Ali, and for 8 years remained in the hands of the Egyptians, who began growing cotton on the surrounding plain. Upon the return of the Ottomans this cotton drove a substantial growth in the economy of the area.
However after being a port for 3,000 years at the end of the 19th century due to neglect, Tarsus no longer had access to the sea, and the delta became a swamp. At this point Tarsus was a typical Ottoman city with communities of Muslim Turks and Christian Greeks and Armenians. At the founding of the Turkish Republic in the 1920s the swamp was drained, the River Berdan was dammed to build Turkey's first hydro-electric power station, and irrigation, roadworks and a railway brought the economy of Tarsus back to life, with new factories, particularly producing textiles.