Cilicia: The Province of Paul

When the Apostle Paul introduces himself to a Roman tribune in the Acts of the Apostles, he names not only a city but a province: "I am a Jew of Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city" (Acts 21:39, Douay-Rheims). (Scripture) Cilicia is the region that formed him. It was a coastal territory in the south-east corner of Asia Minor, a fertile plain hemmed between the sea and a great mountain wall, and by Paul's day a Roman province with Tarsus as its chief city. To understand where the Apostle Paul came from — his fluent Greek, his Roman citizenship, his mobility across the empire, and the churches he strengthened in his own homeland — one has to understand Cilicia. This article gathers, in a neutral and cited register, what the sources say about the province: its geography, its history, its famous schools, and its place in the earliest Christian story. Throughout, claims are labelled by their evidentiary weight — (Scripture) for what the New Testament states, (Tradition) for later Christian memory, and (Scholarship) for the reconstructions of historians and archaeologists — and dates are given as ranges, because ancient chronology is a careful reconstruction rather than a record.

The land

Cilicia occupied the coastal plain and mountains of what is now the far south of Turkiye, along the north-eastern rim of the Mediterranean. Classical geographers divided it into two contrasting halves. Eastern Cilicia was Cilicia Pedias, "Level Cilicia" — the broad, well-watered alluvial plain that the Turks today call the Cukurova, one of the most fertile lowlands in Anatolia. Western Cilicia was Cilicia Tracheia, "Rugged Cilicia" — a wild, mountainous coast of limestone spurs and pirate coves. It was this rugged western coast that had sheltered the Cilician pirates whom Rome suppressed in the first century BC. (Scholarship)

The heart of the province, and of this story, is the plain. Tarsus, Paul's birthplace, sits on that plain roughly twenty kilometres inland from the sea, on the River Cydnus (the modern Berdan or Tarsus Cayi), which in antiquity ran through the middle of the town and gave it a river route to the coast. (Scholarship) A rich agricultural hinterland, a navigable river with sea access, and — crucially — command of the one easy gateway between the Mediterranean and the Anatolian interior together explain the wealth and importance of Cilicia in every period of its history. (Scholarship)

The Cilician Gates

The feature that made Cilicia strategically priceless was a mountain pass. To the north the province is walled off from central Anatolia by the Taurus Mountains, and through that wall runs a single narrow defile, the Cilician Gates (Turkish *Gulek Bogazi*). The pass climbs through a gorge to a high point of roughly a thousand metres, and at its narrowest the road is squeezed into a defile only a few dozen metres wide. Because so few routes cross the Taurus at all, the Gates were of exceptional military and commercial value for millennia — used, over the centuries, by the Hittites, by the Greek mercenaries of Xenophon's Ten Thousand, by Alexander the Great on his march toward Issus, by Roman armies, by the Byzantines, and by the First Crusade. Tarsus commanded the southern approach to this pass, and much of the city's prosperity flowed from that position. (Scholarship)

It is often stated that Paul himself passed through the Cilician Gates on his journeys between Cilicia and the Anatolian interior — for instance travelling inland toward Galatia. This is a reasonable inference from the geography and from the routes Acts describes, but it is worth being precise: the biblical text nowhere says so explicitly. It should be read as a likely inference rather than a documented fact. (Scholarship) What Acts does record is that Paul, having left Jerusalem after his conversion, was sent "to Tarsus" (Acts 9:30), and later travelled "through Syria and Cilicia, confirming the churches" (Acts 15:41) — movements that carried him repeatedly through this corridor. (Scripture)

Tarsus, capital of the province

Throughout the Roman period Tarsus was the capital of the province of Cilicia, and the two names are almost inseparable in Paul's story: when he claims Cilicia, he means Tarsus, and when he claims Tarsus, he means a privileged city of a Roman province. The city had a very long history before Rome arrived. The occupation mound of Gozlukule, in the south-eastern part of the modern town, shows continuous settlement from the Neolithic period through the Islamic era, and it is beneath and around this mound that the successive cities of Tarsus lie. (Scholarship)

In the second millennium BC the site appears in Hittite records under a name such as *Tarsa*, within or beside the kingdom of Kizzuwatna. It later passed under Neo-Assyrian influence, and under the Achaemenid Persians it served as a capital of the Cilician satrapy, a link between the empire and the sea. (Scholarship) After Alexander the Great's campaign brought the region into the Greek world in 333 BC, the city was refounded under the Seleucids and for a time styled Antiochia on the Cydnus — not to be confused with the great Syrian Antioch on the Orontes that later became Paul's mission base. Under the Seleucids Tarsus grew into a major Hellenistic cultural centre. (Scholarship)

Rome came in 67 BC, when Pompey brought Cilicia firmly under Roman control after clearing the Cilician pirates from the western coast, and Tarsus became the provincial capital. The city enjoyed a markedly favoured status: it was briefly renamed Juliopolis in honour of Julius Caesar and received privileges commonly described as those of a free city, with tax advantages. The philosopher Athenodorus of Tarsus, a tutor of the future emperor Augustus, returned home to reform the city's government, cementing its imperial connections. Cicero himself served as governor of Cilicia in 51 to 50 BC and was based partly at Tarsus. (Scholarship) This is the city, and the provincial standing, that stands behind Paul's proud phrase "no mean city" (Acts 21:39). (Scripture)

A Roman citizen of Cilicia

That provincial and civic privilege matters directly to Paul's biography, because the Acts of the Apostles presents his Roman citizenship as inherited from birth in this city. When a tribune prepares to have him scourged, Paul asks whether it is lawful to flog "a man that is a Roman and uncondemned" (Acts 22:25); the commander, who had bought his own citizenship "with a great sum," is told by Paul, "But I was born so" (Acts 22:28). (Scripture) He invokes the same status again when he appeals to Caesar (Acts 25:11), the step that eventually carries him to Rome. Paul's own letters never mention the privilege, so a minority of scholars are cautious about the claim; most accept it as historically plausible and consistent with the picture of a well-placed Jewish family in a privileged Greco-Roman city of Cilicia. (Scholarship) Whatever its origin, that Cilician-born citizenship gave Paul legal protection, fluent Greek, and the freedom of movement on which his whole mission depended. The details are treated more fully in the reference on the Apostle Paul and in the source note on the Acts of the Apostles.

The schools of Tarsus

Cilicia's capital was famous in the ancient world for something beyond its trade: its schools of learning. The single most important classical testimony is the *Geography* of Strabo, written in the early Roman imperial period, whose fourteenth book praises the intensity of Tarsian philosophical culture. Strabo says the people of Tarsus were so devoted to philosophy and to the whole round of education that "they have surpassed Athens, Alexandria, or any other place that can be named where there have been schools and lectures of philosophers." (Scholarship) He notes a distinctive feature of the place: the students of learning there were chiefly natives rather than foreigners, and even the local men tended to complete their education abroad and not return — the opposite of Alexandria, which drew scholars in from elsewhere. He lists a series of eminent Stoic philosophers native to Tarsus, among them Antipater, Archedemus, Nestor, and two men named Athenodorus, and adds that Rome itself was "full of Tarsians" — so many learned men did the city produce. (Scholarship)

This is the documentary basis for the standard description of Tarsus as a university city ranking with Athens and Alexandria. Two cautions belong here. First, Strabo praises the *intensity* of local philosophical culture; the flat popular claim that Tarsus was simply "the greatest" university reads more into his words than they say. (Scholarship) Second, the frequently repeated figure that the city's library held some two hundred thousand volumes is not securely attested in the ancient sources and is best treated as uncertain. (Scholarship) It is equally important to note what the New Testament does *not* say. The popular image of the young Paul studying in the philosophical schools of Tarsus is an inference from the city's reputation, not a statement of the text: Acts 22:3 stresses that he was "brought up in this city, at the feet of Gamaliel" in Jerusalem, "taught according to the truth of the law of the fathers" (Acts 22:3). (Scripture) That he absorbed something of the Greek intellectual air of his home province is a reasonable scholarly judgement; that he sat in its lecture halls is not documented. (Scholarship)

Cleopatra on the Cydnus

One of the most famous scenes in Cilicia's history unfolded on the River Cydnus at Tarsus in 41 BC, when Mark Antony, then master of Rome's eastern provinces, summoned Cleopatra VII to answer for her conduct in the recent civil wars. Plutarch's *Life of Antony* gives the celebrated account of the queen sailing up the Cydnus in a barge with a gilded stern, purple sails, and silver oars, rowed to the sound of flutes, reclining beneath a gold canopy "adorned like Venus," while crowds lined the riverbanks. The episode passed from Plutarch through later writers into Shakespeare's *Antony and Cleopatra*. (Scholarship) The meeting itself is a documented historical event; the surviving city gate in Tarsus popularly called "Cleopatra's Gate" acquired that name only in the early twentieth century, and its connection to the queen is legendary rather than documented — a point of local tradition, not fact. (Tradition) The episode is included here because it fixes Tarsus, generations before Paul, as a stage on which the great figures of the late Roman Republic played out their affairs — the kind of cosmopolitan provincial capital into which Paul would later be born.

Cilicia in the New Testament

Cilicia is named repeatedly across the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of Paul, and always as more than a birthplace label. After his conversion and the threats that followed in Jerusalem, "they brought him down to Caesarea, and sent him away to Tarsus" (Acts 9:30) — that is, home to Cilicia. (Scripture) When the church at Antioch needed him, it was to Cilicia that Barnabas travelled to find him: "And he went to Tarsus, to seek Saul" (Acts 11:25). (Scripture) Paul's own letter to the Galatians confirms the movement in the first person: after his conversion, he says, "I came into the regions of Syria and Cilicia" (Galatians 1:21). (Scripture)

The most telling references are the ones that show organised churches already existing in the province. When the Council of Jerusalem sent out its letter on the terms of gentile membership, it was addressed "to the brethren of the Gentiles that are at Antioch, and in Syria and Cilicia" (Acts 15:23) — Cilicia named as a region with settled Christian communities. (Scripture) And on his second journey Paul "went through Syria and Cilicia, confirming the churches" (Acts 15:41). (Scripture) The verb matters: he *confirmed* or strengthened churches that were already there. The Council of Jerusalem and its decision are treated more fully in the reference on the Apostle Paul.

The silent years and the first churches of Anatolia

Those references converge on one of the most intriguing gaps in Paul's biography. After his conversion around AD 33 to 36 and his brief first visit to Jerusalem, Paul dropped out of the connected narrative for roughly a decade — the so-called "silent" or "hidden" years, about AD 36 to 45 — and the sources place him, in that interval, precisely in Cilicia and its neighbouring region of Syria (Acts 9:30; Galatians 1:21). (Scripture) It was from this obscurity that Barnabas retrieved him, seeking him out in Tarsus and bringing him to Antioch, where the disciples "were first named Christians" (Acts 11:26). (Scripture)

What Paul did during those silent years in his home province is not narrated anywhere; it is a genuine blank in the record, and anything that fills it is inference. (Scholarship) But the later references to organised churches in Cilicia (Acts 15:23; 15:41) have led scholars to a striking suggestion. The scholar Mark Wilson, in a study titled "Cilicia: The First Christian Churches in Anatolia," argues that the congregations of Cilicia — with Tarsus foremost — were most likely the earliest Christian communities in all of Asia Minor. The reasoning draws the threads together: Paul returned to Cilicia during the silent years; the Jerusalem Council already addressed believers there; and Paul later revisited to "confirm" churches that plainly already existed. The natural conclusion is that Paul himself was their effective founder, quietly, in the very years the narrative falls silent. (Scholarship) This remains a scholarly reconstruction rather than a narrated event — the founding of the Tarsus church is nowhere described — but it is a well-grounded reading, and it gives Cilicia a claim to a very early place in Christian history. (Scholarship)

Roads, spread, and a connective node

Cilicia's importance to the early Christian movement was not only that Paul came from it, but that it sat at a hinge in the map. The Cilician plain funnelled overland traffic north through the Cilician Gates to central Anatolia — to Cappadocia and to Galatia, with its cities of Iconium, Lystra and Derbe — and, eastward through the passes of the Amanus range, to Syrian Antioch on the Orontes. Tarsus thus stood between the Antiochene cradle of the gentile mission and the inland Anatolian field that Paul would evangelise on his journeys. (Scholarship) The cities of the first missionary journey — Iconium, Lystra, Derbe — lay just beyond Cilicia's mountain gateway, and it is telling that from Derbe, the easternmost point of that journey, the road home ran back toward Paul's native Cilicia through the Cilician Gates (Acts 14:20 to 21). (Scripture) In the geography of the New Testament, Cilicia is a connective node: the place where the Syrian and the Anatolian mission fields meet.

The province also produced later Christian figures and martyrs venerated in the region — saints associated with Tarsus in the martyrologies — but these are hagiographical attestations of a continuing Christian presence rather than first-century documentation, and they are best labelled as tradition. (Tradition)

Cilicia today

The ancient province has no single modern successor, but its heartland is the modern Mersin Province of Turkiye, and Tarsus is today a district within it, between the coastal city of Mersin to the west and Adana to the east. (Scholarship) The tangible remains of Paul's Cilicia are modest and mostly lie beneath the living town: a stretch of excavated basalt-paved Roman street, the medieval city gate popularly called Cleopatra's Gate, the settlement mound of Gozlukule, and the precinct of St Paul's Well and the church traditionally linked to the apostle's birthplace. The church building, an eve-of-modern basilica raised on ground long identified with Paul, operates today as a state-run memorial museum rather than an active parish, opened for services chiefly when pilgrim groups visit. The association of the well and the church with Paul's own household is commemorative tradition, not documented fact: the structures are far later than the first century, and no archaeological find ties either directly to the apostle. (Tradition) The church, the well, Cleopatra's Gate, and the surrounding historic quarters have been placed on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List as a single cultural ensemble tied to Tarsus as Paul's birthplace; the precise wording and status of that listing are best verified against the current UNESCO record, and the ensemble is a candidate on the tentative list rather than an inscribed World Heritage Site. (Scholarship) For an orientation to the modern geography, see where Tarsus is, and for the wider case for the place, why Tarsus.

Why Cilicia matters for St Paul Global Week

Cilicia is the answer to a simple question: where did the Apostle to the gentiles come from? He came from a fertile plain under a great mountain wall, from a river city that guarded the one gateway between the sea and the Anatolian interior, from a provincial capital famed for its schools and proud of its Roman standing, and from a region that may well have held some of the very first churches in Asia Minor. That homeland shaped the man — his languages, his citizenship, his mobility, and perhaps his earliest, unrecorded work as a founder of churches.

It is that homeland that St Paul Global Week honours. On 28 to 30 June 2027, around the 29 June Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, a faith-tourism gathering organised by Funny Tourism will bring pilgrims to Tarsus and Mersin, in the heart of ancient Cilicia and the birthplace of the Apostle, with the Feast Day prayer programme broadcast live worldwide. You are warmly invited to explore the programme, to read why Tarsus holds this place in Christian memory, and — for church and community leaders who wish to bring a group — to learn about the Hosted Delegation Leaders programme or simply to contact us.