Lystra: The Colony of Timothy and the Stoning of Paul

Lystra is one of the four inland towns of southern Asia Minor that Paul evangelised on his first missionary journey, and one of the most dramatic episodes in the Acts of the Apostles unfolds there: a healing mistaken for a divine epiphany, an attempted pagan sacrifice, and then a stoning that left Paul for dead. It is also, by the account of Acts, the home town of Timothy, who would become Paul's closest younger colleague. Yet of the physical city almost nothing is visible today. This article sets out what the sources say about Lystra — where it stood, what happened there, and how much a visitor can actually see — keeping distinct what Scripture records, what Tradition adds, and what modern Scholarship and archaeology have established. Its coordinates are given as approximate, because the site is identified but unexcavated.

Where Lystra was

Lystra lay in Lycaonia, a district of the highland interior of Asia Minor that in Paul's day belonged to the Roman province of Galatia. Around 6 BC the emperor Augustus refounded the town as a Roman military colony — its full name on inscriptions is Colonia Iulia Felix Gemina Lustra — one of a network of colonies planted to hold the mountainous Pisidian and Isaurian frontier. (Scholarship) A Roman road linked it to the colony of Pisidian Antioch to the northwest.

The site is identified with the Zoldera mound, about 1.5 km north of the village of Hatunsaray and roughly 30 km south-southwest of Konya (ancient Iconium), in Konya Province, Türkiye. (Scholarship) The identification rests on a single decisive find: in 1885 the American scholar J. R. S. Sterrett discovered at the mound an inscribed Roman colonial dedication stone bearing the city's full colonial name, now held in the Konya Archaeological Museum. That inscription fixed the location securely, even though the mound itself has never been excavated. Because the buried city has not been dug, published coordinates — approximately 37.58° N, 32.29° E — are best treated as approximate: adequate for mapping to within a few hundred metres, but not a surveyed point. (Scholarship)

A caution belongs here. The nearby rock-cut settlement of Kilistra (Klistra), near the village of Gökyurt, is a distinct Byzantine-era Christian site with cave churches, and it is sometimes confused with Lystra in popular writing because the names sound alike. The two are separate places and should not be conflated. (Scholarship)

Lystra in Paul's story

Paul and Barnabas came to Lystra during the first missionary journey, dated by most scholars to roughly AD 46–48. (Scholarship) Driven from Iconium by a plot to stone them, "they fled to Lystra and Derbe, cities of Lycaonia, and to the whole country round about, and were there preaching the gospel" (Acts 14:6, Douay-Rheims). (Scripture)

At Lystra Paul healed a man "impotent in his feet, a cripple from his mother's womb, who never had walked" (Acts 14:8). Seeing that the man "had faith to be healed," Paul said "with a loud voice: Stand upright on thy feet. And he leaped up and walked" (Acts 14:9–10). (Scripture)

The crowd's reaction is one of the most vivid scenes in Acts. "When the people had seen what Paul had done, they lifted up their voice in the Lycaonian tongue, saying: The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men. And they called Barnabas, Jupiter: but Paul, Mercury: because he was chief speaker" (Acts 14:11–12). (Scripture) The Douay-Rheims, following the Latin Vulgate, gives the Roman names Jupiter and Mercury; the Greek original names the corresponding gods Zeus and Hermes. That the crowd spoke "in the Lycaonian tongue" — a local language distinct from the Greek of the streets — is a detail often noted for its local colour. "The priest also of Jupiter that was before the city, brought oxen and garlands before the gates, and would have offered sacrifice" (Acts 14:13), until the two apostles, "rending their clothes," rushed out to stop them, protesting "We also are mortals, men like unto you" (Acts 14:14–15). (Scripture) The speech that follows is addressed not to synagogue Jews, as at Pisidian Antioch, but to a pagan, polytheist audience — appealing to the living God "who made the heaven, and the earth, and the sea" (Acts 14:15) — and is an early model of Paul preaching to gentiles with no shared Jewish scripture to build on.

The mood then turned violent. "Now there came thither certain Jews from Antioch and Iconium: and persuading the multitude, and stoning Paul, drew him out of the city, thinking him to be dead. But as the disciples stood round about him, he rose up and entered into the city, and the next day he departed with Barnabas to Derbe" (Acts 14:19–20). (Scripture) Paul may recall this beating years later — "Once was I stoned" (2 Corinthians 11:25) — and the letter known as 2 Timothy names "persecutions, afflictions: such as came upon me at Antioch, at Iconium, and at Lystra" (2 Timothy 3:11), though the Pauline authorship of the Pastoral Epistles is disputed by many scholars. (Scripture, with authorship caveat.)

Lystra reappears on the second journey (c. AD 49–52). Returning to strengthen the young congregations, Paul "came to Derbe and Lystra. And behold, there was a certain disciple there named Timothy" — son of a believing Jewish mother and a gentile father — to whom "the brethren that were in Lystra and Iconium gave a good testimony" (Acts 16:1–2). (Scripture) Paul took Timothy with him, and Timothy became one of his most trusted companions and the named co-sender of several letters. In this sense Lystra's most enduring contribution to Paul's mission was a person rather than a place.

What remains, and what a visitor sees

Very little. Unlike the excavated showpieces of Paul's world — Ephesus, Philippi, Pisidian Antioch — Lystra is an unexcavated mound in open farmland. The Zoldera höyük rises above the surrounding fields near Hatunsaray, but there are no standing colonnades, no theatre, no reconstructed streets; the Roman colony lies sealed beneath the earth. The tangible relic of the city is the Sterrett colonial inscription in the Konya Archaeological Museum, alongside other stray finds from the district. Visitors drawn to the Lystra story in the landscape often pair the mound with the Byzantine cave churches of nearby Kilistra — while keeping clear that Kilistra is a later, separate site and not the New Testament city.

Fact and tradition

The location of Lystra is a matter of secure scholarship, fixed by the 1885 inscription; the vivid narrative of the healing, the acclamation and the stoning belongs to Scripture (Acts 14); and the identification of Lystra as Timothy's home rests on Acts 16:1–2. Beyond this, later devotional traditions attached to the site are sparse and local, and this article makes no claim about them. What can be said plainly is that Lystra, invisible though it is today, was the setting for one of the most human moments in the New Testament — Paul caught between the adulation of a crowd who wished to worship him and the stones of a crowd who wished to kill him — and the place where the mission gained one of its central figures.

Lystra and the wider first-journey landscape

Lystra belongs to the arc of towns — Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, Derbe — that the Apostle Paul founded on the journey that began and ended in his Cilician homeland. It was to that homeland, and to Paul's birthplace at Tarsus, that the mission's roots ran; you can read more about where Tarsus is. St Paul Global Week honours those roots. On 28–30 June 2027, around the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul on 29 June, a faith-tourism gathering organised by Funny Tourism will bring pilgrims to Tarsus and Mersin. You are warmly invited to explore the programme, to read why Tarsus matters to the story, and — for church and community leaders hoping to bring a group — to learn about the Hosted Delegation Leaders programme.