The Roman Road: Tarsus, the Cilician Gates and the Highways of Paul's Mission

Of all the tangible remains in Paul's birthplace, few speak more directly of the world he moved through than a Roman road. In central Tarsus a stretch of basalt-paved street, uncovered by accident, still lies below the modern pavement; and beyond the city, the passes and highways of the Roman Empire are a large part of the reason a man from a Cilician town could carry a message across the eastern Mediterranean world. This entry treats both: the excavated road a visitor can see today, and the wider Roman road network that framed the journeys of the Apostle Paul. As throughout this reference, claims are labelled (Scripture) for what the New Testament states, (Tradition) for later Christian memory, and (Scholarship) for modern history and archaeology, and no date or coordinate is given more precision than the evidence allows.

A paved street in the heart of Tarsus

Near Cumhuriyet Meydani in central Tarsus, an excavated stretch of ancient street survives below the level of the living town. It is about 6.5 metres wide, paved with polygonal blocks of black basalt — some roughly two metres across — and, unusually, it runs above a covered drainage and sewer channel, a feature that makes it notable among excavated Anatolian streets. The paved roadway is dated to roughly the Seleucid or Hellenistic period, about the mid-2nd century BC, while the colonnaded portico with shops along one side was added later, in the Roman imperial centuries (roughly the 2nd to 4th centuries AD); the two therefore belong to different phases. The road was found by chance in a construction pit in 1993. (Scholarship)

A visitor today sees a sunken, fenced excavation exposing the basalt pavement and the bases of the flanking columns, viewed from the perimeter rather than walked. Its importance is contextual, not devotional: this is the kind of paved street that Paul's prosperous home city possessed, not a place where the Apostle is recorded to have stood. It is not a "Paul relic," and careful writing should not present it as one. (Scholarship)

The road as an instrument of the mission

The wider significance of the Roman road for Paul is that the empire's road system, secured by the long Roman peace, made sustained long-distance travel possible for a private traveller. Paul's own Roman citizenship — which he invokes as a man of a "no mean city" (Acts 21:39, Douay-Rheims), and again to avoid a scourging, "I was born so" (Acts 22:28) — gave him both the legal standing and the mobility to move along those roads and to speak in city after city. (Scripture) The roads, the shared Greek of the eastern provinces, and that citizenship together form the standard explanation for how the mission travelled as far and as fast as it did. (Scholarship)

The Cilician Gates

North of Tarsus the land rises to the Taurus Mountains, crossed at one principal point by the Cilician Gates (Turkish *Gulek Bogazi*), a narrow defile that links the Cilician plain to the central Anatolian plateau. Its highest point is about 1,000 metres, and at its narrowest the pass is only some 30 metres wide. Because so few routes cross the Taurus, the Gates were of exceptional strategic and commercial value for millennia, and were used in turn by the Hittites, the Ten Thousand of Xenophon, Alexander the Great, the Romans, the Byzantines, and the armies of the First Crusade; the modern Tarsus-to-Ankara highway follows the same corridor today. (Scholarship)

It is historically plausible, and often stated, that Paul passed through the Cilician Gates when travelling between Tarsus or Cilicia and the Anatolian interior. This is a reasonable inference from the geography and from the narrative of Acts — it is not an explicit statement of the biblical text — and it is best treated as inference rather than documented fact. (Tradition / Scholarship)

Roads in Paul's story

The New Testament does record, in general terms, movement along the roads of this region, and much of it is preserved only in the Acts of the Apostles. After his conversion the disciples "sent him away to Tarsus" (Acts 9:30); later Barnabas "went to Tarsus to seek Saul" and brought him to Antioch (Acts 11:25). (Scripture) Paul himself says he "came into the regions of Syria and Cilicia" (Galatians 1:21), and Acts describes him going "through Syria and Cilicia, confirming the churches" (Acts 15:41). (Scripture)

On the first missionary journey, about AD 46-48, the inland cities were reached overland: Perga, Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, and the Lycaonian towns of Lystra and Derbe (Acts 13-14). Two of these deserve a cartographer's caution. The sites of Lystra (near Hatunsaray, approximately 37.5789 N, 32.2861 E) and Derbe (the mound Kerti Hoyuk, near Karaman, approximately 37.3548 N, 33.3648 E) are identified but essentially unexcavated, so their coordinates are approximate — to be read as within a few hundred metres, adequate for mapping but not surveyed points. (Scholarship)

What remains, and where it sits

The Tarsus road belongs to a cluster of old-town monuments — the excavated street, St Paul's Well, St Paul's Church (now a state memorial museum), and the medieval city gate popularly called Cleopatra's Gate — that has been placed on UNESCO's World Heritage Tentative List. That is a preliminary listing rather than an inscribed World Heritage Site, and it should be described as such. Tarsus itself lies inland on the Cilician plain in Mersin Province; the modern coastal city of Mersin (about 36.8121 N, 34.6415 E) is its near neighbour, and the two together host the 2027 gathering described below. To place the region on a map, see where Tarsus is. (Scholarship / Context)

Fact and tradition, in summary

What is documented is the archaeology of the basalt road and the New Testament's plain statements that Paul came from Tarsus and travelled through Syria and Cilicia. What is tradition or inference is the vivid picture of Paul walking this particular excavated street, or passing on foot through the Cilician Gates — plausible and evocative, but not asserted in any first-century source. Holding those two apart is the discipline this reference tries to keep.

The road today

The arc of roads that runs from Tarsus into the Anatolian interior is part of why the city is honoured today, a theme explored further in why Tarsus. St Paul Global Week is a faith-tourism gathering organised by Funny Tourism, held on 28-30 June 2027 in Tarsus and Mersin, around the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul on 29 June. You are warmly invited to explore the programme, and — for church and community leaders bringing a group — to learn about the Hosted Delegation Leaders programme or to get in touch.