St Paul's Well, Tarsus: The Site Tradition Ties to Paul's Home

St Paul's Well — in Turkish *Sen Pol Kuyusu* — is a stone-lined water well in the old town of Tarsus, on the Cilician plain of southern Türkiye, traditionally said to stand on the site of the family home of the Apostle Paul. It is one of the two principal Pauline pilgrimage sites of the city — the other being the St Paul Memorial Museum — and, of the two, the one that local memory ties most directly to Paul's household. Its interest lies precisely in the distance between what can be documented and what is devoutly remembered: a genuine Roman-period well, still holding water, around which a much later tradition of the apostle's home has gathered.

What and where it is

The well stands in the Kızılmurat quarter of old Tarsus, in the modern Mersin Province, a short walk from the St Paul Memorial Museum and the other monuments of the historic centre. (Scholarship) It is a shaft of largely rectangular-cut stone, roughly 1.15 metres across at the mouth and about 38 metres deep, and it still reaches groundwater. (Scholarship) Beside it lie the excavated foundations of a house and a cluster of restored old-town buildings; the immediate area was investigated in a rescue excavation in 1999, and the masonry of the well is consistent with Roman-period construction — the detail that underlies its identification as an ancient survival rather than a later structure. (Scholarship)

Because Tarsus has been continuously inhabited for millennia, the ancient city lies for the most part beneath the living town, and the well is one of the relatively few points where fabric of Paul's own century is exposed at street level. To place it among the city's other remains — the medieval Cleopatra's Gate, the excavated basalt Roman road, and the great settlement mound of Gözlükule — see the fuller reference on Tarsus.

What a visitor sees

A visitor today finds a wellhead, often fitted with a bucket-and-drawing mechanism, set within the exposed foundations of the house and the surrounding restored quarter. (Scholarship) Pilgrim groups are commonly offered a draw of the well water, and the site functions as a quiet station of devotion rather than a museum with fixed exhibits. It is usually visited together with the nearby church-museum, the two forming the core of a short walking route through the old town.

The well in the story of Paul

Here the sources must be handled with care, because the well is nowhere mentioned in Scripture. The New Testament firmly attests Paul's connection to Tarsus itself. Seized in the temple at Jerusalem, he tells the Roman tribune, "I am a Jew of Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city" (Acts 21:39, Douay-Rheims); defending himself before the crowd, he says, "I am a Jew, born at Tarsus in Cilicia, but brought up in this city, at the feet of Gamaliel" (Acts 22:3); and the same book calls him "Saul of Tarsus" (Acts 9:11). (Scripture) It records that after his conversion the brethren "brought him down to Caesarea, and sent him away to Tarsus" (Acts 9:30), and that Barnabas later "went to Tarsus to seek Saul; whom, when he had found, he brought to Antioch" (Acts 11:25). (Scripture)

What the New Testament never does is locate Paul's family house, describe a well, or attach any single site within Tarsus to him. His own letters, rich as they are in personal detail, are silent about the city altogether. The trade he practised with his hands — Acts describes him as a tentmaker (Acts 18:3) — tells us he came from a working household, but nothing in the text points to this particular spot. (Scripture / Scholarship) The identification of the well with Paul's home is therefore not a scriptural fact but a later commemorative tradition.

Fact and tradition

The honest summary is that the well is authentically old and its Pauline attribution is not documented. (Scholarship) A Roman-period well on this spot is entirely consistent with the first century in which Paul lived; but consistency is not proof, and there is no archaeological or textual evidence tying the shaft to the apostle or to his family. (Scholarship) The naming most plausibly belongs to the piety of the Byzantine or Crusader centuries, both of them eras that actively identified and venerated places associated with the apostles. (Tradition) Read this way, St Paul's Well is best understood as a place of memory: a real fragment of ancient Tarsus that later generations chose as a focus for honouring the city's most famous son.

Holding those two things apart — the genuine antiquity of the well and the traditional, unproven claim about whose home it marks — is what allows the site to be visited honestly, as pilgrims and historians alike have long done. The well belongs, with the St Paul church-museum, the medieval Cleopatra's Gate, and the surrounding old-town quarters, to the ensemble that Türkiye submitted to the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List around the year 2000; that ensemble remains on the Tentative List and has not been inscribed as a full World Heritage Site. (Scholarship)

For the wider context of the man and the city, see our references on the Apostle Paul and on the Acts of the Apostles — the primary narrative behind almost everything we can say about Paul's origins — and the short guide to where Tarsus is.

A living place of pilgrimage

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