Colossae

Listen first. Out here there is wind moving through dry grass, the hum of a tractor somewhere across the fields, and maybe the bells of a flock of sheep. Under your feet the ground rises into a low, rounded hill. It looks like an ordinary hill. It is not. Beneath this grass lies a city that Greek historians once called great, and that most travellers in the Denizli valley drive straight past.

This is Colossae, on the edge of the town of Honaz, east of Denizli city. Look south and the ridge of Mount Honaz rises behind you, often streaked with snow in winter. Below the mound runs a small river. In ancient times it was called the Lycus, a tributary of the great Meander. Water, pasture and the road between the coast and the interior... these three things made Colossae matter.

The city belonged to Phrygia, an old kingdom of inland Anatolia — the people famous in Greek legend for King Midas. Colossae was already old when the Persians ruled this land. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the Persian king Xerxes passed through here on his march toward Greece in 480 BC. He called it a great city of Phrygia, and he described a strange feature: the river here, he said, vanished into a chasm and ran underground for a stretch before emerging again.

That detail surprises many visitors. The water in this valley is full of dissolved minerals. A few kilometres away at Pamukkale, the same kind of water built the white travertine terraces that now draw huge crowds. Here, the mineral deposits likely formed natural crusts and channels along the riverbed. So when you look at the stream below, you are looking at the same chemistry that shaped the most photographed landscape in the region.

A century after Xerxes, another Greek writer passed this way. Xenophon, a soldier and historian, marched with the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger in 401 BC. He described Colossae as populous, prosperous and large. Imagine it then — houses spilling down these slopes, smoke from cooking fires, merchants arriving on the caravan road with goods from the coast.

What made the city rich was wool. The sheep you may hear today are not a coincidence. Ancient writers mention a special dyed wool from Colossae, with a colour so well known that it took the city's name. Experts still debate the exact shade, perhaps a deep purple-red. The streams of this valley helped dyers fix their colours, and Colossian cloth travelled far beyond Phrygia.

But fortune moves along roads. In the centuries after Alexander the Great, a new city was founded a short distance to the west — Laodicea. It sat on a better position for the main trade route, and it grew quickly. Colossae slowly faded into the shadow of its neighbour. Together with Hierapolis at Pamukkale, these three cities formed a close cluster in the Lycus valley, and travellers moved easily between them.

This is where the story turns, and where the name becomes familiar to millions of people who have never seen this hill. In the first century, a small Christian community gathered here. In the New Testament there is a letter addressed to the Christians of this city: the Letter to the Colossians, traditionally attributed to the apostle Paul. Some scholars question whether Paul wrote it himself. Either way, this quiet mound gave its name to a book read aloud in churches across the world.

The letter names local people. It mentions Epaphras, a teacher from Colossae who seems to have brought the new faith here. Christian tradition also links this city to Philemon, the man who receives Paul's shortest surviving letter, about a runaway slave named Onesimus. So the small domestic lives of a few people from this town — a household, a servant, a teacher — were preserved for nearly two thousand years.

The ground here is restless. This whole valley sits in an active earthquake zone. Ancient sources record a powerful earthquake in the region in the early sixties of the first century, which struck Laodicea, and later writers include Colossae among the damaged cities. Over the following centuries the population drifted uphill toward a safer site at the foot of the mountain, a town the Byzantines called Chonae — today's Honaz.

Chonae became known for a church dedicated to the Archangel Michael. Local legend tells that the archangel saved the sanctuary from a flood by splitting the rock so the waters could drain away. It is a story, not a record, but it shows how deeply the people of this valley lived with water and stone. The Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates, who wrote about the fall of Constantinople in 1204, took his name from this town.

Now look around you with fresh eyes. Unlike Hierapolis or Laodicea, Colossae has never been fully excavated. Most of the city still lies under the soil. On the hillside you may spot the faint curve of an ancient theatre, shaped into the slope. Scattered across the fields are pieces of worked stone, broken pottery and fragments of column. In recent years, Turkish archaeologists have begun to study the site more closely, so this quiet picture may change.

For now, though, you have something the famous sites cannot offer: near silence. Walk slowly. Watch the light move across the slopes of Mount Honaz. Notice the green line of trees along the riverbank, the same water that carried dye and wool, and that Herodotus once wrote about. Before you leave, stand on the top of the mound and turn in a full circle. Everything you see — the river, the mountain, the road, the grazing land — is the reason a city stood here for so long.