Guide
Alahan lies about two kilometres east of the state road joining Mersin to Karaman and some fifteen kilometres north of the town of Mut as the crow flies, up in the Taurus mountains at around 1,200 metres. The road to the monastery is open in almost every season and the drive from the main road takes about ten minutes.
Paul of Tarsus, one of the apostles, and Barnabas, another of the early figures of Christianity who had lived in Tarsus, made journeys through Anatolia from AD 41 to spread the faith. Shrines were raised in their memory at nearly every place they stopped. Since Christianity was not yet the official religion and worship was carried on in secret, such places were preferably out of sight and hard to reach, and a shrine of this kind appears to have stood where the monastery now is.
The ruins standing today, though, were built in the fifth century, after Christianity was officially accepted. The man who had the monastery built was a monk named Tarasis, whose sarcophagus and an inscription of his are there, but most of the money came from the Byzantine emperor. Some accounts put the building between AD 440 and 442, others after AD 474. The emperor in the earlier period was Theodosius II, in the later one Flavius Zeno; different parts of the monastery may well have gone up under different emperors.
The great days of the monastery seem to have ended in the seventh century, when the Arab raids began, yet the buildings clearly stood for a long time afterwards: the traveller Evliya Çelebi, writing in the seventeenth century, said it looked as though it had just left the hands of its builder.
Alahan is a complex spread over a wide area, made up of the West Church, known as the Evangelist Basilica, the monastery and the East Church, monks' cells cut into the rock, and graves round about. The stonework and the rich carved ornament show the hand of the best craftsmen of the age. The West Church has collapsed; the East Church survives as a ruin.
In a space thought to have been the entrance to the ruined West Church there are winged angels, among them Gabriel and Michael, along with various animal figures and a bust of Christ. The two churches are joined by a colonnaded, arched gallery and terrace 115 metres long. In the middle of the gallery stands a large niche worked all over with relief ornament, and on the same gallery there is a baptistery with an apse holding a cross-shaped pool. Rock tombs are cut opposite the baptistery.
