The strongest later tradition sends the apostle Philip to Hierapolis in Phrygia, in what is now western Turkey, and has him martyred and buried there. Eusebius, quoting an early source, places a Philip with his daughters at Hierapolis, though the source may again blur the apostle with the evangelist, whose daughters were known as prophets.
The apocryphal Acts of Philip, a work of perhaps the fourth or fifth century, supplies a fuller and more colourful death, with a talking leopard and a mass conversion, and has him crucified head downward. Like the apocryphal acts of the other apostles, it is a devotional romance rather than a record.
What gives the Hierapolis tradition unusual interest is archaeology. In 2011 an Italian excavation on the hill above the ancient city identified a first-century Roman tomb at the centre of a later octagonal martyrium, a purpose-built shrine of pilgrimage, and its excavators announced it as the long-venerated tomb of the apostle. The identification cannot be proved, a shrine attests a cult, not the man, but it shows how early and how firmly the memory of Philip had fixed itself to that place. He is invoked as a patron of Hierapolis and, in the Western calendar, is commemorated together with James the son of Alphaeus.