Sacred To

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Turkey gathers eight cities tracing Anatolian religion from a Bronze Age pantheon through four ecumenical councils to a Sufi order still practicing today.

Hattusa was capital of the Hittite empire and source of the cuneiform archives that preserve Hittite religion, a system its own texts call the thousand gods of Hatti. The tablets carry the Kumarbi cycle, whose succession of sky gods runs parallel to the Greek Ouranos, Kronos and Zeus, and the rock sanctuary of Yazilikaya outside the city shows the pantheon carved in procession.

Four of the eight carried Christian doctrine through its defining councils. Nicaea hosted the first ecumenical council in 325, producing the creed that still carries its name, and the seventh in 787, restoring icon veneration. Ephesus hosted the third in 431, affirming Theotokos for Mary, and tradition ties the city to the apostle John and a house venerated as Mary's last home. Chalcedon hosted the fourth in 451, defining Christ as one person in two natures, a ruling the Armenian, Coptic, Syriac and Ethiopian churches never received and are still identified by refusing. Constantinople, refounded by Constantine in 330 as a Christian New Rome, was Byzantine capital and Patriarchate seat for over a thousand years, hosting two more councils and Iconoclasm, before Ottoman conquest in 1453 made it Istanbul, still home to a reduced Orthodox community.

Antioch, where Acts says the name Christian was first used, sent out Paul and Barnabas and read scripture more literally than Alexandria. Edessa built its own Syriac Christianity around a legendary letter from Jesus before its school closed in 489. Konya, Seljuk capital of Rum, is where Rumi taught and died in 1273, and his Mevlevi order's whirling dervishes still turn despite their 1925 closure.