Arykanda Basilica

The basilica at Arykanda occupies the site of an earlier Roman temple built in honour of the imperial cult during the reign of the emperor Trajan, in the early second century AD. After the empire turned Christian, the temple's stone was reused in the fifth century to build a basilica church together with an adjoining bishop's residence, marking this Lycian mountain city's shift from pagan to Christian worship. Traces of wall paintings and sections of floor mosaic from this later Christian phase still survive among the ruins. The basilica stands among Arykanda's upper terraces, within a city built across five levels on a steep mountainside, and its reuse of earlier imperial-cult materials makes it one of the clearest examples at the site of how a late antique Anatolian city adapted its older Roman monuments for new religious purposes.