The excavation mounds and the modern street grid sit on the same ancient terrain. 36.20°N, 36.16°E — Hatay province, southern Türkiye, near the Syrian border. Antakya is the modern Turkish form of Antioch, and the city the New Testament names roughly 18 times is the same city the Turkish state administers today.
A Verse That Named Two Billion People
Acts 11 records the moment a label entered history. The verse is brief, almost casual.
"And it came to pass, that a whole year they assembled themselves with the church, and taught much people. And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch."
The Greek word the verse coins — Christianoi — was almost certainly an outsider's term, used by Antioch's Greek-speaking population to label this new movement of Messiah-followers. The disciples themselves had used names like the Way (Acts 9:2). The city's residents needed a noun. The label stuck. Today some 2.4 billion people answer to a word first written down in this city.
A First-Tier Roman City
Antioch on the Orontes was, in Paul's day, the third-largest city in the Roman Empire after Rome and Alexandria, with around half a million inhabitants. It served as capital of the Roman province of Syria and as a major trade hub between the Mediterranean, Persia, and the Silk Road. Acts 13 records the Antioch church commissioning Paul and Barnabas for the first missionary journey. Acts 15 records the Council of Jerusalem deciding what Antiochian Gentile believers must observe. Antioch was, in the first century, the headquarters of Gentile Christianity.
What's Excavated
Modern Antakya sits on top of much of the ancient city. Major archaeological zones include the Cave Church of St. Peter (Senpiyer Kilisesi), a small grotto traditionally identified as one of the earliest Christian gathering places, with structural elements dating from at least the 4th century AD; and the Hatay Archaeology Museum, which holds one of the largest collections of Roman mosaics in the world — many from villas excavated nearby. The city's mosaic catalogue is itself a kind of biblical commentary: scenes from local mythology that the early church would have known by heart.
What 2023 Did
The Turkey–Syria earthquake of February 2023 caused severe damage in Antakya. The cave church itself came through largely intact; the stairs and retaining wall leading up to it did not. Numerous other historic buildings — several Ottoman-era mosques among them, and much of the old city — required emergency stabilization. Restoration efforts, supported internationally, are ongoing. The verse from Acts 11 is being read by people whose own walls have, in living memory, also fallen.
Antioch Today
The Hatay metropolitan area has roughly 1.6 million residents, though the central city's population is in flux due to post-earthquake displacement. The cave church reopened on 15 January 2024, after eleven months of work on the stairs and the retaining wall. The Catholic, Orthodox, Armenian, and small Protestant communities — descendants of the Christianity the verse named — have been part of the city for almost twenty centuries. The local Antiochian Orthodox liturgy still uses Greek and Arabic, languages spoken in the city when Acts 11 was written.
Write It Out
Copy the last clause out for yourself. And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch. By the time you finish it, you notice whose sentence you are writing. The disciples did not pick this word. Someone in this city, speaking Greek, needed a noun for them and reached for one. Two thousand years later it is on your page in your own handwriting, and it still belongs to the address where it was coined.
The verse named the religion. The city is still answering to its own name.