Çatalhöyük is small, and within an hour, even after reading every sign in the brand-new, gorgeous museum, we're driving through the villages back to Konya. And even though I’m also interested in the 13th-century history of Rumi, his mausoleum is also small, as is the tiny, underfunded archaeological museum, which is full of stacked slabs of Roman mosaic floors from undisclosed locations and sarcophagi, presumably from ancient Iconium. We are on the verge of boredom with one more night, when my research leads me to a Byzantine church in a neighboring town.
I read that it was not only built in 327 CE but also in continuous use until 1924, when Greece and Turkey conducted a population exchange. In this exchange, the 500 Greek residents of Sille were swapped with Turks living in Greece. It is unusual for a church that predates the Ottomans not to have been converted into a mosque, and I'm thrilled to think we may discover frescoes or mosaics typical of Byzantine churches. Excited as I am, I squeal when I learn that Empress Helena built the church on her way back from Jerusalem.
Helena was Constantine the Great’s mother and possibly the one who led him to Christ (if he did indeed become a Christian). She embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem after the Edict of Milan in 313 CE made Christianity legal in the empire. Looking for holy relics and sacred sites, she built churches in places like Jesus' birthplace (the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem), where the cross was found (the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem), and the site of the burning bush (Mt. Horeb in Sinai), among others. Her biggest quest was finding the cross, which she proved by holding a piece above a dead man to see if he came to life (he did).
By Helena’s time, the Roman Empire had already constructed 250,000 miles of road stretching from Britain to Persia, 50,000 miles of which were paved. The Romans even had a map illustrating 500 cities, geographical formations, distances, and suggested itineraries. If Helena traveled by land, she would have returned to Constantinople via the Roman Road through Anatolia, and this route took her right through Konya, a major city on the road. As a believer on a pilgrimage to find and commemorate sacred sites, she would have sought out the Christian community and asked them for stories, for sure. They would have told her about the 1st-century woman named Thecla, who had become highly venerated by Helena's time and was considered a prototype for the emerging female monastic communities of virgins.
According to the 2nd-century Acts of Paul and Thecla, when Paul came to Iconium on his first missionary journey, he preached for days without stopping. The young, wealthy Thecla, betrothed to a prominent Roman citizen, sat in her window and listened to Paul preach, entranced for three days straight (an entirely plausible thing for a wealthy family to have a two-story villa in the center of town, where Paul would have chosen to preach). Both her mother and fiancé concluded she had converted, would refuse to marry, and thereby break Roman law, and turned her and Paul in to the governor, who sentenced her to death when she refused to recant. As most saint stories go, she survived several different attempts to end her life, after which she escaped to find Paul, who was hiding with other believers in caves outside of town. (Thecla’s story continues and is fascinating. It includes another miraculous escape in Antioch where she baptized herself, a return to Iconium to try and convert her mother, and leading a monastic community in southern Turkey. Our Cappadocian church mothers will intersect with her, but that’s a story for another time.)
Back to Helena and the church in Sille.
Sille is a small weekend town, rising up the hill from the river, lined with cafes serving Turkish Kahve in sand and elaborate breakfast spreads. One place advertises 32 small plates for $10 per person. We order a pistachio Turkish coffee and a pineapple smoothie that comes with a suspicious lime green layer. Couples meander along the lane by the river, the covered girls in chic tennis shoes and trendy sunglasses. We are the only foreigners, but no one is as riled by us as they might have been 25 years ago. It’s a relief to travel even to small-town Turkey in 2025.
On the other side of the river, unbeknownst to us when we set out to find Helena’s church, are rock caves just like the more famous ones in Cappadocia (3 hours away by car). That is to say, a few miles outside Iconium (Konya) are caves where people lived, and where we know Christians used to hide, worship, and establish monastic communities. Suddenly, I know two things: there is most certainly a rock church nearby, and Helena built a church here because of Thecla. We are in the cave community where Thecla fled and found Paul hiding in caves with other believers!
At the edge of town, on top of a hill, sits the restored church-museum: Aya Elena Kilisesi (aka Saint Helena Church). I take a moment to appreciate the oldest church building I’ve ever seen. I have no idea what state it was in when Sultan Mahmud II issued an imperial order to restore it in 1833. Were there mosaics on the floor? Byzantine frescoes depicting the patroness, Helena? They are now gone, probably among the haphazard stacks in the Konya museum. The icons in the iconostasis have been replaced with high-resolution photographs, and the paintings on the ceiling date back to just the 19th century. I scour the building, but there are no signs of either Helena or Thecla. Not one.
But I’m desperate. I want so badly to find some sort of fingerprint of their presence. The small Sille museum lists a few Greek churches by name, and Google Maps pins them in the center of town: both of little help. A large new retaining wall rises from the river, blocking the view of some of the caves, so I send Chris scaling up the side to see if they've covered up one of the churches; no luck. We decide to drive up the road past Saint Helena’s, past an enormous pile of hay bales with an old couch in front, perched on a ledge, with a few teen girls sitting, taking in the panoramic view. We round another hairpin turn and see a few caves, pull off, and immediately see the classic columns carved into the rock facade. At first, we think we are alone and wander through the rock debris and scattered trash to inspect the altar and alcoves, imagining the bright blue-painted icons of other cave churches we’ve seen. Sadly, nothing remains here.
When we emerge, there is a young couple as surprised to see us as we are to see them. The girl speaks first, and we learn they are college students from Konya, studying city planning and tasked with mapping out Sille. She unrolls the large scroll they’re working on, and we see crosshairs denote the church. There is one other such mark on the map, and we ask how to get there. She isn’t sure, nor is he. They converse in Turkish, and we just let them go on, thinking we only speak English. They are sweet and want to help us find it, and the next thing we know, they're in the back seat of the car, directing us right back to the retaining wall Chris just scaled. The wall throws her off, and she scrolls back through hundreds of photos on her phone from her last five visits to Sille. In the end, she concludes it must be over the hill, now barricaded not to protect these ancient ruins, but for a new building project.
But the wall is the metaphor for the day, for both Helena and Thecla are barred from view. No one would know a bold young woman defied Roman marital law and all of the expectations of an aristocrat to follow Paul not just to these caves, but into plenty more persecution. And no one would know that 300 years later her legend would inspire an Empress to honor her with a church, not in the urban center of Iconium, but in the Christian community hiding in the caves of Sille.
Share this post