The Underwater Basilica of Nicaea
Archaeology in the Birthplace of Christian Theology
By Mark Fairchild
InterVarsity, 182 pages, $41.99
Despite what those Indiana Jones movies suggest, ancient archeological sites rarely turn up discoveries that make heart-pounding headlines. But the 2014 sighting of a small, underwater basilica just a hundred feet from the ancient walls of Nicaea (modern Iznik), a place famous in church lore, posed a series of intriguing questions.
What kind of building was it? How did it end up submerged in the waters of Lake Iznik? Could it be the place where more than 300 bishops gathered 1,700 years ago to draft a statement of faith used week by week by billions of Christians today?
Mark Fairchild, a longtime professor of Bible at Huntington University who has devoted much of his career to archaeological research on ancient and Byzantine sites in Anatolia, tackles these questions in The Underwater Basilica of Nicaea, a thorough but accessible introduction to this unique discovery.
Fairchild has worked on the site for several years with Uludağ University’s Mustafa Şahin, the project’s overseer, and he describes the way in which researchers documented the ruins and analyzed artifacts discovered there, with the help of detailed maps and diagrams, as well as numerous color photographs.
He also carefully explicates related historical developments, including the spread of Christianity in the region in the apostolic age, persecution, and the resulting veneration of martyrs, the earliest church buildings, and the fourth-century Christological debate that led Constantine I to summon bishops from throughout his empire to debate whether the Son of God was “of the same being with the Father.”
The masonry building foundation discovered in 2014 can be reliably dated to the late fourth century, and was clearly a church, with an East-West orientation. The presence of earlier Christian burials inside and around the foundations suggests that a smaller, wooden church probably stood here earlier.
Şahin’s guess is that a late second-century Temple of Apollo, described in one seventh-century Byzantine chronicle as being built outside Nicaea’s walls, is the core of the structure. Fairchild thinks it more likely that the building developed from a small early fourth-century shrine chapel, which housed the relics of Neophytos, a young man who was martyred during the persecution of Diocletian in 303 and later honored as Nicaea’s patron. His martyrion became the basilica’s diaconicon, or sacristy, and parts of his sarcophagus survive in a local museum.
Fairchild thinks the church ended up underwater after a series of earthquakes in 1063-65, part of a series that have troubled the city, which is located at the convergence of several active fault lines. Nicaea has always been a lakeshore city, and water levels in the lake and the ground levels near it have risen and fallen over the centuries.
His guess is that the ground around the church gradually subsided, noting that a Byzantine retaining wall on the structure’s lake side was likely designed to keep the waters at bay. The 11th-century earthquakes caused the building to collapse and the ground around it to sink even further. Local inhabitants, he surmises, carried off most of the building materials to reconstruct other parts of their devastated city. The site was soon abandoned, and then forgotten, especially after the city fell into Turkish hands and became majority Muslim.
But did the famed Council of Nicaea meet there? The underwater basilica has a better claim to this honor than any of the city’s 16 other surviving Byzantine churches, all of which were built long after the council’s work was complete. Christianity had been legal in the empire for less than a decade when the council met, so a humble building, even in a city recently favored with an imperial palace, would not have been unexpected.
The great church historian Eusebius’ account even remembered that it was a miracle that the council fathers—318 of them plus their attendants—were able to fit inside the “house of prayer” where some sessions were held (others were in the imperial palace, which archaeologists can’t pinpoint either). Fairchild estimates it would be a tight squeeze for just 300 people—11 square feet per person at most, about half of what modern architects recommend for new church construction.
Striking to me was how quiet an echo such a famous site leaves in the literary record, which makes it harder to verify whether the site on the lake floor is the same one mentioned by some early medieval pilgrims. Fairchild seems to have tracked down every scrap of evidence: Eusebius’ account, an eighth-century panegyric, a Byzantine chronicler’s record of the devastating earthquake, even a travelogue by Willibald, a British monk who visited the church in the 720s. Perhaps the most important clues about this fascinating site’s secrets don’t lie 10 feet beneath the lake but on the dusty shelves of a monastery library.
The Rev. Mark Michael is editor-in-chief of The Living Church. An Episcopal priest, he has reported widely on global Anglicanism, and also writes about church history, liturgy, and pastoral ministry.
