Alaşehir

Alaşehir is the ancient Philadelphia, founded by the kings of Pergamon on the southern slope of the broad Gediz plain, where silt washed down from the mountains has made it a wine and raisin country since antiquity. It was one of the seven churches of Asia in the Book of Revelation, and around 600 a domed basilica of St John rose here. In the 13th and 14th centuries it was a prosperous place, with a Genoese trading colony and a name for leather goods and red-dyed silk; the Turkish name Alaşehir, 'multicoloured town', is already recorded in Ibn Bibi.

By the 14th century Philadelphia stood alone among the Aydin and Saruhan emirates, loyal in name to the Byzantine emperor, and was made the metropolis of Lydia by the patriarch of Constantinople. It outlasted every other Greek city in Asia Minor until Bayezid I took it in 1390, raising a mosque, still called after him, across from the church of St John. In 1402 Timur captured it and built a wall from the bodies of his prisoners; afterwards it passed to the rebel Junayd and finally to Murad II.