Lazkiye

Lazkiye is Laodicea on the Lycus, founded by the Seleucid king Antiochus II between 261 and 253 BC and named for his wife Laodice, a rich city of Phrygia and one of the seven churches of the Book of Revelation. The Byzantines took it back from the Seljuks in 1119 and fortified it, but the Seljuks sacked it in 1161. War, earthquakes and failing water channels drove the people from the ruins from the 11th century toward the gardens and springs a few kilometres south, where the Turks called the new town Ladik.

Ladik was ruled by the İnançoğulları beys and by the Germiyanids. When Ibn Battuta passed through in the 1330s he found seven Friday mosques, splendid gardens, and Greeks paying the poll tax levied on non-Muslims, many of them women artisans, and he had to ride under escort across a plain infested by Germiyan brigands. Bayezid I took the town in 1391, and the Ottomans held it for good from 1429. Later Evliya Çelebi counted 44 quarters and 57 mosques. The earthquakes of 1702–03 killed 12,000 people and drove the town uphill.