Religious Transitions at Ancient Sites: Aphrodisias

This case study explores the religious transformation of Aphrodisias, a Greco-Roman city in Caria renowned for its devotion to the goddess Aphrodite. During the fourth to seventh centuries CE, the city experienced a shift from pagan religious traditions to Christian dominance. But unlike other provincial centers, Aphrodisias did not abandon its past quietly. Strong civic pride in its classical heritage, resistance among elite families, and architectural repurposing all reflect a contested and uneven process. The site offers rare insight into how deeply rooted identities grappled with imperial Christianization in real time, through negotiation, tension, and symbolic transformation.

Context

Aphrodisias was a provincial city with an unusually prestigious religious identity. Named after its patron goddess Aphrodite, it was home to a large sanctuary complex and a distinguished sculptural school that spread its artistic influence across the empire. Its elite class actively cultivated ties with Roman emperors, securing privileges and promoting its temple as a regional religious center. Inscriptions from the third century CE emphasize Aphrodisias’ piety and loyalty to traditional cults, and there is little sign that Christian influence had yet taken root during this period.

As Christianity became increasingly favored by imperial authorities in the fourth century, Aphrodisias emerged as a conservative outlier. While other cities saw temples closed or defunded by the state, Aphrodisias continued to support its local cults longer than many comparable urban centers. The city’s social fabric was tightly bound to its religious institutions, and Christianization posed a direct threat to civic identity as well as elite status. This created friction between the old order and the new, particularly as imperial laws, like Theodosius I’s ban on pagan sacrifice, began to take effect.

The eventual renaming of the city to Stauropolis, or “City of the Cross,” around the early sixth century, was no mere administrative update. It was a symbolic reassertion of Christian hegemony in a city that had once defined itself by its allegiance to the pagan divine. The change came late compared to other cities and likely reflected ongoing ideological division within the community.

Key Changes

The Temple of Aphrodite stood at the center of this transformation. Far from being destroyed outright, it was eventually converted into a Christian basilica in the late fifth century. But the decision to reuse, rather than demolish, was likely both practical and political. The temple’s monumental presence made it impossible to ignore, and its conversion allowed Christian authorities to symbolically displace Aphrodite’s cult with christianity. Nonetheless, this act was highly charged, an effort to overwrite the city’s most sacred space with a new religious narrative.

Archaeological evidence points to deliberate tensions in this process. Numerous pagan inscriptions were defaced, particularly those invoking traditional gods or highlighting civic honors tied to pagan offices. Some were chiseled out while leaving other parts of the text intact, a selective destruction that suggests targeted ideological opposition. Christian symbols began appearing on reused architectural fragments, inserted into formerly neutral or pagan contexts.

The city’s sculpture workshops continued to function into the Christian period, but their themes changed. Imperial portraits and mythological figures gave way to biblical subjects and saints. However, stylistic continuities persisted. The tension between preservation and erasure is evident across the city’s built environment. Sacred space was redefined, but never entirely divorced from its earlier meaning.

Consequences

The religious transformation of Aphrodisias had far-reaching consequences for its civic identity. While churches replaced temples as centers of communal life, they did not erase the collective memory of the classical past. Public rituals changed, as did economic patterns tied to festivals and votive offerings. However, the persistence of certain cultic symbols, sometimes faintly preserved, sometimes reused, reveals that not all inhabitants accepted or internalized the transition at the same pace.

For the population, particularly the elite class that had long served as patrons of traditional religion, the shift was existential. The decline of pagan institutions meant a decline in their public roles. Bishops and church officials replaced local priests as civic leaders, and with them came a new moral order and legal influence. Resistance was not necessarily violent but could take the form of slow compliance, muted defiance, or cultural inertia.

At the same time, Christian institutions brought new forms of cohesion. Liturgical calendars, charitable endowments, and ecclesiastical courts provided structure in a period of political instability. By the seventh century, Christian Aphrodisias had become fully integrated into the Byzantine religious world.

Interpretation

Aphrodisias reveals that Christianization in the ancient world was not always a clean break. In cities where pagan identity was deeply embedded in public life, the transition involved compromise, contestation, and, at times, (symbolic) violence. The conversion of the Temple of Aphrodite into a church was a declaration that the city’s old gods were no longer sovereign, even if their presence still lingered in the stones.

What makes Aphrodisias unique is not just the richness of its archaeological record but the clarity with which it documents cultural resistance. The city did not passively receive Christianity. It negotiated it, resisted it, and slowly absorbed it through a process that redefined both sacred space and civic identity. The renaming of the city, the selective defacement of inscriptions, and the visual rewriting of public monuments all point to a community under a siege of transformation, not submission.