Honaz

History

In antiquity it was known as Colossae. At 500 BC Colossae was founded by the Phrygians, and then passed into the hands of the Ancient Greeks. Herodotus and Xenophon both record the passage of Greek and Persian armies though here during the Persian Wars, at that time it was a large Phrygian city. A few ruins of the ancient city remain. Like many other ancient cities of the region, Colossae was destroyed by earthquakes, with little surviving. In the Byzantine period its name was Chonae. The city was distinguished in 858 as a Metropolitan See and possibly served as the capital of the Thracesian Theme from the 7th to the 11th century. The Byzantines also built the Church of Archangel Michael, one of the most important churches in Anatolia. The settlement decreased in importance because of Arab raids but it soon recovered and became a vital economic and religious center. In 1070 Chonae was sacked by the Seljuk Afshin, who plundered the Church of Archangel Michael and turned it into a horse stable. The residents of the city attempted to escape in a nearby cave close to a river, but the water level rose and flooded the cave, drowning all the survivors there. The Byzantine chronicler Niketas Choniates and his brother Saint Michael Choniates were natives of the town. Chonae was plundered twice by local warlords backed by the Turks, by Theodoros Mankaphas in the late 1180s and by Pseudo-Alexios in 1192, in which the Turks destroyed the mosaics, the altar, and then the rest of the Church of Archangel Michael. There is a Seljuk fortress in Honaz, and the Murat Mosque which dates back to the reign of Ottoman Sultan Murat II (imperabat 1404–1451). In the 20th century, Honaz was one of the places where the Vallahades or Valaades (ethnic Greek Muslims from southwest Greek…