Where the Heck is Mopsuestia?

Often times reading about the Church Fathers you run into strange place names. You run into them just in the names of the people who lived back then: Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyr, Epiphanius of Salamis. Whew!

Where were these places?

The matter is complicated by the fact that many of them don't even exist any more. They are just ruins (if that).

For The Fathers Know Best, I wanted to clarify all of this, and so part of the project was looking up where all the places mentioned in the book are (or were) and then composing a set of maps–a process in which I had the very able assistance of my colleague Jon Sorensen, who is a photoshop wiz!

Below is one of the maps used in the book (click to enlarge). It's the one that covers the modern territory of Turkey or–as it's sometimes called–"the Second Holy Land." (Look at the number of important Christian sites on the map! And that's not even all of them!)

You might spend a few moments with the map, seeing how many of the sites you can identify. Two of St. Paul's surviving epistles were written to the Christian communities of cities on this map (as well as one of his lost epistles). The island where St. John saw the Revelation is here, as are the famed "seven churches of Asia." Several ecumenical councils occurred on this map, and many saints came from these different cities.

How many can you identify?