Tyana

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For the genus of nolid moths, see Tyana (moth).

Tyana (or Tyanna) was an ancient city of Anatolia, in modern south-central Turkey. It was the capital of a Hittite kingdom in the 2d millennium B.C., and had a long history as a Greek city state and later a Christian community. Tyana was a queen in Anatolia.

Though now ruined, it is still officially the center of a Roman Catholic titular archbishopric in the former Roman province of Cappadocia Prima.

[edit] History

Tyana is probably the city referred to in Hittite archives as Tuwanuwa. In Greek legend the city was first called Thoana, because Thoas, a Thracian king, was its founder (Arrian, Periplus Ponti Euxini, vi); it was in Cappadocia, at the foot of Taurus Mountains and near the Cilician Gates (Strabo, XII, 537; XIII, 587).

Xenophon mentions it in his book Anabasis, under the name of Dana, as a large and prosperous city. The surrounding plain was known after it as Tyanitis.

It was in a strategic position on the road to Syria via the Cilician Gates. It is the reputed birthplace of the celebrated philosopher (and reputed magician) Apollonius of Tyana in the first century.

Under Roman Emperor Caracalla the city became Antoniana colonia Tyana. After having sided with Queen Zenobia of Palmyra it was captured by Aurelian in 272, who would not allow his soldiers to sack it, allegedly because Apollonius appeared to him, pleading for its safety.

In 371, Emperor Valens created a second province of Cappadocia, "Cappadocia Secunda", of which Tyana became the metropolis.

The ruins of Tyana are at modern Kemerhisar, three miles south of Niğde (in the former Ottoman province of Konya); there are remains of a Roman aqueduct and of cave cemeteries and sepulchral grottoes.

[edit] Ecclesiastical history

As noted, in 371 Emperor Valens created the province of Cappadocia Secunda, of which Tyana became the metropolis. This aroused a violent controversy between Anthimus, Bishop of Tyana, and St.Basil of Caesarea, each of whom wished to have as many suffragan sees as possible. About 640 Tyana had three, and it was the same in the tenth century (Heinrich Gelzer, "Ungedruckte ... Texte der Notitiae episcopatum", 538, 554).

Le Quien (Oriens christianus, I, 395-402) mentions 28 bishops of Tyana, among whom were:

Eutychius, at Nice in 325
Anthimus, the rival of St. Basil
Aetherius, at Constantinople in 381
Theodore, the friend of St. John Chrysostom
Eutherius, the partisan of Nestorius, deposed and exiled in 431
Cyriacus, a Severian Monophysite.

In May, 1359, Tyana still had a metropolitan (Mikelosich and Müller, "Acta patriarchatus Constantinopolitani", I, 505); in 1360 the metropolitan of Caesarea secured the administration of it (op. cit., 537). Thenceforth the see was titular.