Antioch's Hatay airport is closed, biblically flooded. Instead we fly in to macho, meat-loving Adana, Turkey's very own Texas, over vast brown and green fields of cotton and tobacco. This detour affords us an overnight stay in Tarsus, birthplace of Saint Paul, and the site of Anthony and Cleopatra's first frolickings. Tarsus has been bypassed by a motorway more lately, so what was an important, thriving city 2,000 years ago is now a charming provincial backwater.
No visit here is complete without a muttered blessing over a swig of (in truth, rather stale-tasting) water from St Paul's Well, which is in the warren of streets that comprises Old Tarsus. Here, pleasingly decrepit Jewish and Armenian homes from the past few centuries moulder atmospherically away. You might glimpse an orange tree growing through a ruined roof, some rubbled Corinthian pillars and pediments, or a dramatically cracked architrave of prettily dressed stone with Arabic inscriptions.
Bedesten is a cool, airy late-sixteenth-century version of a shopping mall, where you bargain for knick-knacks and sip hot kaynar, a sweet cinnamon-and-spice drink garnished with crushed walnuts. The people here are lovely: gentle and welcoming, and delighted to see a rare foreign visitor. And with their dark dramatic eyes, the girls look just like young Cleopatras.
The other drink you might be offered is thick purple salgam, which is juice of carrot-pickle water flavoured with half-fermented turnips. It's a Tarsus speciality, taken either plain or spicy – or not at all if you're me. Locals drink salgam with a delicious meat-and-two-meat lunch at Antik Anadolu Sofrasi, an airy restaurant next to the antik yol, a pre-Roman road that was rediscovered by council workmen in 1993. The road is an engineering masterpiece along which would have passed the Emperor Hadrian, Cicero, Greek historian Strabo, and the Tony and Cleo show – as well as millions of plebs like us.
It would have taken Saint Paul and his donkey the best part of a fortnight to get from here to Antioch. We drive it in three gentle hours, following signs for Halep – Aleppo – along good empty roads. En route we listen to high-cholesterol Arabesque music on a station calling itself Turkey's Artery. Having cut the throat of shame, the male and female singers spew out their sweating, broken, defiant hearts.
To our right, the port of Iskenderun is where the whale is said to have spewed out the prophet Jonah, and is also where Indiana Jones got off the train to seek the Holy Grail. Our search for Antioch's town centre leads through uninspiring suburbs before revealing the stunning, plunging valley where ancient Antioch, today's Antakya, glints and winks in sapphire-bright March sunlight.
Old Antioch, capital of the ancient kingdom of Hatay, is on the east bank of the Orontes river, which flows thickly and brownly through the city, having risen near Baalbek in Lebanon. The Orontes (called Asi by the Turks) reminds us how close we are to the lands of Araby. The border with Syria is barely 10km from here, and indeed Antakya offers many of the exotic Levantine pleasures of say, Aleppo, but in the safer, soulful environment of a bustling old Turkish town.
Antioch on the Orontes (as it was called, to differentiate it from other, lesser Antiochs) is smaller now than it was in antiquity. Founded in the fourth century BC, it grew to be, along with Rome, Constantinople and Alexandria, one of the most important cities of the Roman Empire. From its peak population of nearly half a million in those heady days of empire, the city is now home to about 200,000 people.
After the more conservative Tarsus, Antioch would have seemed to Saint Paul a place of abundant water, beauty, life and learning. Following his conversion, Paul preached his sermons and saved his first souls here; Saint Peter founded a church here; and it was in Antioch that the word "Cristianos" was first used to describe this band of believers.
The cave church of St Peter's is a 10-minute drive, then a bit of a climb above town. It a movingly simple grotto, said to originally have been dug by Peter himself out of the soft volcanic rock of Mount Starius: its facade was constructed by Crusaders in 1100, and rebuilt in the 19th century. As the sun starts to drop, the pink-tinged views from the church are of minarets in silhouette shrouded by the fragrant smoke of a thousand braziers as fires are lit for supper.
I've been warned to expect delicious food – Turkish with an Arabic accent – so first work up an appetite with a brisk hike from St Peter's to Demir Kapi, the Iron Gate. Guided by a couple of chattery young Kurdish shepherds called Valad and Mehmet Ali, we scramble along a lonely narrow path above a straggly hamlet. Way below, with whistles, whoops and a flag, our shepherds' uncle is training his pet pigeons to circle, swoop and bank in unison in the late light.
It is said that the Emperor Justinian (who also built Hagia Sophia in Istanbul) built Demir Kapi to reinforce the many kilometres of wall protecting Antioch's vulnerable back from invaders. It's more likely that he just improved an existing fortification by building a massive block barrage to fill in the valley between the mountains Starius and Cassius.
Demir Kapi is huge, awe-inspiring and powerful, even for our young guides, who see it every day. They explain that their lives have changed recently – like most of their neighbours, their families are sheltering refugees from Syria.
To eat in Antioch is to experience both deep joy and an unbroken link with the past. We're planning to spend the following day immersing ourselves in the markets that supply Antakya with its ingredients, but that night we just eat. At Leban restaurant (Gazipasa Caddesi 5, next to the Orthodox church) we drink good Turkish wines and feast on flatbreads spread with crumbled, peppered çokelek cheese, and salads of spicy wild mountain herbs; thick lactic-tangy virgin yoghurt is puddled with new olive oil and strewn with torn mint; kebabs are speckled with green pistachio and dusty/lemony sumac; aubergine and tahini paste tastes of fire, smoke and earth … these are foods that Saint Paul would have feasted upon, and they still taste blessed.
Hatay is famous for künefe – a sweetmeat made of white cheese sandwiched within shredded wheat-like filaments that's then butter-griddled and flipped. It is served in a pool of thin sugar syrup and (if you like) sprinkled with ground green pistachios. A good place to try it is Çinaralti, in the courtyard of the Ahmediye Camii mosque.
After a slightly unwise late-night künefe crawl, sleep comes blank and deep, leaving us ready for a day of trade. Once a Silk Road terminus, and always a forum of enthusiastic exchange, Antioch has markets that easily rival the fabled bazaars of Aleppo. Uzun Çarsi means "Long Bazaar", and is a connected warren of streets, alleys, ateliers, depots, shops, stalls and places of worship. Antioch's god is praised in buildings ranging from Protestant, Greek, Maronite, Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches to synagogues and Shia, Sunni and Alevi mosques and shrines. These sit comfortably and naturally next to each other, just as their congregations have lived, worked and loved together for the past two thousand years.
Uzun Çarsi's streets skirt around church walls, run right through the bowered courtyards and orange trees of medieval mosques, and fall in white tunnels under stone and wood minarets built a thousand years ago in the names of beauty and glory.
An itinerant corset seller leaves his barrow to beckon me into the steamy subterranean baths: in the hot room is the tomb of a venerated 16th-century water-carrier.
Above ground, we are introduced to the boilerman who keeps the hammam's fires stoked. Buried in the sawdust ashes are several elderly amphorae in which broad beans are slowly cooking. These we eat in the adjacent alley at Çayirci Bakla Humus (Meydan Civari, haci Molla Ishani 6), where the still-warm beans are being pounded with wooden pestles to a dense paste with garlic, sesame paste, olive oil and lemon juice. The equivalent of £1.10 also buys piles of hot chewy bread and many-hued shredded pickles. This hummus is jokingly called beton – concrete – as it fills you up so. This is Abrahamic food, enjoyed in Antakya equally by all peoples of the book.
Uzun Çarsi is alive with tiny dairies, above which artisan cheesemakers work in laddered, low-ceilinged attics. There are mattress-stuffers and saddlemakers, cobblers wearing skullcaps and pale, manicured besuited jewellers. Over tulip-shaped glasses of tannic tea we bargain for Antioch's famous laurel-oil soaps and for knives designed to slice tomatoes. Also on sale are rude catapults, kitsch slippers and walnut jam.
At lunchtime locals might take parsley, onion, peppers and tomato to one of the many butchers, who for a few pennies minces them with his scimitar and mixes them with fatty lamb. This mixture is spread into a copper tin which the baker opposite will slide into his hive-shaped wood-fired oven. The remedy for so rich a lunch on a concrete-lined stomach is more künefe, and a very long sit-down.
A day or two exploring Uzun Çarsi and the jumbled cobbled streets that surround it is a lesson in history and harmony. We eat lentil pottages, messes of beans and salads of herbs, and witness myriad influences from the Greeks, Persians, Arabs and Turks who sought success and peace here. I never hear a harsh word, a raised voice or even a parped horn.
There's much to see within striking distance of Antakya, and the spring air is clear and sunny, so we carry on following in the footsteps of Alexander and Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra (who were married here), Peter and Paul, and sundry other saints, sinners, movers and shakers of the ancient world.
Harbiye is 7km south of Antakya. The Romans called the place Daphne and believed it was here that a horny Apollo pursued the nymph Daphne, who was turned into a laurel tree to escape him, her wreathed leaves later crowning victors. Today it is a deep wooded valley of sparkling cool waterfalls and bay trees, where tea is taken and shaded picnics are spread – a paradise in the sledgehammer heat of summer.
The road to Samandag mountain takes us coastwards, over foothills where wind turbines turn in lazy harmony. At the village of Senköy we climb towards St Simeon's Monastery. It was here, in the sixth century, that Saint Simeon Stylites the younger sat in devotion atop his stone column for (some say) 68 years. I wonder briefly if he was the inspiration for The Stylistics' I'm Stone in Love with You. Whatever, Saint Simeon chose a heart-thumping, cloud-high view to gaze upon, and though it lies in ruins, his monastery today remains a place of deep peace.
Whether it is the world-defining biblical events that have taken place here, or 2,000 years of the rhythms of invasion, conversion and assimilation, there remains in Antioch and Tarsus a happy atmosphere that is relaxed, liberal and at peace with itself. You meet a people who are ethnically mixed, and happy to mix with you. We eat, drink and shop with relish and then leave, praying to return.
