Mokisos
Mokisos (also Mokissos or Mokessos) was an early Byzantine city in the southwest of Cappadocia in Asia Minor , which is probably identical to Viranşehir (Turkish = ruined city) about 35 km south of modern Aksaray .
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Foundation and heyday
According to the report of the historian Prokopios ( De aedificiis V 4, 15-18), Mokisos was the name of an old, ruined fortress on a plain, which in the time of Emperor Justinian I (527-565) in a safe place in the near Bergen was rebuilt and expanded into a city. The new city was equipped with a strong wall, churches, inns and public baths and raised to the rank of metropolis (seat of a metropolitan ). Since Mokisos is already mentioned as a city under Anastasius I (491-518), the re-establishment could actually have taken place in his time, perhaps as a reaction to an attack by the Sabirs on Asia Minor in 515. 527/28 Mokisos appears in the Synekdemos of Hierocles , a list of cities in the Roman Empire.
The elevation to the rank of metropolis can be dated around 535. Mokisos then became the capital of the new ecclesiastical province of Cappadocia III, which was created from parts of the old (political) province of Cappadocia II, and received a number of important bishoprics, including Nazianzos (modern Nenezi) and Koloneia ( Aksaray ). On the political level, however, Cappadocia II was not divided, so that Mokisos only became an ecclesiastical administrative center. Metropolitans of Mokisos were present at the councils and synods of 536, 553 and 692 in Constantinople, in whose documents the city is also called Iustinianupolis (= city of Justinian).
Mokisos as a ruined city
After the 6th century, Mokisos only appears in lists of bishops and the De thematibus of Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (944-959), which is based in part on older, not updated sources. The city was probably destroyed by the Arabs as early as the 7th century, and the metropolitan later resided in the middle of the ruins or in a nearby monastery.
After the Turkish conquest of Asia Minor in 1071, many bishops fled to Constantinople , where the presence of a Metropolitan of Mokisos around 1170 and 1265 is attested. The last known metropolitan, Ioannikios, was appointed in 1370.
The location of Mokisos has long been controversial. The ruined city of Viranşehir near Aksaray was identified by its first European visitor William Hamilton in 1842 with Nazianzos , later by JGC Anderson with a fortress named Nora or Neroassos mentioned by Strabo , while Mokisos was searched for near today's Kırşehir . Most recently, Ernst Honigmann suggested in his edition of Hierocles in 1939 that Mokisos be equated with Viranşehir at Aksaray. However, since no inscriptions have been preserved on site, definitive evidence cannot be provided.
The ruined city with an area of about 50 hectares is located at an altitude of 1500 m in an old secondary crater of the extinct volcano Hasan Dağı , so that it is almost invisible from the plain with the exception of the strongly fortified acropolis and a church.
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Contrary to what Prokopios reports, there is no city wall, and apart from a large number of simple private houses built from uncut boulders, only churches that can be dated to the 6th and early 7th centuries are preserved in public buildings. They are made of ashlars from the local dark stone and show the typical forms of the architecture of Asia Minor of their time, such as horseshoe arches . The city built over a Roman necropolis , of which a number of tumulus tombs have been preserved between the houses. Apart from a repair to a church that cannot be dated, there is no evidence of construction activity after the early 7th century, and several churches and monasteries in the area were closed in the 10-11 Century built with stone blocks from Mokisos.
literature
- Albrecht Berger , Viranşehir (Mokisos), an early Byzantine city in Cappadocia . In: Istanbuler Mitteilungen 48, 1998, pp. 349-429
Coordinates: 38 ° 11 '8.2 " N , 34 ° 12' 25.9" E