What happened to the seven churches of Revelation is not one story but seven. Not one of them disappeared in the years after John wrote; every congregation outlived the emperor who exiled him, and several kept going for more than a thousand years. What finally closed them was earthquake, silt and conquest, each arriving at a different city in a different century. All seven places are still there in western Turkey today — three of them beneath living towns, four of them excavated ruins — and at every one of them something built by Christians still stands.
What Happened to the Seven Churches in Revelation After the Letters?
The letters were carried around the province of Asia in about AD 95, to the seven congregations named in Revelation 1:11. The first thing to say about what happened next is that these churches grew for centuries.
Sixty years after its letter, Smyrna gave the Church its most famous early martyr in the old bishop Polycarp, burned in his own city's stadium. In 431 the whole Christian world came to Ephesus for the council that met in the Church of Mary. Around 363 a synod of roughly thirty clergy from across Asia Minor sat in Laodicea itself — the Council of Laodicea, whose canons are still quoted — which means the city Christ called lukewarm was hosting church legislation nearly three hundred years after being told to buy gold tried in the fire. Whatever the warnings meant, they did not mean immediate extinction; several of these communities were at their largest in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries.
Seven Churches in Revelation Church History, City by City
Ephesus was closed slowly by its own harbor. Silt filled the channel, the sea drew back, the trade went elsewhere, and the population drifted uphill to Ayasuluk, where the bishopric settled beside the Basilica of Saint John over the apostle's tomb. The lampstand, as we put it in our article on the church that left its first love, was not so much extinguished as moved half an hour up the road, to what is now Selçuk.
Smyrna is the exception to almost everything. It has never been abandoned, never buried, never renamed out of recognition: it is İzmir, Turkey's third city, and its ancient agora is excavated in the middle of the modern street grid, with a church bearing Polycarp's name a short walk away.
Pergamon kept its Christians through the Byzantine centuries, and their most striking inheritance is the vast brick hall of the Red Basilica in the lower town, a temple of the Egyptian gods that the Christians took over and turned into a church — the building that most surprises our guests at the site of Satan's throne. The acropolis above, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, emptied as the settlement came down into the valley, where Bergama still is.
Thyatira has the least to show of the seven, and for the happiest reason: modern Akhisar was built straight over it. What is excavated is one plot in the town center, a Byzantine basilica and a stretch of colonnaded street fenced in among the shops.
Sardis faded before it fell. By 1369 its metropolitan titles had passed to Philadelphia down the road, and in 1402 the city was taken and destroyed by Timur during the campaign that ended at Ankara. It never recovered; by the eighteenth century two hamlets stood where the Lydian capital had been. The ruins beside the village of Sart — synagogue, gymnasium, and the little church tucked against the Temple of Artemis — are the seven's most eloquent witness to a name that outlives its life.
Philadelphia was the last of them to go, and it went stubbornly. It held out as an independent Christian town until 1390, long after everything around it had changed hands, and the brick pillars of its basilica are still upright in the middle of Alaşehir, broken at the top, roofless for a thousand years, standing much as the letter promised.
Laodicea ended more abruptly. After centuries of earthquakes and rebuilding it was abandoned for good following the severe quake in the reign of Phocas, between 602 and 610, and lay empty until modern excavation. The great church uncovered there now shelters under a steel roof, floors and font intact — the lukewarm church given its building back fourteen centuries after the congregation walked away.
Do the 7 Churches in Revelation Still Exist?
It depends which of three things is being asked, and the answers differ.
The cities mostly exist. İzmir, Bergama, Akhisar, Alaşehir and Selçuk are ordinary Turkish towns going about their business; only Sardis shrank to a village, and only Laodicea and the lower city of Ephesus were abandoned outright.
The buildings exist in part. Every one of the seven sites has Christian remains a visitor can stand in: a basilica, a church floor, a font, a row of pillars.
The congregations do not continue. The Christian presence here thinned over the Ottoman centuries and ended for most of the seven towns with the exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece in 1923. The honest answer, then, is that the places and the stones still exist; the original churches do not. What it is like to visit them as a Christian today, in a country with a Muslim majority, is the subject of our post Are the Seven Churches of Revelation in a Muslim Country?
What Are the Seven Churches of Revelation Called Today?
Ephesus is Selçuk, Smyrna is İzmir, Pergamon is Bergama, Thyatira is Akhisar, Sardis is Sart, Philadelphia is Alaşehir, and Laodicea lies just outside Denizli. All seven sit within a few hours of one another on the loop of old Roman road our map of the seven churches traces, so they can still be seen in the order the courier rode them — the circuit our Seven Churches of Revelation tour follows, and the route we set out in our guide to visiting all seven. More posts like this one are on our blog.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happened to the seven churches of Revelation? All seven survived for centuries after the letters. Ephesus was closed by silt, Sardis destroyed by Timur in 1402, Laodicea abandoned after an earthquake in the early seventh century, and Philadelphia held out until 1390. Smyrna, Thyatira and Pergamon were absorbed into towns that are still inhabited.
Do the seven churches of Revelation exist today? The seven sites all exist and can be visited, and each has surviving Christian remains. The original congregations do not continue; the last Orthodox communities in most of these towns left in the population exchange of 1923.
Which of the seven churches in Revelation still exist as cities? Smyrna, Pergamon, Thyatira and Philadelphia are living towns today — İzmir, Bergama, Akhisar and Alaşehir — and so is Selçuk, next to Ephesus. Only the ancient lower city of Ephesus and the site of Laodicea were abandoned outright; Sardis shrank to a village beside its ruins.
When were the seven churches of Revelation established? The New Testament records the Ephesian church being planted during Paul's long stay in the city in the fifties, as our article on Paul in Asia Minor describes. The others are given no foundation dates, but all seven were settled enough by about AD 95 to be addressed as known communities.
Why were these seven churches chosen? They stood on one circular road through the province, in the order a messenger would ride it, and seven carried the sense of completeness throughout the book. Other churches existed nearby — Colossae, Hierapolis and Troas among them — and were not addressed.