Before Jesus Had Long Hair: İznik and the Early Image of Christ
- Seda
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 17 hours ago
If you drive southeast from Istanbul, past the ferry at Yalova, the road eventually drops into a basin of olive trees. This is İznik. Today it feels slow. Tractors pass through Roman city walls, surlar, that have been standing here for two thousand years. The people inside them are usually on their way to the bakery.
İznik is the modern name. The ancient name is Nicaea. For Christians across the world, the words they recite every Sunday were composed here, in this small town by the lake.
If the water is low and the light comes in at the right angle, you can make out something about fifty meters from shore. An outline just below the surface. Walls. The shape of a floor plan.
That outline is the Basilica of Saint Neophytos.
Neophytos was sixteen years old when he died. A Christian living in Nicaea, killed in 303 AD during the persecutions of Emperor Diocletian. The Roman state demanded sacrifice to the emperor as a condition of loyalty. Christians who refused could face arrest and execution. Neophytos refused.
After Christianity became legal, a basilica was built on the lakeshore at a site traditionally associated with his martyrdom. It stood for four centuries. Then an earthquake in 740 AD brought it down, and the lake swallowed what remained. For over a thousand years, nobody knew the building was there.
In 2014, government surveyors took aerial photographs of the lake and noticed the outline. Archaeologists from Bursa Uludağ University, led by Dr. Mustafa Şahin, began underwater excavations the following year. They found the basilica's walls, human burials beneath the main structure, coins, and oil lamps. There may be an even older structure underneath, possibly a pagan temple dedicated to Apollo.
The Shepherd in the Dark
The basilica was not the only thing the ground here was holding.
Just outside the ancient surlar, on a hillside overlooking the lake, the Hisardere Necropolis had served as a burial ground from the 2nd through the 5th century AD.
Families in Nicaea brought their dead here. Archaeologists had been working the site for several seasons. Then in the summer of 2025, they broke into an underground chamber tomb and found frescoes.
The southern wall had collapsed, but the rest of the chamber had survived with surprising clarity. The other walls and the ceiling were still there. Inside, a terracotta funerary bed, a kline, remained in place where the body had once lain. On the north wall behind it, someone had painted a young man.
The figure is young and clean-shaven. He wears a simple Roman tunic and carries an animal across his shoulders. More animals stand nearby, while birds and painted plants spread across the ceiling above. The archaeological reports differ on whether the animal is a goat or a sheep, but they all identify the scene as the Good Shepherd.
Most people today picture Jesus with long hair and a beard. The figure in İznik belongs to an earlier visual tradition. Here, Christ appears as a young shepherd, closer to Roman funerary art than to the familiar Byzantine image that developed centuries later. The motif comes from the Gospel of John: "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep" (10:11). Early Christians used this image in catacombs, tombs, and burial monuments across the Mediterranean. It expressed the hope that the dead remained under Christ's care.
In Anatolia, this image had very rarely been found. Dr. Gülşen Kutbay, the archaeologist working the Hisardere site, described the İznik fresco as one of the very few documented examples in the region.
The tomb dates to the 3rd century AD. Christianity still carried legal danger in the Roman world. During periods of imperial persecution, Christians could face arrest or execution. The artist who painted this fresco worked underground, by lamplight, on a wall that no living authority was expected to see.
On the west wall of the same chamber, there is another scene. A married couple, probably the people buried there, recline at a feast in the style of Roman aristocrats.
The image belongs to an older funerary tradition, where the afterlife could be imagined as a banquet. Across the room, the shepherd carries an animal on his shoulders. The two scenes share the same tomb. Whoever chose them seems to have drawn from both worlds at once.
This suggests that Christianity was already present in Nicaea before the council made the town famous. It had been growing quietly in Bithynia, along roads, households, and burial places, long before Constantine gathered the bishops there.
The Council
In 325 AD, roughly a century after the Good Shepherd went onto that wall, Emperor Constantine brought over two hundred bishops to Nicaea for the first ecumenical council of the Christian church.
Constantine chose Nicaea for practical reasons. The roads were good, his own capital at Nicomedia was nearby, and the city had imperial buildings large enough to hold the gathering. He arranged and financed the bishops' travel. The persecutions had ended barely a decade earlier, with the Edict of Milan in 313 AD. Some of the bishops who came to Nicaea still carried scars. These were men who had watched fellow believers killed for the same faith they were now being asked to formalize.
The question that brought them together had been splitting the church apart. Arius, a priest from Alexandria, taught that Christ was a created being. Powerful, yes. Sent by God, yes. But made by the Father, and therefore something less than fully divine. The bishops who opposed him argued the opposite: Christ was of the same substance as the Father. Fully God.
Constantine opened the session. According to Eusebius of Caesarea, who was present, the emperor entered in jeweled robes, told the assembly that division in the church was worse than war, and sat down to listen. The debate lasted two months, May through July, in an imperial hall in this small lakeside town.
The council rejected Arius. They chose the Greek word homoousios, meaning "of one substance," and built a creed around it. That creed, expanded at a later council in Constantinople in 381 AD, became the foundational statement of Christian belief. It is called the Nicene Creed. It was composed in İznik.
The Hisardere fresco provides new archaeological evidence that Nicaea had an established Christian community before the council. The faith did not arrive in this town in 325. It was already present, underground, painted among the dead, generations before the bishops sat down to write the Creed.
1,700 Years Later
In November 2025, Pope Leo XIV came to İznik. His first trip abroad as pope. He traveled by helicopter from Istanbul and landed near the shore of Lake İznik, where the outline of Neophytos's basilica is now visible from the bank.
He was there to mark the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I joined him. Together, they held a prayer service at the archaeological site of the submerged basilica. At the end, the leaders of the Christian churches present recited the Nicene Creed together, on the same ground where it was composed.
"We are all invited to overcome the scandal of divisions," the pope said. He spoke about what was at stake at Nicaea in 325, and what remains at stake now. "If God did not become man," he asked, "how can mortal creatures participate in His immortal life?"
The visit carried one more gesture. The Good Shepherd fresco at Hisardere had been discovered that summer but had not yet been made public. During the trip, a tile reproduction of the fresco was presented to the pope as a diplomatic gift.
The gift connected several moments in İznik's history. A 3rd-century image of Christ, painted during a period when Christians could still face execution, was reproduced in traditional Turkish ceramics and presented on the shore of the lake where the Basilica of Saint Neophytos now lies beneath the water.
The Same Lake
There is a Turkish word for the kind of depth İznik carries: katman. Layer. Stratum.
İznik is katman katman.
Without these stories, it may look like a quiet lakeside town. Cars pass through the old surlar, people walk toward the market, and the water barely moves. But the stillness is misleading. Under it are layers of hope, fear, violence, faith, death, and return.
Earthquakes broke the city. Armies crossed it. Councils gathered there. A basilica sank beneath the lake. A young shepherd stayed on a tomb wall in the hillside, painted long before the familiar long-haired image of Jesus became part of Christian art.
How much can one small town hold and still look so quiet?
Vocabulary
nekropol – necropolis, an ancient burial ground
fresk – fresco, a painting applied to wet plaster on a wall
katman – layer, stratum
kilise – church, from Greek ekklesia
sur – city wall, fortification wall (plural: surlar)
mezar – grave, tomb
şehit – martyr
inanç – faith, belief
zulüm – persecution, oppression
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q: Where is İznik and how do you get there from Istanbul?
A: İznik is in Bursa Province, about 130 kilometers southeast of Istanbul. The most common route is by ferry across the Sea of Marmara to Yalova, then roughly an hour's drive east. The town sits on the eastern shore of Lake İznik.
Q: Can you visit the Good Shepherd fresco?
A: As of 2025, the Hisardere Necropolis is an active excavation site. Public access depends on restoration progress and decisions by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The İznik Museum in town holds artifacts from the region's archaeological sites.
Q: What happened to the underwater basilica in Lake İznik?
A: The Basilica of Saint Neophytos stood on the lakeshore in the late 4th or early 5th century AD. An earthquake in 740 AD destroyed it, and the ruins sank beneath the lake. Aerial photography revealed the outline in 2014. Dropping water levels have recently made the ruins partially visible from shore.
Q: What is the Nicene Creed and why does it matter?
A: The Nicene Creed is a statement of Christian belief drafted at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD in İznik and expanded at the Council of Constantinople in 381 AD. It affirms the divinity of Jesus Christ and defines the relationship between the Father and the Son. It is the most widely shared creed across Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions.
Q: Why did Pope Leo XIV visit İznik in 2025?
A: Pope Leo XIV visited İznik in November 2025 to commemorate the 1,700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea. He joined Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I for a joint prayer service at the archaeological site of the submerged Basilica of Saint Neophytos. It was the pope's first foreign trip.
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