ANTIOCHIA of PISIDIA. - A city of Asia Minor, founded by Seleucus I (312–280 B.C.) with colonists from Magnesia, on a site famous for the sanctuary of the Phrygian god Men. It stood at an elevation of 1,200 meters above sea level, on a height on the southern slope of the mountains of Phrygia Paroreia, on the border of Pisidia (Strabo, XII, 8, 14). Declared a free city by the Romans, it was assigned to Pisidia (Pliny, Hist. Nat., V, 24). From Augustus, perhaps as early as 30–27 B.C., it was constituted an imperial colony (Colonia Caesarea A.); it then became the capital of Pisidia.
W. Ramsay discovered there, besides a paleochristian basilica with a mosaic pavement, in 1912 an inscription in honor of P. S. Quirinus (v.), and in 1914 the Latin text inscribed on stone (10 slabs) of the *Res gestae divi Augusti* (completed by excavations of the University of Michigan in 1924), corresponding to the text of the monument at Ancyra in Galatia and at Apollonia in Pisidia. Near the ruins of A. (arcades of a Roman aqueduct that brought water to the city from the Sultan Dagh) now stands the Turkish village of Yalovaç, in the district of Konia or Iconium (v.), about 120 km to the east.
A. flourished on the great trade route that ran from Ephesus through Asia Minor to the East, and had attracted many Jews, to whom the Seleucids had already granted civil rights (Flavius Josephus, *Ant. Iud.*, XII, 3, 4). In their synagogue, between 45 and 47 A.D., St. Paul announced, in a lengthy discourse, Jesus as Messiah and Son of God, winning many converts (Acts 13, 14–52). Paul, with Barnabas (on his first missionary journey), had come from Perge, about 168 km distant from A.
Hindered by Jewish hostility from preaching the following Sabbath, Paul continued, “turning to the Gentiles,” his apostolate in A. (for a year, according to J. Holzmier), amid many dangers and hardships, until the machinations of the Jews expelled him and his companion. They departed for Iconium “shaking the dust from their feet against them,” but on their return they passed again through A., reviving and organizing the community hierarchically (Acts 14, 20–23). At the end of his life, Paul (II Tim. 3, 11) recalls the persecutions he suffered there; doubtless among these are to be reckoned some of the five scourgings and three beatings mentioned in II Cor. 6, 5; 11, 23–24.
As a see founded by the Apostle, A. has bishops known from the 3rd century. Among the earliest, M. Le Quien mentions Eudoxius, Optatus, Antimus. At the Council of Nicaea (325), Antonius of A. appears among the bishops of the province of Isauria, while at the head of the 14 bishops of Pisidia is that of Iconium, Eulalius. Already before 381, however, A. is the seat of the metropolitan of Pisidia: at the Council of Constantinople (381), Optimus signs as head of the 15 representatives of the dioceses of Pisidia (Mansi, II, p. 695; III, p. 570). In subsequent councils, up to the 7th century, various names of metropolitans of A. of Pisidia appear. The city was then overwhelmed by the Islamic invasion. Taken in 1097 by the crusaders of Bohemond of Taranto, the Latin see was restored there; since the Middle Ages it has been an archiepiscopal titular see. The Greek-Orthodox metropolitan of Pisidia now resides at Isparta.