Castabala (city)

Castabala was an ancient city in Cilicia, in what is now southern Turkey, standing near the Ceyhan River, which the ancients called the Pyramus. It was first identified from inscriptions in March 1890 by the British explorer J. Theodore Bent, and the modern Turkish town of Kirmitli in Osmaniye Province lies a few miles to the west-southwest. The settlement belonged to the Late Hittite world, and its name is thought to be of Luwian origin. It later passed under the Achaemenid Empire, as part of the Cilician satrapy, and was taken by Alexander the Great. In Hellenistic and Roman times it was known as Hieropolis, or Hieropolis Castabala, and in the first century BC it was the capital of the client ruler Tarcondimotus. Strabo records a sanctuary of Artemis Perasia where priestesses were said to walk barefoot over hot embers unharmed. In late antiquity it was a suffragan see of Anazarbus, and it survives as a titular bishopric of the Catholic Church.