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Photo: Sinan Şahin, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
St Nicholas was bishop of an early church on this site, rebuilt in 520 AD. He died in 343 and lay for 300 years in a chapel on Gemile Island, then his relics were brought here. The church was again rebuilt in the 8th century and in the 11th added a monastery, but the monks were unable to stop the relics being stolen away to Bari in 1087. Under Seljuk Turkish rule the church was disused and filled with mud, until restored and modified in 1862 under the aegis of Tsar Alexander II. It then served the town's Orthodox Greeks until they were deported in the 1923 population exchanges.
St. Nicholas Church is an ancient East Roman basilica church in the ancient city of Myra which had been in use until the local Greeks had to leave in 1922, and is now a museum located in modern Demre, Antalya Province, Turkey. It was built above the burial place of Saint Nicholas, a 4th-century Christian bishop of Myra, an important religious figure for Eastern Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics and the historical inspiration for Santa Claus. Its use dated from its 6th century construction for the state church of the Roman Empire by Justinian the Great. The basilica is on UNESCO's tentative list to become a World Heritage Site.
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This is the main group of ruins of ancient Myra, with an amphitheatre, an eastern and western necropolis of rock tombs, a bathhouse and Byzantine chapel. The acropolis is only worth hiking up to for the view.
This was the port for Myra: St Paul and his fellow captives changed ship here in 59 / 60 AD on their way to trial in Rome. There's the foundations of a couple of baths and churches, a synagogue, cistern and granary. Other structures lie here and there outside the ticketed area around the wetland that was once an inlet of the sea.