Key questions
- What is St Paul Trail?
- St Paul Trail is a Christianity pilgrimage route in Turkey, Antalya & Isparta Provinces (ancient Pamphylia and Pisidia). A modern waymarked trail through the Taurus Mountains, following where Paul's first mission is believed to have passed
- How many stations are on St Paul Trail?
- This guide currently maps 7 stations, with 7 total sites noted in the route metadata.
- When is the best time to walk St Paul Trail?
- Spring (April–May) and autumn (September–October); summer heat in the lowlands and winter snow in the Taurus Mountains make other seasons difficult
Opening
The trail begins at the Pamphylian coast, at Perge, where columned streets and a stadium still stand under the Antalya sun, and climbs inland through the Taurus Mountains toward the high, cooler plateau of ancient Pisidia. Between the two lies country that changes character as sharply as its elevation: citrus groves give way to gorge and pine forest, then to the bare limestone highlands around Eğirdir Lake, before the trail descends again into the wheat country around Antioch of Pisidia, near modern Yalvaç. Whoever walks or drives this line moves through the same geography — coast to gorge to highland plateau — that shaped how Roman roads, and the region's earliest Christian communities, were laid out in the first place.
Origins
The seven stops on this page are ancient cities and landscape waypoints, not one continuous ancient monument: Perge and Aspendos were major Pamphylian cities; Selge and Adada were highland Pisidian cities, each with their own temples, theaters, and civic life; Köprülü Canyon and Zindan Cave/Yazılı Canyon are natural gorges that carried the Roman road inland and, in Zindan Cave's case, held a documented sanctuary of their own (a river-god and mother-goddess cult of the 1st–2nd century CE, later rebuilt as a Byzantine basilica); and Antioch of Pisidia was the Roman colony where, according to Acts 13, Paul preached in the synagogue on his first missionary journey. The connecting thread — 'the St Paul Trail' — is a modern waymarked walking route created in 2008 by cartographer Kate Clow and the Culture Routes Society, tracing a plausible line between places Paul's journey is recorded as having passed through or near. It is not an archaeologically certified ancient pilgrim road, and no ancient text places Paul inside any specific gorge along the way — the trail's claim on his footsteps is inferential, built from the geography Acts describes rather than a preserved itinerary.
Why pilgrims walk it
Most people who complete any real distance on this trail today are long-distance hikers drawn by the Taurus Mountains scenery and Roman-road engineering as much as by scripture, and the trail's own promotional materials are candid that it's a modern cultural-heritage route rather than a devotional circuit with an unbroken practice behind it. For Christian travelers, though, the appeal is real: this is honest, walkable ground for picturing the world Paul's first mission moved through — market towns, mountain passes, colonial cities with their own gods before his arrival — without needing to treat every gorge or ruin as a confirmed relic of his passage. Others come for the archaeology on its own terms: Aspendos's theater and Adada's three standing temples reward the trip regardless of what one believes about the man the trail is named for.
Significance
Antioch of Pisidia carries the clearest textual claim to Pauline significance — Acts 13 places his synagogue sermon there, and the city's excavated remains (including a substantial church built centuries later) reflect its importance to the early Christian community that followed. The other six stops matter on their own historical terms: Perge and Aspendos as major Pamphylian cities (Aspendos's theater is among the best-preserved in the ancient world), Selge and Adada as highland Pisidian centers with their own long religious histories, and the two canyon sites as both natural landmarks and, at Zindan Cave, a genuine multi-era sacred site independent of any Pauline association. Held together, they document a region's Roman civic and religious life more richly than they document one apostle's route through it — which is worth knowing before treating this as a pilgrimage in the Camino sense.
