The Priene Synagogue is an ancient synagogue discovered by archaeologists in

Priene Priene ( grc, Πριήνη, Priēnē; tr, Prien) was an ancient Greek city of Ionia (and member of the Ionian League) located at the base of an escarpment of Mycale, about north of what was then the course of the Maeander River (now called th ...

Turkey Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with a small portion on the Balkan Peninsula in ...

. The synagogue was discovered by archaeologists

Theodor Wiegand Theodor Wiegand (October 30, 1864 – December 19, 1936) was one of the more famous German archaeologists. Wiegand was born in Bendorf, Rhenish Prussia. He studied at the universities of Munich, Berlin, and Freiburg Freiburg im Breisgau ...

and

Hans Schrader Johann (Hans) Hermann Schrader (15 February 1869, Stolp – 5 November 1948, Berlin) was a German classical archaeologist and art historian. He was a student at the Universities of Marburg and Berlin, where he was a pupil of Reinhard Kekulé von S ...

in the western residential area in 1895–98. The synagogue dates to the 2nd century CE and was built into an older Hellenistic house. It consists of a main hall with two rows of columns forming a small basilica. Only one column was still in place. However, in the 1904 excavation report they mistakenly speculated that the structure was a house church.Hans Schrader/ Theodor Wiegand: ''Priene. Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen und Untersuchungen in den Jahren 1895–1898''. Berlin 1904, p. 480–481.
The excavation report online
/ref> In 1928 archaeologist

Eleazar Sukenik Eleazar Lipa Sukenik (12 August 1889, in Białystok – 28 February 1953, in Jerusalem) was an Israeli archaeologist and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is best known for helping establish the Department of Archaeology at the ...

identified the building as a synagogue, pointing to a niche for the

Torah Ark A Torah ark (also known as the ''Heikhal'', or the ''Aron Kodesh'') refers to an ornamental chamber in the synagogue that houses the Torah scrolls. History The ark, also known as the ''ark of law'', or in Hebrew the ''Aron Kodesh'' or ''aron ha- ...

. He also noted the carved menorah near the niche. It is known that hundreds of thousands of Jews lived in Asia Minor in the 1st century CE. Only two confirmed synagogues have been discovered: the Sardis Synagogue and this second one in Priene. In the summer of 2009 archeologists Nadin Burkhardt from the

University of Frankfurt am Main Goethe University (german: link=no, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main) is a university located in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It was founded in 1914 as a citizens' university, which means it was founded and funded by the wealt ...

and Mark Wilson of the Asia Minor Research Center in Izmir began an exploration of the synagogue in a dig sponsored by the

Biblical Archaeology Society The Biblical Archaeology Society was established in 1974 by American lawyer Hershel Shanks, as a non-sectarian organisation that supports and promotes biblical archaeology. Its current publications include the ''Biblical Archaeology Review'', whil ...

.; Nadin Burkhardt, Mark Wilson,
The Late Antique Synagogue in Priene: Its History, Architecture, and Context
, ''Gephyra'' 10, 2013, pp.166-196

References

See also