Limyra

Limyra was a small city in Lycia on the southern coast of Asia Minor, on the Limyrus River, and twenty stadia from the mouth of that river. It is mentioned by Strabo (XIV, 666), Ptolemy (V, 3, 6) and several Latin authors. Nothing, however, is known of its history except that Gaius Caesar, adopted son of Augustus, died there (Velleius Paterculus, II, 102).

The ruins of Limyra are to be seen three or four miles east of the Turkish village of Finike formerly Fineka (in Antiquity the port Phoenicus, a Phoenician foundation), in the Ottoman sanjak (district) of Adalia, in the Vilayet of Konia. They consist of a theatre, tombs, sarcophagi, bas-reliefs, Greek and Lycian inscriptions etc.

Ecclesiastical history

Limyra is mentioned in the "Notitiæ Episcopatuum" down to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as a suffragan of the metropolitan of Myra. Six bishops are known: Diotimus, mentioned by St. Basil (ep. ccxviii); Lupicinus, present at the First Council of Constantinople, 381; Stephen, at the Council of Chalcedon (451); Theodore, at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553; Leo, at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787; Nicephorus, at the so-called Photian Council of Constantinople (879).

It remains a Roman Catholic titular see of the former ecclesiastical province of Lycia.

ource

*CathEncy|title=Limyra|url=http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09265a.htm