Author: M. Cassia

Download article as .pdf: «The inscription is surely a fake»: un villaggio cappadoce tra finzione toponomastica e storia ecclesiastica

The news of a “sensational” epigraphic discovery in Cappadocia – released in 1911 by some Turkish newspapers and “consecrated” the following year by the scientific periodical Échos d’Orient – still today arouses strong perplexity. The phantom inscription – never photographed and / or drawn – would have carried the text πόλις Σαδαγολθινά, a toponym actually attested only by the Cappadocian ecclesiastical historian Philostorgius, who however considers the site not a “city”, but a κώμη, “village”. The fake news was actually the intentional product of a political amplification of progressive style and of a Orthodox religious orientation of which the historian Pavlos Karolidis (1849-1930), a native of a suburb of Kayseri, ancient Caesarea of Cappadocia, was the main exponent.