Who were the seven holy sleepers or 'people of the cave' in tarsus turkey?

Answer 1

Except for a small shrine near Ephesus in modern day Turkey, there is no hard historical evidence to support the veracity of what is known as The Tale of The Seven Holy Sleepers which can be found in the hagiographies of the Christian Church emanating from Rome and the Orthodox Christian Churches of the East. At best, the tale may be put under the heading of "pious Christian belief" or "Christian Mythology". The tale has its origins in the third century AD during the reign of the Roman emperor, Decius who had launched brutal extermination measures against Christians. There were seven young men who refused to renounce their Christianity. In an unlikely situation, the emperor gave the them time to reconsider, during which time they gave up all their worldly goods to the poor and retired to a hilltop cave to pray and consider their fate. The emperor found that they had fallen asleep and ordered that the cave be sealed with "the sleepers" still inside. Some hundreds of years later, a peasant who then owned the land, pulled away the rocks which blocked the entrance to the cave; he wanted to use it as a shelter for his livestock. On doing so, he discovered the young men who awoke and thinking they had been asleep for a short time went to the township to buy food and more importantly, gave testimony of their Christian beliefs. It should also be remembered that during the reign of Decius, there were several Christian "heresies". Many of these heresies had one thing in common ie. the denial of the resurrection of the human body on the day of judgement. The Christian communities of the east and the west hailed the young men's awakening as "living proof" that the doctrine of bodily resurrection was true. The tale continues: the young men returned to their cave and went back to sleep. Over time, the tale became a pious belief which had the young men as dying and going to Heaven (body and soul).