City
Laudiciaca Tacecaumeno
Ladik
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Laudiciaca Tacecaumeno is a copyist's tangle: the name should read Laodicea Catacecaumene, but the words were split in the wrong place and the epithet was given the wrong gender. That epithet means 'the burnt', perhaps after the copper and cinnabar mines and smelting furnaces in the surrounding country. The town, probably a Hellenistic foundation, lay at Ladik in Turkey, on important roads leading east. From the first century AD it also bore the name Claudiolaodicea. By the fourth century it was a bishop's seat and a centre of several Christian sects, and its bishop Julius Eugenius gave it a splendid church.