An international team of researchers excavating in the Turkish town of İznik says it has uncovered the remains of a church that hosted the First Council of Nicaea, the gathering that produced the foundational creed of Christian belief.

Excavation director Mustafa Şahin told Fox News Digital that his team now believes the Church of St. Neophytos stood beneath a later structure called the Church of the Holy Fathers, and that the older building was the very site where bishops assembled seventeen centuries ago to settle the core doctrines of Christianity. The discovery hinged on a single, stubborn detail: floor paving that kept going where it should have stopped.

The First Council of Nicaea, convened in A.D. 325, was the first ecumenical council in Christian history. It produced the Nicene Creed, the statement of belief still recited in churches around the world, and established theological boundaries that shaped Western civilization. Identifying the building where it took place has been an open question for archaeologists and church historians for generations.

Floor paving beyond the wall pointed to an older, hidden church

Şahin's team had been working at a church complex along the shore of Lake İznik, in what was once the ancient city of Nicaea. Archaeologists first identified a large submerged basilica at the site in 2014. Subsequent work established that structure as the Church of the Holy Fathers, built around A.D. 380. But Şahin wanted to answer a bigger question: was there something older underneath?

Şahin told Turkey's Anadolu Agency that this was the central aim of the most recent dig season, which continued through July.

"That was our most important question this season. We began excavating east of the prothesis, outside the church's exterior wall."

A prothesis is a side chamber in an Eastern Christian church, typically used to prepare communion bread and wine. Şahin's team dug just beyond the outer wall of the known structure, and within the first week, they found what they were looking for.

"At the end of the first week, as we had hoped, we discovered that the floor paving continued beyond the existing church."

That floor extending past the wall meant the later Church of the Holy Fathers had been built on top of an earlier, larger footprint. Coins recovered from graves beneath the later basilica helped date its construction to around A.D. 380. The earlier church, St. Neophytos, had been destroyed by an earthquake in A.D. 368, just forty-three years after the council met inside it.

The timeline fits. The physical evidence aligns with the ancient written record. Eusebius of Caesarea, who attended the council himself, described the meeting place as a small church, so small, he noted, that it seemed remarkable so many bishops could fit inside. Şahin echoed that ancient observation directly.

"The church was so small that one wonders how so many bishops fit inside. This itself was a great miracle of God."

Şahin calls the hypothesis confirmed after years of excavation

For Şahin, the floor paving was the final piece. He told Anadolu Agency that the Church of the Holy Fathers, the later structure built around A.D. 380, was erected over the original council site as a memorial to the bishops who attended.

"The Church of the Holy Fathers... was built after 380 over the site of the First Council and in memory of the bishops who attended it. As of this year, we are in a position to say definitively that the Church of the Holy Fathers is located here. We are very pleased because our hypothesis has been confirmed."

He also told Fox News Digital that the earlier phase of the structure "may correspond to the small church recounted in the written sources" about the Council of Nicaea. That careful phrasing, "may correspond", reflects the inherent limits of matching physical ruins to events described in ancient texts. But Şahin's public statements leave little doubt about where he and his team stand.

Discoveries like this one carry weight far beyond academic journals. For Christians worldwide, the Nicene Creed is not a museum artifact. It is a living declaration, spoken aloud in worship services every Sunday. Connecting it to a specific, physical place, stone floors, earthquake damage, coins in graves, gives the faith a tangible anchor in history that skeptics have long questioned. The broader pattern of ancient historical evidence supporting early Christianity continues to grow.

Turkey's soil keeps yielding early Christian sites

The İznik excavation is not an isolated find. Last summer, archaeologists working at the ancient city of Olympos in southern Turkey uncovered a fifth-century Christian church featuring a long-hidden inscription. Later that same year, a separate team in southwestern Turkey found the remains of a Roman hospital that had been converted into a Christian sanctuary.

Each discovery adds another layer to the physical record of Christianity's earliest centuries, a record that was, for a long time, thinner than historians wanted. The authentication of lost sermons by St. Augustine after 1,600 years reflects the same trajectory: ancient Christian documents and sites once dismissed or forgotten are surfacing with increasing regularity.

Turkey, in particular, has become one of the richest grounds for this kind of work. The country sits on layers of Roman, Byzantine, and early Christian history, and modern excavation techniques, combined with technologies like underwater survey and ground-penetrating radar, are opening sites that previous generations could not reach. Similar methods have been applied to other biblically significant locations in Turkey's mountains.

The Fox News Digital report also referenced author Dinesh D'Souza, whose new book, "The Stones Cry Out: Biblical Archaeology, Prophecy, and the Last Days," explores how archaeological discoveries across Israel and beyond connect to people, places, and events described in the Bible. D'Souza's broader argument, that the physical evidence is catching up to the scriptural record, finds a concrete example in Şahin's excavation.

Open questions remain. The material does not specify Şahin's university or institutional affiliation, the full composition of the international research team, or whether the Turkish government has formally endorsed the identification. No dissenting scholarly opinions are cited. The submerged basilica first spotted in 2014 appears to still be under active investigation.

For those who have watched secular institutions spend decades treating the historical claims of Christianity as soft mythology, the work happening on the shores of Lake İznik is worth paying attention to. Researchers like former skeptics turned believers have argued that evidence, honestly examined, points toward faith rather than away from it. Şahin's team appears to be adding another data point.

The stones, it turns out, do not stay buried forever, and what they say when they surface tends to confirm what believers already knew.