Seleucid

Hanukkah itself celebrates an ancient Jewish victory over the Seleucid Empire, which sought to impose Hellenistic culture and forced assimilation in Judea.

In one, recounted in the First and Second Books of Maccabees, a small band of ancient Jewish zealots defeat the Seleucid army, which is intent on eliminating Jewish religious and cultural practice, and has defiled the Temple in Jerusalem with idol worship.

In 175 B.C. the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes came into power and tried to force Judeans to assimilate.

The eight days and nights of Hanukkah commemorates the preservation of light in the holy temple in Jerusalem during the 2nd century BCE, when the fundamentalist Maccabees revolted against the Greek Seleucid Empire and re-dedicated the temple through the burning of sacred oil, which miraculously lasted eight nights.

Established by the Seleucid Empire in 300 BC, Antakya, formerly Antioch, has been home to Jews, Christians and Muslims and destroyed or heavily damaged several times as it changed hands between Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Ottomans.