status that it still holds. It was granted this honour because the city did not capitulate to the Ottomans. The city was prosperous especially in the 13th and 14th centuries: there was a Genoese trading colony, and the city was an important producer of leather goods and red-dyed silk (whence, perhaps, its Turkish name, which probably means "red city"). By the 14th century, the city was surrounded by Ottoman emirates but maintained nominal allegiance to the Byzantine emperor. The city remained prosperous through trade and its strategic location. Philadelphia was an independent neutral city under the influence of the Latin Knights of Rhodes, when it was taken in 1390 by Bayezid I and an auxiliary Christian force under Byzantine emperor Manuel II after prolonged resistance by when all of the other cities of Asia Minor had surrendered to the Ottomans. Manuel had been forced by Bayezid to participate in subjugating Philadelphia to Ottoman rule, a bitter irony given its long resistance. Twelve years later, it was captured by Timur, who built a wall with the corpses of his prisoners. Later, it passed into the rule of Junayd until it was ultimately captured by Murad II. Modern period From 1867 until 1922, Alaşehir was part of the Aidin Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire. The Greek Army occupied the city during the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922). There is dissent about who burned Philadelphia in 1922. American Consul George Horton wrote in his memoirs about the Turkish army tactics of burning every Greek city that they entered, which culminated with the Great Fire of Smyrna. Other accounts put the blame on the other side in which retreating Greek Army carried out a scorched-earth policy while it was retreating from Anatolia during the final phase of the war, which included the Fire of Alaşehir. According to Park, 70% of the buildings of Alaşehir were destroyed by fire, and Kinross wrote, "Alaşehir was no more than a dark scorched cavity, defacing the hillside. Village after village had been reduced to an ash-heap". It is estimated that some 3,000 lives were lost in the burning of Alaşehir. A suburb of Athens, Nea Filadelfia ("New Philadelphia"), is named from the Greek refugees from Alaşehir (in Greek known as "Philadelphia") who settled there following the war and the population exchange between Greece and Turkey of 1923. The city was the site of the Alaşehir Congress in 1919. In 1969,