The Roman mansio or way station and Byzantine bishopric of Parnassos in Cappadocia is chiefly known through inscriptions and bishops’ lists and identified with the small Turkish village of Parlasan/Değirmenyolu. It came as a surprise when a salvage excavation unearthed a large building with sumptuous floor mosaics beyond the outskirts of the village. Previous excavation reports misrepresented the building as a basilica church, when it was in fact an apsed hall and may be identified as the reception unit of an elite residence, as this article shows. A large central room had an elevated apse where the landlord would have sat. An animal mosaic in front of the apse is comparable to similar compositions in fourth-to-sixth-century urban palaces but avoids any reference to pagan mythology and employs stylistic features that are otherwise known from church floors. A mosaic inscription identifies the reception unit as belonging to the bishop and thus as part of the episcopal palace. This discovery is augmented by the find of a Late Roman sarcophagus and three Early Christian gravestones. Later, after the original palace was mostly destroyed, the building complex underwent a second, utilitarian phase that appears to date from the Invasion Period, when the Arabs raided central Anatolia from the seventh to ninth centuries.