Sentire Cum Ecclesia

Thursday, 13th December 2012
Thessalonike, Beroea (Veria), Meteora

For all photos for 13th December, click here to view them on my dropbox site. If you don’t have Dropbox, use this link to sign up and you and I will both get a bonus amount of free storage space.

I was very glad to leave the hotel in Thessaloniki, but a little sad that we didn’t have more time to spend there. On our way out of the city, Sophia took us up to the northern walls on the rise above the city, where we had a good view of the city around the harbour and of the mountains on the other side of the bay. We then joined the morning traffic jam on the Via Ignatia heading out of the city on the same road that St Paul took when he was “asked to leave” Thessaloniki – the road across the plain to the town of Beroia, known today as Veroia or Veria. This town is on the very edge of the range of mountains running down from north to south in Greece. We drove up to a point called “St Paul’s Altar”, at which a large memorial has been built around three marble steps which are traditionally said to be the entrance steps to the synagogue of Beroea, in which Paul preached the gospel (and the hearers received it with uncharacteristic joy, cf. Acts 17:10f). As we were climbing the steps up to this place, I was just behind Sophia. She got to the top and called back down “Be careful! Ice on marble!” It was then that I became aware that there was in fact snow on the rooftops of some of the houses, and in the shadows where the sun had not yet shone. In some places, such as here on the marble paving before the memorial to St Paul, snow had melted and refrozen into ice, and it was indeed very slippery. Next to the main memorial (which is decorated with mosaics depicting Paul’s dream of the Macedonian and Paul preaching to the synagogue in Boroea) is another smaller memorial which was put there in the year 2000. Behind this can be seen an old disused Mosque (with minaret) from the Ottoman days. Just goes to show that sometimes history works out in our favour…

Nearby Veria is the village of Vergina and here there was a special treat for us which was not on the agenda: the tomb of Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great. We do not know where Alexander is buried (although it is very likely in Alexandria, where we are told Julius Caesar viewed the tomb), and it was only in 1977 that this tumulus was identified as the tomb of his father. Throughout our trip across Turkey, and here too in Greece, it has not been uncommon for us to see such “tumuli”, or “burial mounds” on the landscape (they stick out like pimples on otherwise flat landscapes). Over the centuries, most tumuli have been broken into and their treasure stolen; an attempt had been made on this one too, but the thieves had not found the burial chambers. Following the identification and initial excavation of the tumulus, the archaeologist (a man by the name of Andronikos) pressed on with the dig despite the fact that the season was ending and winter was coming on – because he realised that there was something “really big” under this artificial hill. What he found in the end were four tombs, including the tombs of a king, one of his wives, and one of his sons, complete with their treasures and, what is more, with the bones of the dead still in their gold caskets inside their sarcophagi. From the articles in the tombs, a positive identification was able to be made: this was indeed Philip II, father of Alexander the Great.

Today the tomb is a museum. They have very cleverly recovered the entire excavation area with a rounded roof over which they have placed earth and replanted grass, so that the museum in fact looks like the original tumulus (sort of like Parliament House in Canberra…sort of). Within this museum, the tombs are still where they were uncovered and all the artifacts found within the tombs are on display. We were not allowed to take any pictures in the museum, so all I can suggest is that you google it and see what comes up. The treasures are really amazing – gold and silver and ivory, dinning sets, armour, coins and furniture, most of it incredibly intricate and meticulously reassembled by the museum (a wood and ivory shield took one restorer eight years to reconstruct from the thousands of pieces into which it had disintegrated). In small miniature figures on a piece of furniture found in Philips tomb are two small detailed carvings – Philip and his son Alexander. To stand before the tombs is an eerie experience – it is fairly dark in the museum in order top preserve the frescos on the plastered walls of the tombs and other objects – but to see a tomb still embedded in the ground with the front doors closed which have not been opened since they were closed 2300 years ago…

We had lunch in Vergina at a restaurant (I had a broad bean soup and – genuine – Greek salad), before setting out for Meteora where we would be spending the night. Meteora is well-known for its mountain top monasteries, familiar from tourist posters for Greece and from James Bond films (eg. For Your Eyes Only). It is as familiar an icon for Greece as Pamukkale is for Turkey, but it isn’t easy to find on a map. We followed first the Via Ignatia south west from Veria, before turning off toward the south east at Grevena for the town of Kalambake which is in the shadow of the Meteora mountains. If “Meteora” sounds very much like “meteorite”, there is a reason: it means “rock lifted up” and that is exactly what these rocks look like – as if they are suspended above the earth. I will write more about this location in tomorrow’s post, as the main feature of the rest of today was the scenery on the way there.

As soon as we had turned onto the Via Ignatia after Veria, there was ample evidence of snow from the night before. Sophia told us that this was the first snow of the season, and we were very luck to be seeing Greece with snow, as most tourists come here in summer and never see this aspect of the climate. At first the snow was light, but as we turned off the Via, we entered into more serious snow country, where all the land around was covered with it. We stopped at this point for afternoon tea, and it was delightful to see how the tour group members reacted with childish glee to all the cold wet stuff (see the photos). Australians never cease to be fascinated by snow. It only occurred to me when I saw the Christmas decorations at the cafe at which we had stopped that I was for the first time experiencing the build up to a “white Christmas”. Unfortunately – or fortunately, depending on how you look at it (the one draw back of a white Christmas would be the extreme cold that comes with it), by the time Christmas comes, I will be back in Australia with 35 degree plus weather. At the moment the weather is treating us very kindly – it is indeed cold but the sun is shining and there is little by way of wind (which would be chilling if there were any). You will find that my fascination with the snow is demonstrated in the number of photos I took, but we really were moving through some beautiful territory, with mountains all around. One special treat was the view of Mount Olympus in the distance as we came around the corner and began working our way down into the valley in which the town of Kalambake is now situated.

Our hotel here is back up to standard, but the internet is not free – they want 8 Euros for the day, and then it can only be used on one device and we need to decide whether we want to use it in the lobby or in the bedroom, so I decided to give it a miss. Instead, I sat out on the balcony smoking my pipe and editing my 400 pictures down to 200 until 1) my battery on my tablet ran out and 2) it became far to cold to continue staying outside. I had a bath before mass and dinner (every bathroom should have a bath). Dinner tonight was a fixed menu of soup, a simple salad and a nice piece of beef, with crème caramel or ice-cream for dessert. Back in my room, I went through my suitcase and determined that I had enough clean laundry to last till I went home with the exception of trousers which I will get laundered at Athens. I am not so much counting the days until I get home as “counting the undies”. Laundry and internet continues to the be basic concerns of this traveller. Because I had no internet and my table was recharging (I really didn’t want to do any more writing anyway), I dug out of my bag the Alexander McCall-Smith book “Unusual Uses for Olive Oil” which I bought in Melbourne Airport before leaving and have barely read anything off so far. But again, I was tired, so I switched the light off at the same time as Fr Peter did, and tried to get some sleep.

Wednesday, 12th December 2012
Philippi, Neapolis (Kavala) and Thessalonike

For all photos for 12th December, click here to view them on my dropbox site. If you don’t have Dropbox, use this link to sign up and you and I will both get a bonus amount of free storage space.

I am writing this at quarter to six out in the corridor outside my room on Thursday morning. Yesterday’s itinerary was just too full to allow me the time or energy to do anything more than upload my photos before I had to pack it in for the night.

We did a lot of travelling, driving about 300km along the northern coast of Greece from Alexandroupolis to Thessaloniki, travelling via the ruins of the ancient city of Philippi and the modern/ancient city of Kavala (Kabala/Neapolis). Our task was to catch up with St Paul, who had taken the route by sea from Troas via the island of Samothrace (Acts 16:11) and making landfall at Neapolis before heading out to Philippi. We passed Samothrace on land on the north side, and went to Philippi first. Our constant companion on this trip was the old “Via Ignatia” or “Egnatia Hodos” as it is still called in Greek today. This road runs all the way from Constantinople in the East to the Adriatic sea in the West, from whence ancient travellers would catch the boat to the Italian Peninsula and the road to Rome. At least on our part of the journey today, we were following this road almost exactly, and from Philippi to Thessaloniki – and more today as we head out to Boroea – we followed St Paul’s footsteps literally as the new double lane freeway is built more or less directly over the old road (here and there we could se the old Roman road still peeking out from underneath the highway where it took a different turn to us).

All of which reminds me of an old joke:

There once was a Scot named MacCarter,
who drove his car(t) faster and faster.
While speeding t’wards Rome,
which was on his way home,
he was killed on the Via Ignatia.

Along the way, Sophia gave us a running commentary on various things Greek, including the current political and economical situation (which is, as you know, on hard times) and some commentary about the Greek Church (which is undergoing something of a renaissance). I was surprised to see mosques in the villages we were travelling through. It appears that quite a large Muslim population lives in Northern Greece, and that there are some tensions politically because of this. Nevertheless, they have complete freedom of religion in Greece, which contrasts a little with what passes for religious freedom on the other side of the border. The territory of Greece in the north is not very broad on the north-south axis, as just over the mountain range is the border with Bulgaria. We were driving along the sea plain between the mountains and the coastline. We passed fossil fuelled power stations (they look nuclear but Greece does not have nuclear power) and fields of solar panels, which, together with windmills, provides an alternative source of power in Greece. The road frequently went through tunnels, as Greece is, in Sophia’s words, mainly mountains and rocks.

We stopped for morning tea at about 9:30am at the cafe at the entrance to the archeological site of ancient Philippi, which is just 14kms north-west of Kavala. There is a town today called “Philippi” a bit east of the ancient site, but the ruins are actually closer to the location called “Lydia”, with the entrance located at a town called Krinides. As we were having mass soon, I skipped morning tea and sat smoking my pipe in the sun contemplating the beautiful scene of snow covered Pangaion Hills to the south. Although the sun was out, and the air still, it was a bracing 6 degrees. (There are cats and dogs all over this part of the world – as you can see from my pictures – and near me was a small black kitten being bothered by a skinny black and white dog which was trying to carry the kitten around in its mouth like a pup. The kitten didn’t seem to put up much of a fight, but was obviously annoyed by the dog’s overly maternal interest.)

When the group had finished their coffee, we boarded the bus and headed around to the other end of the archeological excavation, which is where the traditional site of the baptism of Lydia on the small Gangites River is located (Acts 16:14-15). The Greek Church has done this very nicely. There is a fairly new building which I suppose one should call a “baptisterion”, that is, a baptistery which also has a sanctuary and altar attached. This building is a traditional eight-sided shrine, decorated in the dome with the icon of the baptism of Jesus, with additional biblical baptism scenes (including St Paul baptising Lydia) around the eight walls on which the dome is suspended. Below this is a sunken marble baptismal pool with steps going down into it, and in the centre of the pool is a font for infant baptisms. In the narthex is a floor mosaic showing the second missionary journey of St Paul, on which he came to this place.

A short walk outside, and you come to the banks of the fast rushing creek which is the River Gangites. Here too the Greeks have done very well. They have diverted a part of the river to run through a channel over which they have built two small footbridges to the resulting island in the middle. There is a small shrine to St Lydia here, and in front of this, in the artificial channel between the two footbridges, is a baptismal pool, with steps down into the pool from both sides. On the island is a small stone table, quite low and obviously designed to hold the required bits and pieces for a baptism, and on the other side of the baptismal pool is a small odeon going up several levels on the banks. Sitting in the seats of this theaterette, we celebrated Mass, presided over by Fr Bhin on the island (using the small stone table as an altar) with the water of the river rushing through the baptismal pool between us.

It was very cold, and the water was a consistent roar in the background, but at the same time I found it one of the most spiritually moving experiences of the entire trip. Looking back over my shoulder, I could see where the town of Philippi would have been on the slopes of the hill, and easily imagine Paul asking for directions to the local synagogue and being shown down to the river in this place, where all he found were the women doing their washing. The fact that Paul didn’t do what any red-blooded Jewish male should have done – ie. high-tailed it out of there quick smart – but took the opportunity to proclaim the Gospel to these women, and the fact that one of them – St Lydia – was ready to receive the message and be baptised together with all her household – and that it all happened right here, was a great deal to take in. This was, in a way, Europe’s “Jordan River”. You may recall that at the beginning of this journey, I expressed a fear that I would go in search of the past only to find it buried under the present. That has certainly been the case more times than not, but in a few cases – such as in Galilee and here on the banks of this river – the past has been tangibly present. As always, there was a shop here where one could buy religious souvenirs. I passed on the opportunity, but now wish that I had picked up an icon of St Lydia, just as a reminder of this place.

Sophia then took us around to the archeological site itself. Here the major feature is the large Agora or “market place” where Paul was (according to Luke in Acts 16:19-20) dragged before the magistrates. We could see the very place where the magistrates sat to give judgement. Besides the Roman baths and an excellent theatre which is still used for concerts, most of the ruins are Byzantine from the 4th and 5th Centuries. There are a number of ecclesiastical structures – one is the main basilica that was used by the city. This one is very early, and also quite large. There is also a kind of martyrion, although it is not clear what its use was. It is octagon shaped, and has some very good mosaic floors (which are roofed over). There is a tomb in this spot, but it is an ancient Macedonian tomb, not a Christian one. And then there are the ruins of a second church – Basilica B – which is built on the south west side of the Agora. For its construction, in the sixth century, a large part of the old Roman agora area was demolished. Yet it was never used. Sophia described it as a “folly” of the bishop at the time: despite the point that the city already had a very large and serviceable basilica, the bishop wanted a building to rival Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (this was during the time of the second Hagia Sophia before the current one). But it seems that the bishop’s architects simply didn’t have the know-how, and the dome collapsed and the building was never finished.

There is one other significant place on the site: the “prison of St Paul”. Of course, with the gaol playing such a huge part in Luke’s narrative of Paul’s stay in Philippi (Acts 16:24ff), there must be a site with which to identify it. And there is: just on the north west side of the Agora near where the Magistrates seat is located and across the Via Ignatia (the original Roman road runs right along the edge of the Agora) there is an old Roman cistern. Constructed to be watertight, it would have been deep and dark, and could quite possibly have been used later as a prison cell. Sophia is of the opinion that tradition is always worth something, and that this is, in the local minds, a “capital T” tradition. The Church, Basilica A, is very close to this, but then so is an ancient pagan temple.

The whole excursion over the archaeological site had taken until about two o’clock, and by now we were very cold (the fingers of my right hand were frozen around my camera) and hungry, so the bus took us into Kavala for lunch. Kavala (Greek: Kabala – with a meaning associated with horses) is the modern name for Neapolis, and is, as I have said, where St Paul landed (together with Silas, Luke and Timothy) for the first time in Europe. This event is commemorated by a large modern mosaic in front of a church on the spot where Paul is thought to have disembarked (about 50 metres up from the current harbour line), showing, on one side of the panel, his dream in which he saw a man saying “Come over here” (Acts 16:9), and then, on the other side, Paul stepping off the boat onto European soil.

We had lunch nearby in a restaurant on the harbour. First I needed to go to the bank to get some Euros. I wasted about 15 minutes of our break waiting in line in the bank to try to change my remaining 30 Turkish Lira into Euros (they wouldn’t do it), so then just used the ATM to get some cash. The Euro is running at about $1.25, which is a lot better than when I last travelled to Europe three years ago, when it was about $2. I had been looking forward to my first meal in Greece (discounting the hotel fare which differed little from Turkey except for the appearance of bacon at breakfast for the first time on the tour!), and was not disappointed. Given that it was now almost 3pm, my appetite was encouraged by my hunger. We were able to choose our meal from the display, and could have had any number of different kinds of fresh fish cooked whichever way we wanted, but I chose a good fish soup followed by mousakka and Greek pastry for dessert washed down with a glass of white wine.

We did not explore any further in Kavala, but hopped back on the bus for the drive to Thessaloniki, still some distance away. It would be dark when we arrived, but Sophia wanted to take us on a tour of the city centre and to the church of St Dimitrius. We road down an ancient valley along the Via Ignatia, which was, as I said, exactly where Paul would have travelled. There were snow topped mountains down one side, and the whole scene was quite picturesque. When we stopped for afternoon tea at a roadhouse, I took the opportunity to go for a walk into the country side a little more – I had spied a small church out in the fields, and wanted to capture it in a photograph. I passed a young mother dog with a little puppy – she looked desperate for some food but I didn’t have any to give her. After returning to the road house, I just sat and looked at the countryside around me for a bit as I smoked my pipe. On a trip as rushed as this, we don’t get much time to sit and take in the fact that we are in a new country, an old country, with the past all around us, and just be present in it. I may be killing myself with my smoking, but at on the positive side, it does give me space for such contemplation.

We did arrive after dark in Thessaloniki – and late too – about 6:30pm. But Sophia wanted to show us some of the sights of the city even if we couldn’t actually see them very well (photographs were useless from the moving bus in this light). I would have liked to have had a whole day – or at least an afternoon – explore this very interesting city. It is the second largest city in Greece with a population of about 1 million, and has a history dating back to the 4th Century BC, and was established King Cassander of Macedon. He named it after his wife, a half-sister of Alexander the Great and daughter of King Philip II. But we did stop the bus and get off to have a close up look at the Church of St Dimitrius. Dimitrius is the patron saint of Thessaloniki. He was a soldier, martyred under the persecution of Diocletian in the late 3rd Century. A church was built here – on the spot of his martyrdom – very early in the Constantinian era, but was destroyed and rebuilt a number of times, and even used as a mosque during the Ottoman period – which only ended with the “liberation” of the city in 1912. Bits and pieces were damaged by the communists during the 2nd World War, and there have been more modern restorations too, which give the whole building a jig-saw appearance. There are fresco icons which date back to the very earliest constructions, and the columns of the church come from all dates – from the very beginning to the medieval restorations to the modern reconstructions.

We arrived just as Vespers was finishing – it was very good to enter a church while the changing was still going on and to see a Byzantine Church being used as a place of Christian worship still. But again, one joy was to be able to venerate the very relics of St Dimitrius himself. These had been stolen (as so much was) by the Crusaders and were in Rome until they were returned by Pope Paul VI in the 1970’s. For not the first time, I thanked God for these greedy Crusaders. If they had not stolen the relics, would they have survived until today? I had no coins to buy candles, so I bought an icon of St Dimitrius and then lighted my customary three candles for my wife and daughter and asked for the holy saints intercession for them.

We then went in search of our hotel. Rosemary had chosen the hotel based on the fact that it was next door to some excavations which she thought were of the old city forum. It was indeed near excavations, but not the ones that Rosemary thought – they were later Byzantine houses or some such. The bus could not navigate the narrow street to the hotel door, so dropped us off on the other side of the excavation site and we needed to off load our luggage and drag them around to the Hotel Esperia. The name “esperia” means “western” or “evening” (and it was indeed evening when these westerners). One should always be careful choosing an hotel off the internet for a tour group without checking it out first. Having so far taken advantage of the off-season prices and stayed at 5 star hotels (in the main – the Ma’agan Village in Galilee had its own charms, as did the aged Richmond Thermal at Pamukkale), it was a bit of a shock to find ourselves in a hotel that would struggle to qualify as 3 stars. There were no porters, so we lugged our own cases into the old elevators (these had swing open doors and were big enough for two people – as you moved up and down, you knew what floor you were on as you watched each one go past on the open side of the lift). Our rooms were very small – the bed were old single mattresses on camp-bed style springs. The bathroom did not have a bath – the open shower cubicle was fighting for space with the toilet which encroached upon it. There was a balcony overlooking the street below, but there was no chair in the room or on the balcony, so I dragged the single chair that was out in the corridor into our room to use out there while I smoked by pipe and downloaded the day’s photographs. The hotel did at least have a good internet connection. We did not eat in the hotel – there wasn’t actually a restaurant – just a breakfast room, but walked around to the other side of the block where we ate at a very nice local restaurant. It was already about 8pm, and we were all once again hungry (thank goodness for the late lunch). We had a good meal – a variety of shared entrees, and a choice of ten main courses (I had the grilled sardines) and very nice cheap wine served in 500ml beakers for 3 Euros. We even had a chap on an accordion who knew all the classic tourist tunes which had some of the team singing along. It was very enjoyable, and except for a few communication problems, we could have been in a restaurant in Brunswick street. I chose to leave a little earlier than the rest of the group to start writing. But I was far too tired, and chose to go to bed and do the writing in the morning.

Tuesday, 11th December 2012
Istanbul, Gallipoli, Alexandroupoli

For all photos for 11th December, click here to view them on my dropbox site. If you don’t have Dropbox, use this link to sign up and you and I will both get a bonus amount of free storage space.

An early start today to farewell Istanbul – and to get out before the peak hour traffic – leaving the hotel at 7am. Cold but not raining.

Not much to tell for the first part of the day, as the drive to the Gallipoli peninsula is not really very interesting. We stopped for lunch early at a roadhouse buffet, and I, feeling a little daring, had the herring stew with pilaf. It was actually very tasty, especially washed down by a nice cold Efes beer (I asked about the single serve bottle of white wine – 20 lira ($10) – compared to the 500ml can of beer – 5 lira ($2.50) – and the beer won).

Then we arrived at Anzac Cove and began our tour of the memorials. We visited the Cove memorial, the Lone Pine Memorial (where we prayed and sang “Abide with me”), the Turkish 57th Regiment Memorial, and the New Zealand Memorial (which is also the site of the statue to Mustafa Kemal – later Ataturk – as this was the spot where he was shot just above the heart – but the bullet hit his pocket watch and he survived to go on to become Turkey’s immortal hero – God plays funny games sometimes…). Last time I was here was in 2007 for the dawn service on Anzac Day there were crowds of all nationalities – principally Turkish, Australian and New Zealanders. The Lone Pine Memorial was surrounded with scaffold seating, and it was damned hot. Today, by contrast it is as cold as buggery and we are the only ones up here. You can see from my photos that they were hardly doing a roaring business at the kiosk/souvenir shop at the New Zealand memorial.

I have always had a funny sort of reaction to ANZAC day and the Gallipoli story. For a start, it was not a part of my family story. No one in my family ever served in the armed forces let alone in active combat. I think I attended my first ANZAC day parade when I was in my thirties. As I said to someone on the bus, at the same time they were fighting this campaign, they were closing Lutheran schools, imprisoning our pastors, changing all the names of our German towns to good English names, and even – in some cases – burning our churches. I thought I would give some attention in the Lone Pine cemetery to looking for German names among the predominantly Anglo-Celtic names on the list. I found a few – a Kempe here and a Jaensch there, but I also found a Weinrich who served under the name of Devlin and a Klump who served as Clump. I guess they wanted to be sure that they were not mistaken for the enemy…

Gallipoli is, for me, a very difficult place. From Mustafa Kemal’s great rhetoric about the Johnnies and the Mehmets to the whole Anzac “religion” – but most of all the horrendous historical “what ifs” and “if onlys” – I just cannot in my own mind decide what to make of it. I did pick up an iron red stone from the shore of Anzac Cove to take home with me, and I carried this stone about with me for most of the day. I wonder about this stone. It has sat on the ocean bottom and then on this shore for God knows how long, and here I come and pick it up and take it home to a country as alien to it as this country was to the boys who died here. I have a small mirror that I use for shaving in the morning, and which has accompanied me on several overseas trips and now this one. I blutack it to the shower wall so I can shave in the shower in the morning. This mirror I picked up out of the mud on a motorcycle trail on Philip Island years ago – it is a broken-off motorcycle mirror. What chance was there that this mirror would ever have found its way out of the mud let alone to Rome and Istanbul and Jerusalem? It just makes you think. Well, it makes me think. And somehow I find that relates to my experience of Gallipoli.

At the end of our visit to Gallipoli, we farewelled our tour guide, Hakan, and three of our pilgrimage team, who, for various reasons, needed to head back home. One part of me, though greatly longing to see Greece, wished that I could join them and return home to my family. There is only one week to go on this study tour, but I am very much feeling my separation from my family, and wish that I could be home with Cathy to share the burdens of family life with her. My oldest daughter is on school holidays already, Cathy has just received the good news of a day’s employment each week next year with UnitingCare’s aged care department, and my youngest daughter is in her last day’s of primary school. In fact, her “graduation” from primary school (and the attendant party) is on the very night that I return home at 2am in the morning – thus missing this milestone in her life by a matter of hours.

We have now arrived in Greece, and our feet are once again upon (at least nominally) Christian soil – the most obvious signs of which are

1) Christmas decorations in the hotel and shops
2) A couple spied kissing on the streets
3) Bacon in the “Potatoes a la crème” for dinner tonight!

We have checked into the Alexander Hotel in Alexandroupoli, about half an hours drive along the ancient Via Ignatia (which we have been following since Istanbul) from the border. Although today it is a nice modern multi-lane freeway, this is the same road that lead from Byzantium to Rome even in Paul’s day, and tomorrow we will meet up with where Paul himself set out on the road from Philippi. Our new Greek guide is Sophia, who seems on first impressions to be a thoroughly good stick, so I think I will enjoy our next few days. It is my first time in Greece, and despite having studied the classics as part of my Adelaide Uni BA, I am far from an expert in this part of the world. But I am really looking forward to “meeting Paul” along this journey.

Dinner tonight was very nice – fish soup, Greek salad with balsamic dressing, potatoes a la crème (aka scalloped potatoes – which the aforementioned bacon – yum yum), a nice local Greek Syrah wine (aka Shiraz), and a piece of honeyed cake for dessert. Peter and I had a bit of a surprise on entering our room: the two single beds were made up as one double bed with a single doona covering the whole shebang! That was a little too friendly for us, so we asked for them to be made up separately…

The long journey today was tiring – I think we must have covered at least 500km in addition to the visit to Gallipoli. But I spent most of the day listening to music on my iPhone and meditating on this that or the other as we went through the rather indifferent countryside. I haven’t actually seen anything of Greece yet – it was getting dark when we pulled up at customs on the Turkish side of the border, and thoroughly dark when we came out of the Duty Free shop (with the necessary alcohol for the week ahead – a litre of whisky for $13 – cheaper than their bottles of wine – I doubt if even Peter and I can make it through that much in the next week, but at that price I won’t mind leaving the remainder behind). Crossing the border on bus was a new experience. Unlike the crossing from Jordan to Israel, which was as difficult, if not more so, than any airport border crossing, this one simply involved a number of showings of our passport, changing buses (with the bus drivers transferring our luggage) and driving on through. The bridge between the two countries has railing either side – we knew we had left Turkey and entered Greece when the railing turned from red and white to blue and white.

The rain was still pelting down and the temperature at about 9 degrees and lightening all around us as we drove to the hotel. My iPhone weather app tells me that we will have fine, if very cold, weather for most of the rest of our trip down to Athens, so that is very nice too. Our room overlooks an expanse of lawn, and on the other side of the lawn is the ocean. There is a doorway and porch outside our room, so I am looking forward to waking early and taking in the view as the sun rises. I am currently sitting in the bar smoking the pipe I bought in the Bazaar yesterday. When I arrived, I tentatively asked the same question I have been asking since leaving Jordan (expecting the answer “No”): Is there somewhere in the hotel where I can smoke? Imagine my joy when I received the answer “But of course!” No “of course” about it, but I am very glad that I do not have to sit out in the freezing weather outside. There is even an open log fire here….

Monday, 10th December, 2012
Istanbul (Day three)

For all photos for 10th December, click here to view them on my dropbox site. If you don’t have Dropbox, use this link to sign up and you and I will both get a bonus amount of free storage space.

Our third day in Istanbul. It is very cold outside, about 7 degrees, and wet. This cold weather could be with us for the rest of the trip. It is about ten to five in the afternoon and almost dark outside. Most of the rest of the group are out doing local walking tours shopping and sight seeing – Rosemary took a group off on the couple of kilometres walk to the Galata Tower. I have never been there, and had the weather been a little more pleasant would have enjoyed the walk. Instead, I have decided to take advantage of the fact that I am staying in a nice hotel with nice warm heating…

We had a late start today, which was very welcome. Originally this was going to be a free day but the plans were changed a number of times. Nevertheless, at 10am we set off for the Grand Bazaar for those who wanted to do some shopping. I did want to do some shopping for gifts and such but had little expectation that I would find anything I wanted in the Bazaar. I did want to search up for a couple of books on the places we visited, and so, although warned not to head of on our own, this is precisely what I did (I didn’t have a “shopping buddy” with the same interests as me – where is Fraser Pearce when you need him?). There is a small corner that sells all kinds of books, old and new, but mostly in Turkish, of course. Nevertheless, I did find a couple of very nice coffee-table style books on Turkey and Cappadocia – but they weighed a ton and I wasn’t minded to drag them all the way home with me. Wandering back into the main part of the Bazaar, I paused to look at a pile of cheap Meerschaum pipes. Of course, when you do this, you are invited into the shop for a cup of tea and a chat. This one was a very tiny little store, just room for the owner and myself to sit, as he pulled out pipe after pipe to show me, and talked in broken English of the governments, taxes, and hope for the future. Universal concerns, really. With my hands full of pipes, I had to choose one, and so, as I handed each one back and the as the price fell from 65 Turkish Lira to 40, he and I finally clinched a deal. Another spare one for the office.

I wandered around for a bit more, and then realised that I hadn’t actually taken any notice of when we were supposed to be meeting back at Gate 7. I took out my iphone and texted Rosemary – I had fifteen minutes to be back there. I checked the spot that I had marked on my Pocket Maps app (also on the iPhone) and saw that I was at the opposite side of the Bazaar from where we had to meet (as usual). I used the direction finding capability of the app to find my way back through the maze of shops to the other side, and arrived with a few minutes to spare.

We then headed around toward the Church of St Saviour in Chora, via a tour of the city walls. Some parts of the walls are being restored with funding from UNESCO, others are still in ruins. The walls protected Constantinople from invasion from the Turks for almost four hundred years, but were finally breached with the aid of the new invention of cannons powered by gun powder. A story for another time.

I had visited the Chora church last time I was in Istanbul in 2009. It is a little off the main tourist road, and so was not so crowded – certainly not on a day as inclement as this one. the main attraction of the Chora Church is the many mosaics and frescoes preserved mostly in its two narthexes and side chapel, despite the building having been used for a mosque for about 400 years. In the main, the pictures were simply plastered over – when the plaster was removed in the master restoration, there they were as fresh as they day they were put there. The main nave and sanctuary of the church is a little less interesting as the walls are mainly marble covered brick. The original church on this site was constructed during the reign of Justinian in the 6th Century, and some little evidence is visible of this church on the ground outside near the apse of the church. More evidence – the base of some walls – remains of the late 11th century church are also in the same location. Finally rebuilt to the present structure in the early 14th century, this is the period from which most of the images date. Most notable are the series depicting in detail (like a comic book) the life of the Blessed Virgin from her conception to the conception, birth and ministry of our Lord, and inside the sanctuary a large panel mosaic of the Dormition. In the side chapel, which was probably used as a burial place, there is the magnificent and classic fresco of the Anastasis of Adam and Even – otherwise known as the Harrowing of Hades. I had intended to spend a bit of time sitting in the church praying (Hakan gave us plenty of time), but it was really very cold and I didn’t feel very inclined. Instead I went and had a look at the small museum shop (yes, this place, like Hagia Sophia, is also a museum) for books. I couldn’t find the ones I was looking for – “Paintings of the Dark Church” and “Biblical Turkey”, but I did find “Churches of Istanbul” and “”Biblical Anatolia” – the latter virtually the same as the “Biblical Turkey” book I was looking for and the former a good guide book to the sacred places in the City. Frustratingly, the “Churches of Istanbul” does not include a map showing the locations of these churches – the same thing I noticed in the Istanbul exhibition in the Museum on our first day here.

We grabbed a bite to eat at the cafe near the Chora, a toasted sandwich and a cup of Salep (the hot white milky spiced drink) for about $5, and I had a chance to sit and smoke my new pipe and read a few pages of my new books. The last time I was here it was a beautifully warm and sunny Spring day – what a contrast!

Then it was back on the bus for our last visit of this short day – one of Hakan’s “icing on the cake” events: and indeed it was – a visit to the Fenar, that is, to the Church of St George which is the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew. I had not visited this place on either of my two previous trips – last time because the date of our visit coincided with Orthodox Holy Week and Easter. I remember clearly watching Pope Benedict during his visit here for Vespers on the Feast of St Andrew in 2006, and it was a joy to visit the church which is now, by default, the mother church of our Eastern brethren and sistern. You can read about this church and its history on this page on the Patriarchate’s website: http://www.patriarchate.org/patriarchate/stgeorge. A special unexpected pleasure was being able to venerate the relics of St John Chrysostom and St Gregory “The Theologian” (aka Gregory Nazianzus – one of the three Cappadocian Fathers), who were both in their time Patriarchs of Constantinople and whose relics had been in the possession of the Roman Church until John Paul II returned them to the Patriarchate in 2004. Clearly visible inside the beautiful white marble caskets were the bones of these saints. We were all very moved by this encounter.

And so the day’s tour came to an end. Tomorrow we leave Turkey and head for Greece via Gallipoli. I don’t know if I will ever visit this city again – chances are that I will (given that I have been here three times in the last five years), but if I do I would like to come back here with my wife and family, to share some of the wonders I have seen with them.

Sunday, 9th December, 2012
Istanbul: Hippodrome, Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, Cisterns and Bosphorus

For all photos for 9th December, click here to view them on my dropbox site. If you don’t have Dropbox, use this link to sign up and you and I will both get a bonus amount of free storage space.

The traffic outside our window was quite noisy overnight, and woke me again in the morning at about 6:30am. We were starting the day at 9am, so I had some time to go up to the 11th floor landing after breakfast and do a bit of writing while having the first pipe of the day. It was pretty chilly up there – today will not get any warmer than 14 degrees. I have to keep reminding myself that we are heading into a European winter now. The days are quite short, with the sun only coming up at about 7:30am and setting around 4:30pm. As I may have commented in a few places, the tourist crowds are not that heavy, so there is little waiting in line for entry to places, and the hotels are far from full (in some cases we have been almost the only guests). That and the good exchange rate on the Australian dollar means that we are really getting value for money on this trip.

I resolved at the beginning of the day not to take too many photographs, as I had visited each of today’s destinations twice before. I decided to take everything a little bit more slowly, learn new facts, and see corners and details that I have not seen before. We went first to the Hippodrome. There isn’t a lot to see of this any more except the shape and outline of the old stadium – most of it is buried under about 10 feet of modern Istanbul. When I was here last, the Hippodrome was still a long U-shaped roadway, but this time I discovered that the whole area has been repaved as an open walkway. There is still space for vehicles to drive if necessary, but it appears that a working road it has been closed off. The main attractions in this area are the Kaiser’s fountain, the 3,500 year old granite Obelisk of Thutmosis III (which Emperor Theodosius brought over from Egypt in 390AD), the so-called Walled Obelisk built in the 10th Century by Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus (which was originally clad in bronze plates – but these were nicked by the Fourth Crusaders), and the Serpent Column (about 2,500 years old, nicked from Greece by Constantine the Great, and originally a tripod, consisting of three intertwined snakes holding a bowl at the top – only the column base remains today – although one of the snake heads is in the museum we went to yesterday). These all stand along the “spina” or spine of the race track to mark the centre of the arena.

We moved then to the “Blue Mosque”, which is really a foreign nickname for what is officially the Sultan Ahmed Camii, named after the Sultan who commissioned it and completed in 1616. You can read the details anywhere on the web (just google it – there is a good summary at http://www.istanbultrails.com/2008/05/the-blue-mosque-once-of-the-most-famous-misunderstandings/). Geographically and architecturally it is related to Hagia Sophia on the other side of the intervening park, even though there is about a 1000 years between the two. Personally, I quite like the mosque – despite the superficial similarities, the mosque and the church are two very different buildings. Some draw attention to the fact that the architect of the mosque needed to rest the dome on four gigantic pillars (the “elephants feet”) whereas the Hagia Sophia dome appears to be unsuspended, but the way the HS dome holds up is with the incredibly ugly and bulky buttresses on the outside of the building which were put there by the Ottomans. Despite the pillars, the overall effect inside the mosque and out is of light and space. Having been in the Blue Mosque several times in the past (once memorably for dawn prayers on my 2009 visit with our Muslim fellow pilgrims), I decided to spend our “free time” in the building by sitting in a back corner and saying morning prayer.

We then passed through the park to the Hagia Sophia “museum” on the other side of the park. Again, if you don’t know anything about this church – google it. What you need to know is that it was built by the Emperor Justinian, and consecrated for use in 537AD (there were two previous buildings on the site by the same name, but both were destroyed by fire – bits of the second one are lying around on display in the yard around the current building). It was the seat of the Patriarchs of Constantinople, and the largest church in existence until the building of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome in the 16th Century. By then, Hagia Sophia had begun her second career as a mosque, as the Ottomans had conquered Constantinople in 1453. She began her third career as a museum under Ataturk in 1935. Her greatest architectural attraction, beside sheer size, is her dome, which, while it never held the record for the largest in existence (that belonged to the Pantheon in Rome), was the largest masonry dome and the first and largest “pendentive” dome (ie. not directly supported by columns, but by segments of domes “hanging” of the sides). The interior of this dome once sported a magnificent mosaic “Pantocrator” icon of Christ. Perhaps it is still there – under the plaster and paint of the Muslim decoration. We shall never know. The authorities are not about to start ripping off the venerable design that is there in the hope of finding something else underneath it.

In actual fact this is the first time I have visited Hagia Sophia when there has not been scaffolding in the centre of the church working on the dome and the side designs. Today, for the first time, I was able to appreciate the sheer immensity of the building in all her glory. One new thing: there are four cherubim (Hakan called them “archangels” but there usually are only three archangels in tradition, and these have six wings, so I reckon they are the cherubim) in each of the “pendent” corners of the dome (they would originally have encircled the Pantocrator). The faces of these cherubim were covered with brass pieces by the Muslims, but one has recently been removed to reveal a face done in quite intricate mosaic work. I revisited all the mosaic pieces in the top southern gallery of the church. I could never tire of looking at these (see the photos for all the detail). Again, I found myself in the situation of having seen all I wished to see in the building, and so found a quiet corner in which to sit and pray the Office of Readings. I was intrigued to watch, out of the corner of my eye, a young man also sitting cross-legged nearby, deep in thought. He had a book at which he would occasionally glance, but he had an air of great recollection about him. I would have liked to have taken his photo, but felt that this would have been an intrusion on his meditation. Like the Blue Mosque, it is possible to pray in Hagia Sophia despite the crowds of tourists. It is a place that inspires awe and leads to contemplation. (Note: Add to the list of things to do before you die: visit Hagia Sophia. And if you already have, make sure you visit one more time before you die.)

The time ticked by very quickly, and I had to rush outside to get a few photos of the excavated pieces of “Hagia Sophia Mark II” before making our rendezvous with Hakan at the Baptistery. This is new – not the baptistery, of course, which was very old, but the fact that tourists are now allowed into this part of the building. There is not much to see, but for the huge baptismal font made out of a single piece of marble. Designed along the same lines as the immersion fonts at St Mary’s in Ephesus and St John’s at Selcuk, this font had steps leading down into it on both sides. But this one is much, much bigger, as big around as a child’s blow-up wading pool. Originally embedded in the floor of the baptistery, when the Muslims took over the building, they pulled it up and pushed it into a corner, where they used it to store oil. I guess such a large marble basin would have no leaks to speak of and so was regarded as useful to have around.

Over lunch in a near by restaurant (all the food was displayed in the front window and you pointed at what you wanted – I had some very nice mince-meat-and-mint stuffed tomatoes and zucchini topped with mashed potatoes) we discussed the matter of the bits and pieces that are here, there and everywhere from other places and of which the “original owners” are demanding their return. The most (in)famous case is that of the Elgin Marbles, and Hakan has mentioned quite a number of Turkish treasures that are elsewhere (usually in German and British museums) and which he would like to see returned to Turkey. And yet… what would his reaction be to Egypt asking for the return of the Obelisk in the Hippodrome, or Palestine, Syria and elsewhere asking for the return of the antiquities in the museum we looked at yesterday? Then we fell to the topic of the return of the Hagia Sophia to the Patriarchate for use as a church. “Give them Cordoba in exchange for Hagia Sophia”, suggested my conversation partner. I prefer a kind of “two-state” solution, and would like to think that the old girl could come out of retirement and take up both her earlier careers again: is there not room upstairs for the Muslims to have (for eg.) the northern transept and the Christians to have the (again for eg.) southern transept behind the Marble Door? The rest could remain a museum and everyone could be happy… Well, perhaps not.

Next stop was the cisterns, which really are quite spectacular. Again, google and see the pictures. This location was used in one of the recent James Bond movies. Very cool. Literally.

All day, the rain had been threatening, and despite a few drops while we were out in the Hippodrome, never really came to anything. The afternoon was cloudy and cold, but fine and – as tomorrow has been forecast rainy and windy – it was thought best to use our afternoon by doing the Bosphorus cruise (another one of the standard items on any Istanbul visit) this afternoon. As I have said (I think) about a dozen times, it is off-season here at the moment, and all the cruise boats are moored at the banks of the Bosphorus unemployed. So I was not surprised to see that we had a big craft all to ourselves. You could have played lawn bowls on the deck at the back (although the rocking course would have caused some challenges). Having seen all there was to see on this cruise several times, and having gigabytes of photos at home to prove it, I determined to take photographs of the group members enjoying the scenery. I lit my pipe and sat out back and just let the banks of the Bosphorus flow past.

And so we were back at the hotel at about 4pm – by which time it was already getting dark. I had time to upload the photos, do a bit of writing, wash some clothes, and have a shower, all before our Sunday mass at 6:30pm. Dinner tonight was again served on the 11th floor and again a fixed menu. The menu was chicken tonight, after a mushroom soup, with the same kind of strange un-ice-cream dessert that we had last night. One effect of a “sit-down” meal, as opposed to the usual buffet, is that we all remained deep in conversation and enjoyment of each other’s company much longer than normal.

At about 8:30pm, I returned to our room and kept writing up today’s story. It has turned out much longer than I expected, and is now about 10pm. Fr Peter is just turning out the light, and I think I will too.

Saturday, 8th of December (Feast of the Immaculate Conception)
Kusadasi to Izmir to Istanbul

For all photos for 8th December, click here to view them on my dropbox site. If you don’t have Dropbox, use this link to sign up and you and I will both get a bonus amount of free storage space.

I am a bit behind in writing up today’s travelogue so I will be brief. Please excuse this.

We were up early to leave at 6:30am to catch the 9am flight to Istanbul from the Izmir airport. Unfortunately we were not able to spend any time in Izmir, that is, ancient Smyrna. As one of the seven churches of the Apocalypse, it would have merited some time spent here at least (also as the burial place of St Polycarp – one of our earliest and historically most definite links to the apostle John).

We arrived in Istanbul at a bit after 10am and went directly to the Spice Markets for a bit of shopping. I hadn’t been here before – I had visited the Grand Bazaar but not this place. I enjoyed it – but probably spent a little more money than I needed to. I have found that haggling is less difficult on this trip than other times I have visited – the sellers seem keen to get a sale at almost any price. Maybe a symptom of the off-peak season. I bought some saffron – which is one thing I tried buying last time I was at the Bazaar but I brought the wrong kind (which is normally sold as “Turkish saffron” and includes parts of the plant) and it wasn’t allowed back through customs in Australia. They informed me that had I purchased just strands of saffron, it would have been allowed. So that is what I bought this time. I also bought some Jasmine tea balls, which have been vacuum sealed, so I will see if that is successful in getting it through customs Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

We then had lunch at a nearby buffet (which included the excellent “Asura” or “Noah’s” pudding), before heading around to the Topkapi Palace – not to see the Palace (that in itself isn’t on the agenda, and I have seen it twice before) but to visit the excellent antiquities museum that is in the grounds of the palace (not to be confused with the museum exhibits in the Palace itself). We passed the Church of Holy Peace or Sancta Irene, where the Second Ecumenical Council was held in 381. I have been inside this church on my last trip (although it is not the original church Justinian built) but it is not usually open to tourists, and wasn’t for us on this trip either. However, from here we were able to look across the Bosphorus to the location of the Fourth Ecumenical Council, Chalcedon (the modern suburb of Istanbul called Kadikoy), easily identifiable by two “twin towers” office buildings.

The Museum was indeed excellent, with many features, such as a bronze statue of the emperor Hadrian, the stone from the Jerusalem temple forbidding entry of gentiles into the inner court of the temple (Paul’s so-called “dividing wall”, cf Eph 2:14), a tablet with the earliest example of Hebrew writing, and a commemorative tablet with the story of the successful construction of Hezekiah’s tunnel at the Pool of Siloam in Jerusalem. It also has a great display of material from the excavations at Troy (which I visited on my first trip to Turkey), although not Schleeman’s famous “Treasure A”, which has gone AWOL. Most of the rest of the tour group focused on the ancient Hittite and other Bronze Age exhibits which have relevance to the study of the Old Testament, but I found myself attracted to the Roman and Byzantine sections (there is a statue of a rather more updated Artemis than that at Ephesus), and especially a good exhibition on the history of Istanbul. If you look at the photos, you will see that I have taken a good many snaps of the various explanatory panels with the exhibits – because there was some very good information on these which I would like to use in teaching history in the future. These will probably not be of interest to most readers of this ‘ere blog. One exhibit will, though – a section of the length of chain that famously crossed the entrance to the Golden Horn river to protect the city from attack by sea.

One thing I found interesting about the Istanbul exhibit was its concentration on the many churches that were within the city. One panel listed all the churches and other Byzantine structures that were converted into mosques (24 in all), all the churches not converted into mosques (7, two of which are still used as churches), and Byzantine churches and structures formerly used as mosques but no longer existing today (18 in all). So. 49 structures converted into mosques, two of which are churches still today. It would be very interesting to do a tour of Istanbul identifying all these structures and locations. I have also been struck – again as I was on my previous visits – by the different narratives of history that are told by the Turks as opposed to western narratives. For instance, one panel described the sack of the city by the Fourth Crusade thus: “the greatest destruction visited upon the city occurred with the invasion of the Latins in 1204”. In contrast, the Turkish conquest in 1453 is described as “both extremely civilised and rational”. Sultan Mehmet II is praised for issuing decrees “for the repair of fortifications” (who blew them to smithereens in the first place?).

It is useless today to try to point out that the invasion was not carried out by the Latin Church (Pope Innocent III condemned the action of the Crusaders) but directed by the veniality of the Venetians. After 800 years, this remains a blight on the good name of the Catholic Church in this area both among the Greeks and the Turks. it is a reminder to us that the horrific scandals of the Church (including the present scandal) will never, in a sense, be “over”. History cannot be obliterated. It can only be faced honestly and without censorship. That does mean, however, that we can excuse ourselves from the necessity of trying to understand the events of history in their context. The eighth commandment tells us, as Martin Luther so wonderfully put it, to always put the best construction on everything our neighbour says and does – even if our gut reaction is one of suspicion and condemnation.

We are staying at a hotel on the other side of the Golden Horn River today. We passed a new bridge being built across the Golden Horn, and an underground subway has been constructed too – but not opened. We are near the Galata (original “Christ”) Tower on the central peninsula of the city (still on the European side), and had dinner in a room overlooking the Golden Horn Bridge with its marvellous light display. We celebrated Mass for the feast of the Immaculate Conception. Fr Chris was the celebrant as it is the 30th anniversary of his entry into the novitiate as a Franciscan friar.

It has been a good day. I have seen parts of Istanbul that I haven’t visited before. Tomorrow will be different as we head into the Old City to visit the Hagia Sophia, Blue Mosque and so on. Still, I could happily visit these places a thousand times!

Friday, 7th December 2012
Ephesus

For all photos for 7th December, click here to view them on my dropbox site.

I woke this morning to the sound of crashing waves below us. And thunder. And rain. And hail against the window. Not a good omen for the day. I looked at the weather on my iPhone, and saw that the hourly breakdown was 70% chance of rain all day. Well, I thought, that leaves a window of 30% that we might have fine weather for our visit to Ephesus. Having learnt a lesson from our visit to Perge, I did not put on fresh clothes today, and instead of wearing my suede leather runners (which got soaked through in five minutes last time), I put on my black leather shoes (my “good” shoes), polished up to be extra water repellant. I packed the large plastic bag that my washing came in a few days ago, to wear as extra protection around my waist and trouser legs. Unfortunately, the umbrella which I had bought at Perge had been left behind in the hotel at Antalya, but if I needed to, I would buy another.

Besides the inclement weather, I had mixed feelings about the day ahead. I had been to Ephesus once before, in 2007 on the Australian Intercultural Society. That trip introduced me to the area, but left me with a number of questions, some things I did not get to see, and some things I wanted to have a second look at. In many senses, Ephesus had been a kind of half-finished visit: I was hopeful that today would sew up a few loose ends.

Our first port of call, “The House of Mary”, is one of those places I have mixed feelings about. One of the things I have been reflecting upon during the entire trip is the role of tradition in both our Christian stories and the lands connected to our stories: what is the relation of tradition to “history”? This has come out especially in conversations with our tour guides. In general, it is my rule to give the benefit of the doubt to tradition (the older and more widely attested the better), and if the tradition happily fits with other “evidence” of a more scientific or documentary nature, well and good. My problem with “The House of Mary”, is that the “tradition” for this particular place is a bit shaky, to say the least. There is a row of large signs in about ten different languages at the entrance to the site detailing the “evidence” for the site:

1) Mary was given into John’s care by Jesus at the crucifixion
2) The tomb of St John is in Ephesus
3) Ephesus is the site of the first Church in the world to be dedicated to “Saint Mary” (and the place where the Ecumenical Council pronounced her “Theotokos”)
4) The continuous tradition of the local Orthodox community that this was the place of the Dormition

Now, the last one seems to me to conflict with the other tradition that Mary’s Dormition took place in Jerusalem (we had recently visited the great church built in Jerusalem in honour of this event), but I can live with that. The rest points to the fact that Ephesus in general was thought of as the place where Mary lived into her old age with the apostle John, whether or not it was here or in Jerusalem that she finally concluded her earthly life. But as for this place on top of the mountain, and the “house” that is said to have been the “House of Mary”? Well, the source for that is the visionary account of “The Life of the Blessed Virgin” by none other than the very same 19th Century German nun who provided Mel Gibson with his overly dramatic version of the Passion of the Christ, Blessed Katherine Emmerich. Now, Blessed Katherine had never left Germany in her entire life, yet she had a vision which described the “House of Mary” on a hilltop outside Ephesus, and a priest with rather more faith in her visions that I would have had, packed his shovel and his copy of “The Life of the Blessed Virgin” and headed off to Ephesus to go looking for the a “house” that matched this description. Of course, he found one: the foundations of a two room building from somewhere between the first and fourth century. And, voila, a new Marian site has been established. A small chapel has been built upon these foundations, which is now the focal point for the pilgrims.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a beautiful place, very peaceful. It has attracted many pilgrims – Catholic, Orthodox, and even Muslim – to prayer. Even popes have graced the place with their presence – most recently Pope Benedict XVI celebrated mass here when he visited Turkey in 2007. And since Mary is well and truly associated with Ephesus, it is good that visitors have somewhere specific to honour her. I just wish we could simply call the place a shrine to Mary, and not get to worked up about Blessed Katherine’s dreams regarding this building being the actual “House” that Mary lived in while she was in Ephesus. And a place is sanctified by the prayer offered there, so that is something too, and over time the sanctity of the place will only increase. We celebrated mass here this morning, in the chapel of the Franciscan monastery attached to the site. It was Fr Chris’
30th anniversary of his entry into the novitiate, so it was appropriate that he be the celebrant. It is also the day before the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. We seem to be doing this regularly: 2 days early at Myra for the Feast of St Nicholas, and a day early at “Mary’s House” for the Immaculate Conception.

It was still raining – but lightly – when we came out from mass, so Rosemary and I sat in the verandah of the cafe on the site and she shouted me an apple tea. We then got back on the bus and headed around to the principle attraction of the area: the largest site of Roman ruins in existence, the ancient town of Artemis the Great, in which St Paul preached and taught for three years and St John the Apostle lived out his final days – Ephesus.

By the time we arrived, the rain had cleared away and the sun was shining in blue skies. Deo Gratias! Again, there were things I was looking forward to here after a rather disappointing visit the first time. I was very ill prepared for my first visit, and this lack of preparation was not enhanced by a tour guide who knew nothing (much) of the Christian significance of the site. So he did what many tour guides do: he brought people in at the Eastern end, and ended in the middle of the town at the “climax” of the tour, the Library. He thus completely failed to direct us either the great theatre in which the riot over Paul’s gospel took place (cf. Acts 19), or to the Church of St Mary in which the 3rd Ecumenical Council was held in 431AD (and in which Nestorianism was condemned and Mary declared the “Theotokos”, or “Bearer of God”, as an assertion of the divinity of Christ). You may ask, how is it possible to miss the theatre? We had spent ages at the odeon at the other end, which I thought WAS the theatre, and then, from the Library, we were told that we had five minutes to get to the bus at the Western entrance, and then my attention was attracted by the Harbour, so I simply did not notice until I turned around at the exit that there was a thumping great theatre behind me. The Church, on the other hand, is very easy to miss. It is often not even on maps of Ephesus – which routinely stop at the Theatre and the Harbour, without showing any features of the other, western half of the town.

So, given all that, I was keen to see what I could this time. As in 2007, we entered via the east. Hakan did a much better job of introducing the various buildings and ruins here than my previous guide, for instance, pointing out the place where there was a great temple to the Emperor Domitian (the one who traditionally is supposed to have exiled St John). This temple has been entirely demolished – the work of Christians after Christianity became the state religion – although its foundations remain, and the storerooms under the temple were used by the Christians to store archival material. There was evidence of a few features along the street toward the library being put in place since my last visit: a mausoleum, a pediment for the statue of a god, the Heracles Gate barring the way to through traffic (this may have been here last time, but I don’t remember it). Before we reached the Library, we came to the large roofed structure that covers the south side of the hill at that point. Under this roof is an excavation of a series of about half a dozen large houses and luxury units belonging to some of the more wealthy citizens of ancient Ephesus. This had been closed on my last visit, so I was really very excited when Hakan declared it an “optional extra icing on the cake” for anyone who wanted to pay the 15 lira to go inside. “But don’t do it if you have weak knees – there are over 200 steps!” Well, that deterred everyone in the group except myself, so Hakan said that I had twenty minutes, and to meet them back down by the library.

This was a real highlight of today’s tour. The excavation is a work in progress, but they have progressed a long way. As I said, about six separate dwellings of different sizes have been unearthed, and they all have different characters. One has a large peristyle garden with columns around the rim; the same house had a large “basilica” style meeting room. Most of the excavated houses had bare brick walls, but restoration work was being done to show the original appearance. Many thousands of pieces of tile and marble have been found and are all laid out on tables ready to be put together like a jigsaw puzzle. A large number have already been re-affixed to the walls, to show how the houses were decorated. But the plaster walls in some of the houses have been perfectly preserved along with their decorative frescoes – not pictures as such, but floral and plant and animal designs, in rustic reds and pale greens. And in many of these houses are some of the most fantastic floor mosaic work I have seen on the whole trip – including a beautiful lion, a Medusa head, and one of Neptune and Aphrodite(?). The whole place gave me the best sense I have ever had about how the Romans lived together in large numbers in cramped quarters, some in great luxury. It was so vivid that I half expected to bump into a Roman walking around in the corridors below me.

I made it on time down to the Library, which I had seen very well on my earlier trip, but I did check out the Agora on that side, which I had not really seen before. There are some displays in the niches around the agora, including one with a statue of Artemis (I don’t know if it was original – I suspect not). Then Hakan, pointed out to us where the Theatre, the Harbour and the Church were to be accessed and left us to our own devices for another half an hour or so. I tramped around in the theatre, having a good look about. Much of theatre isn’t there anymore – although a lot of it has been rebuilt. But it was never, as far as I could see, a solid marble job, and much of the marble cladding is now missing. In the incident related in the story in Acts 19, Paul did not enter the theatre, because the rioting crowds filled it shouting “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” for two hours. I climbed to the top and then came back down to the base, to find Fr Peter there with his arm in the air (doing a good impression of Michael Palin in a Monty Python skit) shouting a little half-heartedly “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” (This got a giggle out of a passing tourist, who turned out to be from Melbourne!). I should have taken a picture, but the rain had begun again, just lightly, and I didn’t want my camera to get too wet.

I had wished to explore the Harbour area, but this was blocked off. Nearby, Hakan was standing, pointing the way to the Church of St Mary. The way led over a piece of barrier tape that had obviously been put there to keep people off a brand new cobbled pathway which was under construction (I presume he had talked to the management about this and made a special arrangement for us). This led down to the Church ruins, where there were more workmen about their business. It seems that the Austrian team in charge of the excavation is on their way to making the Church of St Mary the next big item on the standard Ephesus tour, and too right they should too. Paul VI really put this place on the map when he visited on the 26th of July 1967, and left behind a plaque saying that, effectively, “The Pope was here”.

The church appears to have two apses, but the sign nearby indicates that the building went through a number of reconstructions, and in the 6th century was actually divided into two churches (it was originally quite long). Adjoining the western courtyard is an octagonal baptistery (four walls between four doorways on a north-south/east-west orientation). The baptistery has steps going down into it on the east-west axis. Fr Peter gave a mock demonstration of adult baptism in the font (mercifully empty of water after the rain) using Irene as a mock-catechumen. The font itself is around about hip-deep.

We then had to make haste back to the bus, and bid Ephesus farewell. We lunched at a road-side buffet before heading up to the hill at the back of modern day Selcuk where the Crusader fortress still stands. When we got out of the bus, the rain had cleared completely and all was nice and dry. The fortress is not accessible to tourists – I believe it is under the control of the military or something like that – but Hakan said there were plans to reopen it to the public. That will be something worth coming back for. But I was coming to this spot with different questions, also left over from my visit five years ago. For a start, I should say that the ruins of the Basilica of St John are a real marvel, and an excellent example of 6th Century liturgical building. Oriented on an almost perfect East-West axis, the building sports a well preserved baptistery – smaller, but somewhat neater than that at St Mary’s and also within octagonal walls (in case you do not know, the octagon was significant for baptism because of the ‘8th Day’ symbolism, the day of resurrection being the day after the 7th day of the Sabbath). It also has a side chapel oriented on the north-south axis, but with the altar still oriented toward the east.

But of course the real attraction here is the “Tomb of St John the Apostle”. This caught me completely by surprise on my last visit – the location of St John’s tomb is not a well known fact among Western Catholics. Well, it is, without a shadow of a doubt, right here in the apse of the Basilica of St John, which is why, of course, the Emperor Justinian built such a whacking great church on the spot in the 6th century. But on my last visit I asked myself why, if this is the burial place of St John, it isn’t teaming with pilgrims? The answer is that, like the tomb of St Philip which we visited a few days ago, St John’s relics are not here. There is no scientific proof of this, but there are at least half a dozen different legends explaining the disappearance of his bodily remains. All the legends agree that John knew he was going to die, had the tomb dug for him and willingly entered it before preaching a sermon and dismissing his disciples. After that, there is some disagreement about what happened. At one end of the legendary spectrum is something very close to a bodily assumption, at the other end there is just the mysterious absence of his remains when his disciples came to dig him up at a later date. Hakan was somewhat incredulous about these traditions, but I pointed out that all the traditions agree that his body is, for one reason or another, not there, and it would be odd for such a body of tradition to grow up if there was a concrete body interred at this spot. He asked me “Have you been down the crypt?” No, I replied, I didn’t even know that there was a crypt. Well, there is, and I didn’t notice it the first time I was here. There is a well-like hole with a grate over it just behind the altar spot in the apse (ie. right over the tomb itself), and, also covered with a grate, there are steps going town below the altar area, ie. right down to the tomb. I need to find out more about this, and when these entrances were dug. Or excavated.

But I had another unanswered question from long ago yet to solve. From the western courtyard of the ruins, you can look down and see the Isa Bey Mosque, a 14th Century Seljuk Turkish construction, built from stone from Ephesus and (to a large extent) St John’s (which had been destroyed by earthquake). Hakan pointed out that it is the first mosque ever to be built with a courtyard – most likely an architectural feature that was borrowed from the Church of St John (as were the double dome feature on the roof of the mosque). But now to the problem: On my last visit, I had noticed that the mosque is strangely aligned. If the church was east-west, then the mosque was facing, not south east toward Mecca as it should, but just west of south, in completely the wrong direction. However, I find my general sense of direction is often out when travelling in the northern hemisphere, and I needed to double check this. I asked Hakan and he said that I could go down there and they would pick me up in twenty minutes. So down I trotted, and happily entered into the garden courtyard of this very beautiful building. It isn’t beautiful in the sense of highly decorated, just pleasing and peaceful in its general arrangement. The Mosque was empty at this time of day, and I went in with my iphone compass app to check it out. I took off my shoes, entered and knelt down for a few quite moments before taking out my “compass” and camera. Sure enough, the Michrab faces 188 degrees South – that is, just a few degrees west of south. “Well, they didn’t have compasses in those days”, protested Hakan, when I spoke to him about it. No, but the Church of St John is perfectly East-West orientated, and you can’t tell me that the Seljuk Turks were not able to do astrology at least as well as the Byzantine Christians. While I was doing my measurements, another tourist guide came in with just a single couple. He looked at me a bit quizzically, and I explained that I was intrigued by the orientation of the place. He just smiled as if to say, “Yes, I know”. So that is one little mystery answered. Or perhaps not. I still have to find out why it is orientated away from Mecca. As a side note, “Isa Bey” means “Lord Jesus” in Turkish – but it doesn’t refer to our Lord. It is dedicated to a local Muslim leader at the time of the construction. His name was “Isa” (which is the Arabic equivalent of Jesus), and so this is really “Mr Isa’s Mosque”.

Well, that was the visit for the day. We drove away from Selcuk passing the single remaining standing column of the temple of Artemis the Great. Poor old girl. She has been supplanted by two major religions already since her day…

Thursday, 6th December
Aphrodisias

For all photos for 6th December, click here to view them on my dropbox site. If you don’t have Dropbox, use this link to sign up and you and I will both get a bonus amount of free storage space.

I think I have died and gone to heaven. I have just checked in to my room at the wonderfully named “Charisma Deluxe” hotel on the shore of the Adriatic in Kusadasi near Selcuk/Ephesus. When I say “shore”, I mean directly on the coast. I am sitting out on the balcony of the room smoking my pipe overhanging the ocean below. The chill is beginning to set in now that the sun has gone down (it is 5:15pm) but when I arrived it was very pleasant outside (no breeze to speak of). To think that this morning in Pamukkale it was near to freezing and raining and grey for most of our journey here this afternoon! Turkey has as many weather zones as Australia!

As I said, we left Pamukkale this morning after a cold and wet night at 8am, and travelled to the other side of the mountain range (out of the Lycos Valley) off the beaten path a bit to get to the ancient site of Aphrodisias. As the name suggests, the city was named after the fertility/love goddess Aphrodite (and her little mate, Eros), to whom there was a major temple. It had been settled earlier, but the Greeks converted it into a major centre in the Hellenistic period, and it continued to be honoured by the Romans. You can guess that in a city named Aphrodite, a major form of “worship” included temple prostitution, and there are very large baths on the site dedicated to the Emperor Hadrian. A beautiful small pool near the baths has a nice marble of statue of a male nude. When Christianity became the state religion under Theodosius in 381, the name of the city was changed to Stauropolis, or “the City of the Cross”, and the temple converted into a Christian church and the surrounding precinct into a centre of Christian learning. The bishop took over the “palace” and the little theatre-like meeting room of the town became a place for ecclesiastical meetings.

The whole site is incredibly beautiful, at least at this time of the year. The grass is green all around, and covered in oak and pomegranate trees (the pomegranates left on the trees were all over-ripe and split open, but tasted very sweet – much better than the sour piece I tried in the hotel this morning). One of the most arresting sights is that of the tetrapylum, a structure at the entrance to the Temple of Aphrodite, designed along the lines of a cross roads covering. Nearby is the grave of the principle excavator of the area, Professor Kenan Erim, who died in 1990, single and childless. He asked to be buried here since the site was his home and every statue he uncovered were his children, and truly, one could hardly hope for a more serene resting place.

Absolutely breathtaking, however, is the stadium on the very northern edge of the city right up against , which Hakan jested is called the “O my God” Stadium, since that is the usual reaction of visitors who enter it for the first time. It is as large as the hippodrome in Istanbul, fully constructed of solid marble, and – without any reconstruction necessary – is virtually complete. I was tempted to run a lap of the stadium, but the danger would have been tripping over a half embedded lump of marble. In addition to this, there is a marvellous theatre, and an agora with a recreational pool in it about twice the size of an Olympic swimming pool.

Hakan left us to our own devices after showing us around the site, and I used the time to tramp over the temple/basilica area and then around behind the baths. I enjoyed just being out in the country side, really – it was a bit like being back home except for the 2000 year old ruins sticking up all around the place – and this was such a beautiful site. I spent so much time on the site itself that I didn’t have time to go into the museum at the entrance as other members of the tour group did. The museum contains much of the statuary found on the site, and other artifacts, which would have given more insight into the history of the city, but I don’t regret having spent my time outside. We gathered back at the entrance and boarded the tractor-trailer transport that had brought us here from the bus stop. Hakan then took us around to a local “rustic” Anatolian restaurant for lunch. This was an extremely nice way to mark the feast of St Nicholas – with a feast! The host came out with a tray of the dishes that he would prepare for us, and went through them, what they were and their prices. While he took our orders, hot bread was served from where they were prepared and baked in the wood fired oven at the back of the restaurant. I chose the soup and the trout, but others had pide, or mushrooms and cheese or fried cheese rolls – all very nice. I have been a bit bored with the hotel buffet style food for the last few days, and it was good to have something a little different and more interesting again.

Then we began our journey toward Ephesus, or, more strictly, Kusadasi where we are staying the next two nights on the Adriatic coast. We rejoined the main highway to Izmir, and then travelled down the Menderes River valley – in ancient times called the “Meander”, from whence we get our word. So you could say we literally “meandered” our way toward the coast. It rained for a good part of the way there, and it appears that we are in for rain for the next few days too.

We arrived in through the town of Selcuk, to which I had been before in 2007, passed by the site of Ephesus, and then pulled in at a leather goods sales room. This was an optional stop along the way, but as I was the only one who didn’t want to take the option, Hakan arranged for a man to drive me to our hotel. this is really a very nice hotel, right on the coast as I said above. I am glad I didn’t waste a moment of time elsewhere as I just wanted to enjoy the location for a bit. It looks like the sea can get pretty rough here at times – there is an expanse of decking below the hotel over the ocean that is undergoing repairs – it appears to have been wrecked by a storm.

I spent some time writing up this entry to my travelogue before the others arrived, and then went with them to mass and dinner. After dinner, I was feeling quite tired, so I went to bed early, about 9pm. There was a thunderstorm brewing in the west…

Wednesday, 5th December,
Pamukkale, Hierapolis, Laodicea, Colossae

For all photos for 5th December, click here to view them on my dropbox site. If you don’t have Dropbox, use this link to sign up and you and I will both get a bonus amount of free storage space.

Today was a big day in terms of places to see, things to absorb and photos to take. We are in the Lycos Valley, staying at a hotel near the modern-day village of Pamukkale, which is ancient Hierapolis. All the places we visited today are within about 1/2 hours drive, so there was not much travelling.

Pamukkale, our first port of call was just down the road from our hotel. I can vividly remember as a kid seeing a faded poster advertising Mediterranean tours which featured people swimming in snow-white pools of steaming turquoise coloured water high up on a hillside. Today, I finally saw where that picture was taken, but alas, there is no more swimming on the hillside. Within the last decade the area has been declared a UN World Heritage spot, and, in order to preserve the unique white travertine rock that form from calcium deposits from the hot springs flowing out of the top of the hill, human traffic has been limited to barefoot traffic along a small pathway. There is also a severe lack of water at the moment, and I understand they are supplementing the water flow, so I did not see the poster-picture turquoise pools.

No matter, we could swim in the hot pools at our hotel. What we had come to see was the ancient city of Hierapolis. Actually people came here as long ago as the 2nd Century BC for exactly the same purpose that they come today, to “take the waters”, and a thriving city grew up in the area, including large bath complexes and (because so many aged and sick people came to the area for relief from their ailments) large necropoli. Among the other attractions are a large theatre (currently being restored) and agora (mainly now marked by a grove of candle pines). But for me, and many others in the group, the real attraction was the Martyrium of St Philip outside the old Byzantine walls (which were inside the previous Roman walls) on a hill on the northwest of the site.

The Martyrium is an interesting building in itself: a huge octagonal church dating from about the mid-5th century, with a number of rooms forming a square around the outside. It is supposed that this was a centre of pilgrimage, as indicated by the “pilgrims way” road, bridge and staircase leading up to the hill from the city. The rooms around the outside would have been for the pilgrims and the burial place of St Philip (it was always supposed) in the centre of the church under the dome. However, while the floor of the Martyrium has not been excavated, a site just a little down on the Eastern side of the hill has been, and in mid-2011 it was announced that the original tomb of the Apostle (and it is the apostle, not the deacon/evangelist who had the seven daughters, cf. Acts 21:8 – there was some confusion about this this morning at the site but I have checked a number of websites on the matter) Philip had been found (cf. http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-sites-places/biblical-archaeology-sites/tomb-of-apostle-philip-found/). In the nearby vicinity there are quite a lot of Greek and Roman tombs (Rosemary said she recalled reading that one of them has a menorah on it but we didn’t have time to search), and the “tomb of the apostle” is just like these, dating from the 1st Century. It has been incorporated into a small church built at about the same time as the Martyrium. That in itself is significant, but the thing that has clinched it in the mind of many, is that this finally explains the design on a “bread stamp” from Hierapolis in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which depicts St Philip standing between two churches, one with a dome, the other the shape of a Roman tomb, both with stairs leading up to them. If you look at the picture on the page on the link given above, you will see this clearly, and, allowing for the fact that as a stamp, the image is back-to-front, you will see that the pointed structure is on the right side (in both senses) of the domed structure.

Two points of interest:

1) on the tomb is inscribed a single word in Greek (I am transcribing it in English letters): APOLLEINARIOS. Anyone got any idea of what that might mean? There was a famous bishop Apollinaris of Laodicea (not very far from here) who was the one who gave us the word “homo-ousious” or “consubstantial” in the Nicene Creed. He lived at about the time the church over the tomb would have been built.

2) Hakan opined that it is unlikely that the tomb of St Philip could be what it claims to be, since all but one of the apostles were martyred, and if they were martyred, there was no way in which we would know what happened to their bodies. John being the exception, as he died of old age, we know where his remains are. I disagreed with him on both counts, as the cases of Peter and Paul are clear instances of knowing where the bodies of two martyred apostles are, and that as far as my inquiries had led me to understand, John’s remains are no longer in the tomb at Ephesus. After the rest of the group went exploring, the two of us had a spirited discussion on this matter, and on the relationship between tradition and history.

The relics of St Thomas are not, of course, at Hierapolis any more. They were moved to Constantinople over a thousand years ago, and the most likely place you will find them today is the place that the Roman Church claims they now are: in the Church of the 12 Apostles in Rome next to the relics of St James. However, I did take the time to sit between the Martyrium and the tomb and to pray for my parish, St Philip’s Blackburn North, for all its members and for their priest, Fr Nicholas Dillon.

We only had two hours on the site, so this did not leave a lot of time for further exploring. I set off down the hill towards the Agora, and made my way back south towards the entrance on the city. I passed an interesting sight on my right (the east) as I walked back – a Roman tomb half submerged in the white travertine rock. Nearby were some workers with a jackhammer clearing one of the water conduits. Hakan told us that unlike other excavation cites, much of Hierapolis has had to be either chiselled or jack hammered out of the rock, as it is covered in just this hard deposit of travertine. A little further on, I saw a large number of workers on the travertine slopes, working among the luke-warm waters. I wasn’t sure what they were doing, but Hakan informs me they were cleaning the rocks.

On the way back, I detoured for a visit the ruins of the city’s official cathedral. The whole city was always prone to earthquakes, as a large fault line runs through the Valley of the River Lycos, in which Hierapolis, Laodicea and Colossae were all situated. It is because of this fault line that the hot springs are here in the first place. Hierapolis was wrecked a number of time by earthquakes in its history, but a final quake in the 7th Century did the city in and it was never fully resettled again.

I was running short of time, but there was one last thing I just had to do. I went over to the south-west edge of the hill where there path down to Pamukkale began through the travertine pools, took off my shoes and waded into the lukewarm flowing water. The rocks were indeed very slippery, so I had to watch my step. It was very pleasant and relaxing, and I wished that I had the time to walk all the way down the path to the bottom. But on a guided tour there are always time limits, and so I rushed on to the front gates to catch the bus.

We had lunch at a nearby buffet restaurant. I am becoming a little bored with the general Turkish buffet layout, which ultimately develops something of a sameness about it everywhere you go. Not without the occasional surprise, however. I took a helping of each of the cooked vegetable dishes, only to find back at the table that it was all cold. The yoghurt dip made it taste better.

Then we visited a very big location indeed – in both size and significance: Laodicea (or Laodikeia as it was on the signs). The main biblical significance of this city is its inclusion in the “seven churches” of the book of the Revelation, in which it gets pretty short shrift from the Lord (cf. Rev 3:14ff). It is mentioned in St Paul’s letter to the Colossians (Col 4:12ff), where he asks the Colossians to extend his greetings to the church in Laodicea – the two places are only about ten or twelve kilometres apart. Hakan is convinced that, although we do not have any documentary evidence, Paul would have passed through either or both of Colossae and Laodicea on his journey from Pisidian Antioch to Ephesus because this is the way the road lead, and the these were the major cities in the Lycos Valley.

Laodicea is a bigger site than Colossae (at least at the present) which we will come to in a moment. In fact it is a kilometre or more from one end to the other. This is a working excavation, being undertaken by an Italian team, and they are being very busy digging up new things and restoring the old structures. Hakan says that every time he visits, there is something new that has been turned up or reconstructed. This time was no different. Hakan had engaged the services of one of the archaeologists on the site to show us around. The archaeologist, unfortunately, could speak no English, but he did take us to working spots, and in some cases allowed us to enter sites that were otherwise blocked off to visitors. I know you all want me to talk about the Roman and Hellenistic buildings, but you will have to excuse my own particular interests and put up with me waxing lyrical about the 4th Century church known as the “Laodicea Holy Excursion Church” for a little bit. This has already been identified and described in various books (including the latest guides to the city – a very good one is available for 3 lira in the kiosk shop on site), but the excavation is still going on and full publication of results has not yet been made, so we were not allowed to take any pictures inside the building. But I won’t be telling any tales out of school if I say this (a piece of information already in said guide book): the church has eleven apses! The main apse faces just a little south of East (that in itself may be of interest), either side of it, at the end of the two side aisles, are two more apses, and then there are another eight apses, four down each side aisle. What does this mean? Is each apse to be taken as a “side chapel”? If so, this is a very early (and oddly eastern) example of such a construction. What does it mean liturgically?

Other things of note. An impressive reconstruction has been done of “Temple A” – probably associated with the cult of the Roman Emperor and originally built in the second century AD. It was renovated by the Emperor Diocletian at the turn of the 3rd and 4th Centuries, just in time for the legalisation of Christianity under Constantine. During the Christian period, the temple was used as an archive until an earthquake destroyed it in the late 5th Century. The restoration gives a good sense of the original construction and includes a “sky deck” kind of arrangement where the inner sanctuary would have been over a basement which has been excavated. Another site, around which there is a lot of present activity, is the “Sacred Area Precinct”. This site is under current reconstruction, with a number of the columns along the edge of the precinct having been raised up again. Further, more excavations have recently shown that the length of this precinct is at least 50 meters longer than previously thought, making it the longest columned portico yet uncovered. See the photos for impressive pictures.

Next stop, Colossae, Rosemary’s self confessed “love of her life”. I am sure her husband has no need to feel jealous, as it is just a mound of dirt and rocks. Of course, it is much more than that. It is an unexcavated tel, like Lystra a couple of days ago, or Konya. Like Lystra, it is out in the countryside surrounded by farms, near the village of Honaz, under the shade of Mount Honaz, or Mt Cadmus as it was known in ancient times. Unlike Lystra, it is potentially a huge site, possibly as big as Laodicea. Rosemary was very excited to show us around, and point out features of (possible future) interest, such as the odeon (small theatre) on the eastern side of the tel. It is underground, of course, but the shape and a few rocks here and there give its original nature away. Rosemary also told us the story of one of her previous visits, when they found a column fragment down by the creek with the inscription on it “Marcus son of Marcus, chief interpreter of Colossae”. They photographed this piece and have published on it, but when they came back again at a later time the piece was gone – either washed away in a flood or… Anyway, they can make a couple of deductions from this find: a “chief” interpreter means that there must have been many others, and that it was a kind of office within the city. From the fact that Colossae had a role for a number of official interpreters, one can deduct that it was both a major trading centre and that it was a quite sizable town. Bits and pieces like this are turning up all the time around the site, and the local farmers – with whom the leader of Rosemary’s expedition would spend long hours sharing conversation over a bottle of proffered drink – are forever turning up bits and pieces which they give to friends and neighbours. The site is under the authority of the same group doing the Laodicean excavation; if they wait till they have finished Laodicea before beginning Colossae, it will be a long wait before we see anything significant of the secrets that the tel holds under the surface. As a side note, I think I have found the perfect job: site guard of the Tel of Colossae. A single guard keeps watch at the site, and his quarters are a very small transportable hut with a couch, a wood stove, and tea making facilities. A veritable hermitage.

By this stage, it was after four o’clock and getting quite dark, so we returned to the hotel. I worked outside for a bit while there was still light, but by 6:00pm it was too dark and too cold to keep at it. Inside, I found the washing I had put on the line in the bathroom dry enough to pack and the washing that I had sent to the laundry (jeans and trousers – they don’t really dry well enough with just a couple of nights) back in the wardrobe. I packed my bags for the morning, and went down to mass. It has been a great feature of the trip to have daily mass – I missed last night’s mass due to doing my laundry, but arrived in time for communion, so I have been able to receive communion every day on the journey. After dinner, I went to the baths again. No massage tonight. The water was hotter than last night’s luke warm (we were reflecting on the letter to the Laodiceans earlier in the day: “because you are neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm, I will spit you out of my mouth” Rev 3:16), and much more pleasant for the aching muscles. I joined three of our group’s “senators” already in the baths, but did not join in their plotting. I also used the sauna (much too hot) and the spa bath before returning to my room. By this time I was much too relaxed to do any more work and simply went to bed.

Tuesday, 4th December, 2012
Antalya, Myra, Pamukkale

For all photos for 4th December, click here to view them on my dropbox site. If you don’t have Dropbox, use this link to sign up and you and I will both get a bonus amount of free storage space.

Another day of travel with a few stops on the way. We left Antalya at 7:30am, and headed west along the coast, towards and into the majestic mountains that I had been photographing yesterday on my walk back to the hotel. Overnight a decent sprinkling of snow had fallen on the tops of the range, at about 1100metres. The first stretch of about 30 kms through the rocky, pine tree covered hills stayed fairly close to the coast, before turning inwards for another 40kms cutting off a bit of a peninsula, and then descending down to the coast again at Kumluca. Along the way we passed the snow-covered Antalyan Mount Olympus (Hakan told us that there are in fact two “Mt Olympus”s other than the one in Greece – this one looked like the real deal!). On the coastal plain, we were back in true Mediterranean climate, passing many orchards growing oranges and hot houses growing tomatoes. About 15km west along the coast, at a marina village called Finike, the coastal plain ends where the hills meet the ocean. The road beyond this point is purely spectacular – it rivals the Great Ocean Road (note to self: come back with motorbike one day), but has something the Great Ocean Road does not: the Turquoise Sea. And it IS turquoise, just like in all those holiday posters of the Greek Islands that you have seen. The road wound around the coastline with the hills sloping up above us on the right and sloping down to the water on our left. Every turn in the road was a photo opportunity.

We were heading for the town of Kale, and the nearby ruins of the ancient city of Myra. Here there are two attractions: the one in connection with the ancient Roman city and the other, of course, religious. The first involved a visit to the 2nd Century theatre, and the earlier Hellenistic rock tombs. This is a fairly accessible site, and there is a lot more to the city yet to be excavated, but whether it will ever be done is another question: the site where the agora would have been, for instance, is covered with orchards and hothouses. The acropolis of the city is quite visible nearby, but we did not ascend to it (I don’t even know if it is open to tourists). Theatres are always fun – I enjoy the experience of the acoustics (the usual rendition of “Oh what a beautiful morning” was given – I always get stuck for a song when its after noon…).

Then, of course, we went around to the great church of St Nicholas, Myra’s favourite bishop. They clearly do a thriving trade on the St Nicholas/Santa Claus theme in the town. We were there just two days before his feast day. Had we been there on the 6th of December, we have had to contend with some excitement, as it has recently become the custom (thanks to the generosity of the Turkish government) for the Greek and Russian Orthodox bishops and metropolitans to celebrate holy mass in the church on this day. Already, Russian pilgrims were in evidence in the town. Nicholas was not a native of this city, but was bishop there until 343AD, when he was buried there. He was supposed (according to legend) to have attended the Council of Nicea, where, when he heard Arius the Presbyter declare “There was when he was not”, gave the said heretic a biff upon the nose. A curious fact: recently, during an examination of the skeletal relics of St Nicholas at his current resting place in Bari, Italy, evidence was found that his nose had been broken and reset. Perhaps Arius biffed him back?

In any case, he was buried here and almost immediately acclaimed a saint. A church was built over his resting place, but this was destroyed by an earthquake. A new church was built during the time of Justinian in the 6th Century, and other bits and pieces added as time went on to create quite a hotchpotch of a building. But of course earthquakes and floods over time did their damage, and most of the church was rendered buried or unusable over time, until in the 19th Century the Tsar of Russia bought the site and paid for the beginnings of its restoration. That restoration is still going ahead, at a great pace at this moment in time with local Turkish government funding: the Turks know a treasure when they find it.

There are lots of beautiful frescos inside the church, dating from the 11th century, including a few nice ones of St Nicholas himself. The old marble tiled floor (6th century? 11th century?) is quite attractive, and there is also the sarcophagus in which the relics of St Nicholas were laid – with a big hole in the front made by the Italian sailors who nicked St Nick and took his remains to Bari in Italy in the 11th century. I apologise for a rather scrambled version of the story of St Nick’s remains in my previous post – the relics in the Antalya Museum are (in all probability) fragments left behind by the Italians (although Hakan tells me that there has been no DNA test done yet to confirm that they are the same as those in Bari).

We grabbed some lunch from a bakery near the church (very nice pizza roll and the cheese and meat lasagna like thing that the Turks make – very nice), and then Hakan took us on one of his “icing on the cake for all being on time” visits to the old harbour of Myra, which is actually a few kilometres south of the city down river at Andriake. Now silted up in shallow pools, a road has been built out to the coastline where many pleasure cruise boats are moored for the winter. But across the swampy area to the east one can view the ancient remains of the harbour from this road. There has been a bit of work done here. The old harbour at which St Paul docked on his journey as a prisoner to Rome (to change boats at the start of the voyage doomed to end in shipwreck at Malta, cf. Acts 27:5ff) has been excavated, and the 2nd Century granaries built by Hadrian have been largely reconstructed. Also discovered on the shoreline at the harbour was a small synagogue, dating from the 2nd Century.

We then retraced our way to Finike along the ocean road, and turned north up into the mountains for the 250km drive to Pamukkale near modern Denizli. We climbed quickly up the steep and winding road to a mountain plateau, about 1000-1100 metres above sea level, where we reached a large (and mostly empty) lake area around the town of Emali, where we stopped for a break. Along the way we were treated to panoramic scenes of mountains topped with snow, eventually reaching up to the snow level ourselves while taking a shortcut to the Antalya-Denizli highway just before Kilzilcadag (we experienced a little snow falling at this point). Our descent finally began at Sogut, although we came down only about another 100 metres in altitude. It had been quite brilliantly sunny all day, but at this point we entered into the rain clouds on the other side of the mountain (just before our late afternoon stop), and the fog was so thick that we could barely see a car’s length ahead of us. I noticed that all the traffic was driving with their hazard lights on, just to make themselves more visible. When we got out for our stop, it was almost dark, though just after 4pm, and very cold – possibly about 5 degrees. What a contrast from the sunshine and warmth along the coast this morning!

It was dark as we passed through the city of Denizli, and out to Pamukkale, where we passed the calcium deposits of the hot springs (lit up with coloured lights) to our hotel, the Richmond Thermal Hotel. This hotel is a little older and perhaps a star less on the five star scale than our other hotels along the way, but its great attraction is the hot thermal pools, both inside and outside, which are sourced with the hot springs for which Pamukkale has been famed since ancient times. These are free to use, and so after dinner I “took the baths”, as they say. I also paid extra for a massage (“Antistress 60 minutes 60 Euros), as by this stage I was missing my usual every three weeks myotherapy treatment. That was a rather odd experience. The masseur was a little woman, with virtually no English (“relax”, “good?”, “is big problem” – in reference to my shoulders – and “massage finished” was just about the limit of her knowledge of the language), and I was somewhat surprised when she began by climbing on my back to reach my shoulders and middle back! But she worked on my feet and shanks, both sore from yesterday’s walk and on my shoulders, so I felt much better afterwards. I decided to leave the days travelogue to tomorrow morning as we are leaving at 9:30am to take in the local sites of Colossae and Laodicea, as well as Hierapolis (the ancient name for Pamukkale).