Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Hi All!
I've been in southern Turkey for the past several days, basing myself in Adana, which is on the southern Mediterranean coast, just next to Tarsus, the city where St. Paul was from. Today, in fact, I finished my tour of Turkey by going to Tarsus. Not much is there from Paul's days, due in large part to the fact that Tarsus has been continually occupied since well before New Testament times. On the other hand, you may have noticed that many of the places I've visited are now called by different names because the biblical cities that were there before were abandoned, and new towns or villages sometimes sprung up. By contrast, Biblical Tarsus continued to be a city, and so today, Biblical Tarsus is known as, well, Tarsus!

My tour here began after taking an overnight and all day train from Istanbul. It was really a neat way to see a lot of the very diverse and intersting countryside through the central section of Turkey. Much of that central area was once known as "Galatia", and so as I was traveling through, I read Paul's letter to the Galatians! The train ride was very comfortable and I slept well in my sleeping compartment. I had planned to take the train back today. However, when the train was almost 2 hours late getting to Adana, I realized if it was that late getting back to Istanbul, I'd miss my connecting flight to Israel. So, I got a refund of my train ticket (I think!) and I'm flying back to Istanbul tomorrow morning.

The other two places I visited while here were Antioch (and it's ancient port of Seleucia Peiria) and Cappadocia. Antioch, you may remember from Acts, was the place where followers of Jesus were first called "Christians" (Acts 11:26). There's an ancient cave church there, in use since at least the 4th century, which legend claims was one of the places where St. Peter preached while he was in Antioch. The port of Anitoch, known as Seleucia Peiria, was the place from which Paul and Barnabas set out on their first missionary journey.

Cappadocia is an area of central Turkey which has incredible volcanic rock formations. This particular type of volcanic residue becomes very hard when exposed to air, but until then is very soft. So, people for thousands of years have carved out cave homes, churches and other things from these rocks. They still do today. In the early church, very many monastic communities gathered there. It was remote, and also provided protection during times of persecution. The paintings (mostly dating to the 11th or 12th century AD) are incredibly well preserved because they've been in these dry cave rooms. Both the paintings and the rock formations are incredible! Lectors on Pentecost Sunday will remember that "Cappadocia" is one of those dreaded place names you need to read! (Acts 2:9)

I'm sorry I haven't been able to post for a few days. My hotel has free wireless internet, but the Preventer of Information Technology there decided that Blogger is a bad website and won't allow me access. So, for the very last thing on my tour of Turkey, I am visiting the Shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Internet (Starbucks), which has no such restriction!

This concludes my tour of Biblical sites in Greece and Turkey. Tomorrow, I catch a flight from Adana to Istanbul, and then a connecting flight to Tel Aviv, where I'll meet up with Bishop Schneider and the rest of the group from the US, who will be departing from Dulles this evening (Tuesday). So in the immortal words of Mel Brooks, "we're off on the road to Judea!"

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