Philadelphia, Sardis, and Thyatira

Philadelphia Church Pillars

Sardis walls

We drove quite a distance to reach our destinations today. Both Philadelphia and Thyatira are very small sites because they are in the midst of modern cities that have been built on top of them. Philadelphia consisted only of a small area in the city of Alasehir, with three (out of six original) outsize columns that are almost all that remain of the Byzantine church of St. John. It’s hard to imagine what the church was like. Its area couldn’t have been very big, yet the columns are massive. I’m just guessing here—perhaps they were inspired by John’s message to the church at Philadelphia: “If you conquer, I will make you a pillar in the temple of my God” (Rev 3:12).

Marble Court of Sardis Gymnasium

Sardis was a prominent city associated with the Phrygian king Midas and the Lydian kingdom. Aesop, who was a Phrygian, was supposed to have spent time here as well. That was all up on a well-defended mountain--though sometimes not well-defended enough, especially when Cyrus of Persia showed up. From the Persians Sardis passed, like everything else, to Alexander the Great, then the Seleucids, and finally Rome. From Greek times there was a large Jewish population in Sardis, who had been transferred in from Babylon, and later Christianity flourished there as well. Sardis was home to the second-century bishop Melito, whose relationship to Judaism was evidently complex—on the one hand he is remembered as having been the first to call the killing of Jesus deicide, a malicious charge against Jews that became increasingly popular among Christians. On the other hand he insisted on celebrating Easter on the Jewish Passover rather than on Sunday. I imagine church historians have more context for sorting that out.

Synagogue Courtyard

Wall in Thyatira

The ruins we visited were down below the mountain. Sardis is quite a large site, though not a whole town. There is an enormous structure, the remains of a second-century Roman gymnasium—a boys’ school—and bath. The scale of this structure is not like anything else I have seen on this trip--the small arched door in the right hand wall is taller than any human. I admired the exposed stone and brick, but according to the guidebook this was all covered with marble. Beside it was the largest ancient (3rd century) synagogue ever found outside of Palestine, with a mosaic floor. I can’t think of one larger than this one even in Palestine, though there are more elaborate and well-preserved mosaic floors there. This synagogue was originally part of the gymnasium and served as either classrooms or dressing rooms, but it was later converted into a synagogue.

Thyatira city street

Last today we visited Thyatira, which is only a square in the midst of the prosperous modern town of Ahiskar. Thyatira was the home of Lydia in the book of Acts, and is also addressed in the book of Revelation. The ruins that we saw were of a fifth or sixth century public building. When I was done with that I walked across the street into a cooking store in search of a pepper grinder for Claire. With much pointing, hand motion, and noise that I hoped resembled the grinding of pepper I established what I wanted and was told, "Yok," which the tour guide said means something like "doesn't exist." Communication established with the natives. 

In the late afternoon we drove to Kusadasi on the Aegean Sea. I can hear the waves crashing below my window. I caught a glimpse of them before night fell.

Laodicea

Laodicea

Like Hierapolis, Laodicea was huge. It dates from the third century B.C.E. and was named after the founder’s not-yet-ex-wife. It was a banking center, so wealthy that after an earthquake in 60 CE it refused government aid and rebuilt the city themselves. (Not a bad idea, judging from recent history.) John of Patmos didn't think much of their attitude: “You say, ‘I am rich. I have prospered. I need nothing,’” Rev 3:17. It was also a medical center: a salve for the ears was made of nard here, and another for the eyes was produced out of local stone ground fine. We’re told that’s why John recommended they use a little on themselves (Rev 3:18). John also called them “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.” I’m sure he wouldn't have been invited to many parties here even if he could have come. It was to the Laodiceans that he said, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock….”  But to paraphrase anti-evangelist Hazel Motes: “No man with a good chariot needs to be justified.”

Water feature with calcified pipes

Laodicea had no water source—something interpreters, or at least guides and guidebooks, like to link to John's accusation of being "lukewarm"--not hot like Hierapolis's springs nor cold like Colossae's. it had to import water by means of an aqueduct and terracotta pipes that quickly became calcified inside.  The first thing we saw there was a water feature—some kind of tower covered with pipes, though it was impossible to tell whether it was mainly for show or function.

I admit freely: After five or six ancient cities I find myself just seeking out good camera shots and petting the cats and dogs. I'm re-remembering how overwhelming and confusing it is to see a lot of archaeological wonders in a single day, and the exhausted overload my travelers in Israel face.

That's snow on the mountains behind

Patio Homes with View

Pamukkale Park with View

One thing I miss here so far is the opportunity to talk with residents beyond the tour guide. I’d like to know much more about modern Turkey. Since the people are now Muslim, with an ethos of being “not from here,” I wonder what their relationship to these ghosts of the land’s Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian past is. I also wonder what their relationship to their Muslim present is, especially since the west has become more Islamophobic. At lunch today the person next to me said he had gotten an email from someone back home warning him about Turkey’s “sharia” government. Ugoz the tour guide said it’s nothing like that at all: Society and government are quite secular. That's so well known that even i knew it. Turkey does feel more European than many parts of the Middle East do—in some ways more so than Israel. But this is just an impression after two days.

On the way back we stopped at Pamukkale Park, facing the Cotton Castle we had been on top of in Hierapolis. Stunning. That is not snow--it's rock.

My hotel room's bathtub has a regular water faucet and another one for mineral water for your own private spa. I'm off to try it for awhile before bed.

Colossae

We went to the nearby town of Denizli for a sit-down lunch. Turkish food resembles Arab cuisine, except that I haven’t seen any falafel. There is rice, kebab, fish, and great salads of all kinds. Don, you would have loved all the pita pizzas!

A few rocks visible on Colossae mound

I’m going on about lunch because the only thing to say about Colossae is that it has great potential and a beautiful view. It has not been dug yet. We went up on the mound—no one would ever mistake it for a natural hill—and it is covered with potsherds, and with carved stones protruding from the ground here and there. Some future generation will find out its treasures. In the meantime it is interesting to see what centuries of people saw before archaeologists began working on so many other ancient cities. According to the guidebook, we needn't wonder whether it has a theater, though--its shape is visible, though covered with earth and vegetation. I don't recall seeing it, though at Laodicea I did see a stadium in the same shape.

Colossian postsherds. One is part of a bowl (upside down).

I didn't find out till we were on the bus that you can't collect potsherds. Forgiveness--better than permission.


Oh, this is interesting. According to Col 4:9, Onesimus, the slave of Philemon, lived in Colossae. 

Hierapolis

We are staying last night and tonight at a spa hotel in Pamukkale, which means "Cotton Castle." The town is named for the brilliant white mineral cliffs here, created from spring water filled with calcium, looking like the Niagara Falls suddenly deep-frozen. Hierapolis sits at the top of these cliffs. Colossae and Laodicea are just a few miles away (see Col 4:13, where all three are mentioned together).

Necropolis

Hierapolis is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Both it and Laodicea are large and amazing excavations, but Colossae is still just a tall, irregular, grass-covered hill where one can see stones peeking through the ground.

Tomb half-buried in calcium deposits of "cotton castle"

Martyrion of Philip overlooking city and cotton castle

Hierapolis dates from at least the 2^nd century BCE and perhaps the 4^th, and reached its zenith in the 2^nd cent CE. It was built by the Phrygians (King Midas with the golden touch was a Phrygian) and known for its textiles of cotton and wool, purple dyes, and carpets. At the northern end of the city is an enormous necropolis—the road runs for a mile—filled with more than a thousand tombs and sarcophagi—unimaginable wealth must have gone into these. Some have faces of Medusa carved into them to scare grave robbers away, but it apparently didn’t work.

One tomb was a little too close to the spring…

Up on the mountain overlooking Hierapolis, with a view down into the white cliffs, is the Martyrion of St. Philip. According to the guidebook it’s unclear whether this is Philip the disciple/apostle or Philip the father of the four prophet daughters, who in Acts 21 lived in Caesarea. I vote for the disciple, who was born in Bethsaida by the Sea of Galilee and was supposed to have been crucified upside down here. The Martyrion was built in the fifth century as an octagonal church, and even though only some of the walls remain it’s still quite lovely.

Also further down the mountain is one of the best-preserved large Roman theaters in the world. Or, if you’ve been to a few (Wikipedia lists them as being found in 18 modern countries from the U.K. and Portugal to Tunisia and Syria), “another Roman theater.” So many in picturesque spots, as this one is. Turkey has more than any other country, and we’ve already seen four of them.

Theater

The spa in Hierapolis is still used and Roman columns are still lying around in the water.

Izmir (Smyrna) and Bergama (Pergamom)

Under the Agora--Smyrna

Izmir is the third largest city. Ankara, the capital, is second. Izmir is ancient Smyrna, a prominent harbor and shipping port. There we saw the unimpressive exterior of the church of St. Polycarp, who was martyred here in the second century at the age of 86, and the agora, which was preserved because it had become a Muslim cemetery. What impressed me besides sheer size was the variety of stone colors that were used—from what appeared to be black basalt and brown sandstone to white limestone to marble.

Pergamum

Izmir's harbor

We left Izmir and drove north along the coast to Pergamum. There the ruins were far more impressive—a high hill we reached in a cable car, an ancient city with an agora that had been three stories high, where there had been a temple of Zeus. According to the ancient historian Pliny, parchment was first developed in Pergamum (thus the name). Pergamum had the second largest library in the world, after Alexandria’s, and it was dedicated by Mark Anthony to Cleopatra. What a small place the world was then. Legends that have been larger than life—Homer, the Trojan War, the Greeks, the first Christian martyrs, the great church councils, even King Midas, all sprang from this small area. 

Despite the rain and gloom all day, Turkey seems a pretty country. Mountains rise up behind the towns, which are dotted with mosques in every neighborhood. They are of all colors, but follow very similar architectural design. Lots of apartments and most everyone seems to have a balcony. The countryside looks a lot like northern Israel—rocky, hilly, full of pine trees. Olive trees are everywhere, and we saw peach orchards, vegetable fields that looked like green and red cabbage. Ugoz said tea grows in the northeast, and in fact Turkey is largely self-sufficient for food. We’ve seen a few sheep, a few horses, a few chickens as well.

Learning about Turkey

The flights over were blissfully uneventful; the hotel in Izmir beautiful. In the evening we met our guide Ugoz (pronounced just “Ohz”) and one another, nineteen travelers: five husband and wife teams (husbands mostly pastors), one pastor and partner team, one pastor father and teenage son team, four men traveling alone, not all pastors (one RV guy from Chicago, a pastor from D.C., and one from West Virginia, and a quiet man from California), and one woman traveling alone—that’s me. 

The group is quite varied denominationally—from independent and Baptist churches to UMC and UCC. One couple is from Australia, one from the Dominican Republic by way of New Jersey. Others are from Oklahoma, Texas, North Dakota, Oregon, and Georgia.

I realized last night how ignorant I was (am) about Turkey. The language looked like nothing I’d ever seen—Western letters with lots of extra markings, umlauts on vowels and other diacriticals on consonants, but not like the Scandinavian ones. Not much is recognizable at all except loan words, and the sound is very different from anything I’ve heard before. So I did some wide-awake 3:00 a.m. reading, which I hope not to repeat tonight. Here is some of what I learned. Because I keep falling asleep over this tonight I may have to correct it later.

It hasn’t been called Turkey very long. The Greeks called it Anatolia, meaning “east” or “sunrise.” The Romans called it Asia Minor, as in the New Testament. Like Palestine, this area has been conquered and reconquered throughout history. The Assyrians claimed it in the third millennium B.C.E. Hittites came to prominence from the 18th century to about 1180 B.C.E. Soon the Greeks colonized the western coast. Some say that Homer was born in Smyrna (Izmir), and his works reflect knowledge of western Anatolia.

Anatolia was taken by Cyrus of Persia in the fifth century, then by Alexander the Great of Greece in the third. It succumbed to all the turmoil after he died, and some parts welcomed Rome in the second century B.C.E. Constantine moved his capital from Rome to Byzantium, renaming it Constantinople, in the fourth century C.E. Both Nicea and Chalcedon are very close to Constantinople (today’s Istanbul, at the mouth of the Black Sea).

When the Muslim Arabs began conquering the Middle East in the seventh century they tried to take Anatolia, but the Byzantine Empire kept reasserting control. But when the Seljuk Turks showed up they took over, and the country is nearly all Muslime today.

The Turks were from central Asia: western China and Siberia. (They also live today in many former Soviet countries: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and others.) They had become Muslim before they took over Anatolia in the eleventh century. The language came with them. Their coming also inspired the onset of the crusades and the habit of drinking “Turkish” coffee. According to Wikipedia, DNA studies show that most modern Turkish people are not descendants of the conquerors but of the indigenous people, but I have the impression they had rather not be. 

The Ottomans soon came into control, and they were in charge of a vast region until they were defeated in World War 1. The Turkish Republic was born of a revolt that threw off the colonizing powers in the early 1920s. The first president, Mustafa Kemal (with the honorific title Attatürk), was a reformer, who replaced the original Turkish script with Latin letters. Thus a language that has little relationship to European ones, even though it looks like one.

What's with "Bible in One Hand"?

Over the past year and a half I’ve tried to figure out what one roof covers all my work. Since I retired from LPTS my primary daily tasks have been the book for Westminster John Knox (2013) on Scripture and environmental stewardship and the Isaiah commentary for Smyth and Helwys. As many of you with whom I've worked recently know, I’ve also been writing Bible studies, adult curricula, lectionary materials, dictionary entries, study Bible notes, shorter commentaries, scholarly papers, meditations, and sermons, and have had the privilege of teaching and preaching in a wide variety of settings, leading and participating in travel seminars, taking part in conferences and other learning opportunities, volunteering at Don's church--and doing some other amazing things, such as participating in three of our children's weddings in Nepal, New York City, and Louisville. What the rest of my professional life will entail is still an unfolding adventure, and will be, I hope, clear through. 

But one thing has become very clear, and that is that it all seems to be with the “Bible in One Hand,” as Karl Barth said. He said, “The newspaper in the other.” I find myself holding—at least for now—certain aspects of that 21^st-century newspaper most closely: interfaith relations, the middle east and American Christian relationships there, the non-human world that surrounds us, the question of how do we live simply, lightly, and relationally as people of faith, given the multiple and baffling challenges we find ourselves facing today. 

So “Bible in one hand” seemed like an appropriate summary. Not Bible in two hands, to use as a weapon, nor Bible in no hands to be abandoned, but Bible as conversation partner, fellow traveler, guide, point of inquiry. We’ll see what else goes in the other hand along the way.

For now, lots of preparations before Thursday. See you from Turkey!

P. S. I can't help but mention this: I will be going to see my amazing daughter Claire, but my incredible son Ian is featured this month in Presbyterians Today, and can be seen in a fabulous documentary at: http://mediastorm.com/training/voice. Now when I got to parties I am pretty much just "Are you Claire's/Ian's mom?" As it should be.