Touring the Seven Churches of Revelation

So, how shall I summarize my tour through the Seven Churches of Revelation?

Perhaps the most fair way to put it is: a largely foreknown mistake, the extent of which I'd never imagined.

This was the third and final tour I'd worked into my larger pilgrimage, in order to give myself a structured environment in which to see widely-dispersed sights (and sites) in a reputedly unsafe country. I ought to have known that neither was really true, especially after getting through three months on the Israeli bus system and staying on my own in Arab East Jerusalem, but I signed up for this exorbidantly expensive week nonetheless. It turned out to be just as much, if not moreso, a stupid move (on my part, I admit) as the AIT tour I took through Egypt, Jordan, and my first week in Israel.

My initial apologies: this is probably going to be a bit more unloading and catharsis for my sake than detailing the sites I visited. I'll try and work in some of the latter, and I have every intention of banging out a post on one of my pet study subjects- Jesus, Paul, and Revelation in the context of Roman imperial ideology- by way of reference to these sites and others in Greece at some point. By as for now, I just need to breathe.

Allow me to note a few good things first. I met a handful of fun people in their twenties and thirties to hang out with, and I'll probably end up getting together with some of them when I go home since a lot of them are from the D.C. area.

Also, I've can now say I've been to all seven of the churches that received letters in the Revelation to St. John.

Unfortunately, veiled within those two positives are two of the greatest (but by no means 'only') negatives: I got a lot of time to hang out with those people because we spent most of our time either on a bus or back at the hotel, and I can't say much more than that I've been to the seven churches. You see, the daily format went something like this: visit one of the churches with a major site there- Ephesus, Pergamon, Sardis, or Laodicea- and then visit one of those sites that is either an unexcavated mound, a modern city, a ruined Byzantine church, or all three- Smyrna, Thyatira, Philadelphia, or the other site we visited, Colossae. So half of our time was already taken up checking off sites from a poorly-conceived, arbitrary list of places to visit.

But that's hardly all the wasted time. Understand, we stayed the first four nights in the same five-star hotel in Izmir, so that rather than going from site to site day after day, we spent most of our days backtracking on the road to the same central location. This probably wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't been for the fact that we ate dinner in the hotel each night, so there was a policy of being back well before dusk. As a result, or days usually began at 8am, and ended by 4pm, minus an hour for lunch, minus 4 hours of driving, and then divided between a worthwhile site and a (near-)worthless site. Do the math, and that equals about an hour and a half at Ephesus, Pergamon, Sardis, and Laodicea.

Still, an hour and a half, right? Hardly. At each and every site the pastor of the church that sponsored the trip (I'll keep from mentioning his name here out of respect for my friends on the trip who attend his church; but go ahead and ask me privately if you're considering a tour) gave a 30-to-45 minute sermon on one of the letters to the respective church. Naturally, this wasn't a homily or a lecture, so there was no pretense at going through the letter point-by-point and carefully exegeting the text, and then matching it up with archaeological information at the site to provide a fuller picture of the early Christian community there. Rather, it was simply grasping on to the first phrase that resounds with Arminian-Pietistic theology (such as it is) and giving a long pep talk about either making a choice to believe in Jesus or, more often, making a choice to follow God's moral commands. Where's this 'choice' stuff coming from in Scripture, anyway?

All in all, that usually gave us between fourty-five minutes to an hour at each of those four sites.

Normally, as with the AIT tour through Israel (remember Dani?), there'd be another complaint at this point: then we were led around by a tour guide who was a complete idiot and could barely speak English.

To quote everyone's favorite saint in everyone's favorite epistle, "By no means!"

If there's one thing I can give this tour, it's the Turkish tour guide, Dilek (but we just called her Dee). Dee soars head and shoulders above all the country-native tour guides I've had on this whole journey. Well, I don't want to put Osama out, the guide through Egypt; so not head and shoulders above him, but still a cut above. You can just feel her passion for the information; she did her upper level graduate work at Harvard in the Greek archaeology of Turkey, and she took a whole class in Istanbul on the Hagia Sophia. That hopefully gives you a small taste of how extraordinary she was.

Above her sheer grasp of the information, though, she was a truly engaging speaker. From her hand motions I'd say she's been schooled in classical rhetoric. And she obviously has her own curious interests: each day during the interminable bus rides, she'd break up the doldrum by giving us a fun new fact about rural Turkish courting and wedding rituals. I'll have to post them at some point if one of the girls on the trip (who inevitably remembered them all) can list them out for me. A for-instance: when a Turkish father feels his daughter is of marriable age, he places an empty liquor bottle on the roof; in order to begin the courting process, one of the young men from the village takes out his rifle and shoots the bottle. Ah, romance and bottles and empty liquor bottles are in the air!

The only downside to being led around by her was on the first day at Ephesus. Ephesus is one of the best-preserved cities from antiquity. The main cardo (it has a site-specific name, but for the life of me I can't remember it) runs from the upper entrance to the park at the small theater all the way down to the grand theater, with a long series of temples and the amazing Library of Celsus between. Despite its expanse, or perhaps because of it, much of the site is still under excavation. Currently, archaeologists are restoring a series of villas with world-class mosaics on one side of the cardo; entering these requires an extra fee (only 10 dollars, though) and, naturally, free time. However, because the pastor gave an endless talk about missionary strategies before we actually got into the site, and because we were led around, there was no free time to see one of the things I'd come halfway across the world to see.

Still, check out the Library of Celsus:
Fortunately, the complete absence of free time did not repeat itself at Pergamon, Sardis, or Laodicea (unfortunately, I might add, it also failed to repeat itself at Thyatira and Philadelphia, so we took up even more time amid the formless ruins of unimpressive Byzantine basilicas). At Pergamon I was even able to get around to a good number of scattered ruins in the thirty-or-so minutes afforded after the guided tour. Pergamon is marked, in particular, by the impressive Trajaneum,
a temple of the imperial cult begun by the Emperor Trajan (to himself, of course) and completed under his successor Hadrian. It's an archetypal example of how the imperial cult of emperor worship, and Roman imperial ideology/theology more generally, came to supplant traditional Greek polytheism throughout the Pax Romana. But that's for another post.

By the time I'd gotten to Sardis I'd picked up a handbook called Ancient Civilizations and Ruins of Turkey, and I'd had enough of sitting around listening to this fellow talk while glorious cities of antiquity were towering around me. So, with the book in hand and a likeminded fellow-traveler walking alongside, we asked Dee where she would be taking us so that we could go see the other sites first. We headed across the road to a place labeled by archaeologists as the Bronze House, so called because a number of bronze liturgical instruments were found there; together with that and the fact that it has a Byzantine-era prayer niche with frescoes, it's thought that the house belonging to a high-ranking priest or bishop.

But the most impressive monument at Sardis though, as at Pergamon, was the site of the imperial cultic shrine. Here, however, it is the facade of the bathhouse (below) rather than a freestanding temple. It does, however, contain a wide courtyard suitable for the public sacrificing of animals to the emperor, represented as a (long-gone) statue in the highest niches of the wall.By Laodicea, I'd started something of a silent protest against the format, as four other people followed me on my lecture-skipping adventure. Even so, at none of these sites was I able to see the many temples, shrines, bathhouses, villas, and later synagogues and churches each had to offer. Some day I'll have to go back.

Which brings me to my greatest regret about Turkey as a whole: by doing the tour and scheduling my pilgrimage according to its timing, I completed missed central Turkey and the great many sites there. Syrian Antioch, Antioch-at-Pisida, Aphrodisias, Derbe, Perga, Lystra, Attalia, Ancyra, Iconium, and, naturally, the entire country of Cyprus. Before anybody says it, I know, of course, that many of these aren't worth visiting, just like Philadelphia or Thyathira or Colossae; I know, too, that I'd never make it to them all on one trip. After all, no matter how much I saw in Israel, I still missed the Horns of Hattin and Tel Hazor. But still, I'm going to Athens and Rome because St. Paul did, and to miss these central sites in order to pay an ungodly amount of money to spent minutes at equally compelling sites was an incredible disappointment.

A final and particularly sad note. What is less Christ-like? To tell another, self-professed Christian that they're not a real Christian because of a theological difference, or to pass by beggars on your way to a 1250 euro a night hotel room (and if I'd known my money was going toward accomodations rather than getting around the sites, you can bet I'd never have signed up)? Honestly, I don't know, but I was on the receiving end of the former twice in just one week from various individuals in the group [edit: removal of caricature], and was ashamed beyond belief to be walking around in a group like yet another 'ugly American' doing the latter. I may be able to sit up for days on end- yes, literally- and go through all the reasons I think evangelical/Baptistic theology is wrong [edit: softening of statement], but you'll never hear me question someone's faith; and yet, somehow, we should instead bury our differences under a veil of unity while questioning the heart of anyone who brings them up? [edit: sentence removed]

More on the Istanbul half of the week to follow.