Footsteps of Paul and Best of Turkey

By the end of this trip we will have stood in the city where Paul was born, in the city where believers were first called Christians, and in the theater at Ephesus where the riot broke out. Use the hours in the air to read ahead in Acts.

Welcome to Turkey. We are met at the airport in Istanbul and transferred privately into the old city for our first night.

Paul never preached here. In his day this was Byzantium, a modest Greek town on the straits. What grew on this spot afterward matters a great deal to anyone reading church history: as Constantinople it became the seat of the emperors who called the early councils, where the creeds that shaped historic Christianity were argued, voted, and enforced.

We will spend our first and last nights in that city.

Today is for settling in and shaking off the flight. Optional for those who want it: a hamam, the Turkish bath, an old ritual of steam, hot marble, and a thorough scrub.

Dinner and overnight in Istanbul.

For close to a thousand years this was the largest church in Christendom. It is worth standing under that dome for a while and thinking about what happened to the church after the apostles were gone.

We continue to Topkapi Palace and its museum, Hagia Irene, and the Archaeological Museum, then the Blue Mosque and the Hippodrome, the long open square where the chariot races and the Byzantine riots took place. We finish at the Basilica Cistern, a sunken forest of columns that held the water supply of the old city.

Later we walk through the Spice Bazaar, where the air carries cinnamon, saffron, mint, and thyme. Optional this evening: a Whirling Dervishes ceremony, the turning prayer of the followers of Rumi, the 13th century poet and mystic.

Dinner and overnight in Istanbul.

If it is open to visitors we will go in, and we will also stop at the Theodosian Walls, the land defenses that kept this city standing for centuries.

Then we fly south to Adana and the Cilician plain. This is Paul's own country. He was born a short drive from where we sleep tonight, and the passes and coastal roads around us are the ones he used going north and west on his journeys. In Acts he is a man of two worlds, a Roman citizen from a Greek university town and a Pharisee's son, and this is where those two worlds met.

Dinner tonight is at a local restaurant. Overnight in Adana.

We will visit the cave church of St Peter, cut back into the hillside above the city, where they are said to have met in secret.

Antioch is where the gospel first moved out to the Greeks in numbers (Acts 11:19-26), where the Spirit called Barnabas and Saul to be sent out (Acts 13:1-3), and where Paul and Silas departed on the second missionary journey (Acts 15:35-36). Antioch was later the city of Ignatius and John Chrysostom.

In Acts 2:9, pilgrims from Cappadocia were assembled with the thousands in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost when they received the baptism of the Holy Ghost and heard the Apostle Peter preach his powerful message. We will be standing in their country in two days.

Drive back to Adana for dinner and overnight.

He was proud of it. He told a Roman officer he was a Jew of Tarsus, a citizen of no mean city (Acts 21:39), and told the crowd he was born there and brought up at the feet of Gamaliel (Acts 22:3). When the Lord sent Ananias down the street called Straight, the man he was to find was Saul of Tarsus (Acts 9:11).

We visit the well traditionally identified as Paul's, the Roman gate long known as Cleopatra's Gate, and the recent excavations.

Then we climb north onto the high plateau into Cappadocia and visit the underground city at Kaymakli, one of the best preserved of these carved cities, where whole communities, Christians among them, lived below ground when it was not safe above it.

Dinner and overnight in Cappadocia.

Paul never preached in Cappadocia. Its people came to him and to the other apostles instead. Cappadocians were in Jerusalem at Pentecost (Acts 2:9), and Peter addressed his first letter to the strangers scattered through Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia (1 Peter 1:1).

Today is also the wider Turkey this tour promises.

We start in Devrent valley among the fairy chimneys, tall cones of soft volcanic rock left standing as the weather cut away everything around them. At Pasabag we see the houses people carved into that rock. After lunch there is a pottery demonstration in Avanos, a clay town on the Red River for thousands of years.

In the afternoon, the Goreme Open Air Museum, rock-cut churches painted between the 10th and 13th centuries, then Uchisar rock castle for the view over the valleys.

Dinner and overnight in Cappadocia.

We break at Konya, which the New Testament calls Iconium. Paul and Barnabas came here after they were run out of Antioch of Pisidia, and they preached in the synagogue long enough that a great multitude believed. Then the city split in two and they fled to Lystra and Derbe (Acts 13:51-14:6). Years later, near the end, Paul reminded Timothy of the persecutions he endured at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra (2 Timothy 3:11).

Timothy was from that stretch of road.

In Konya we visit the home of the Whirling Dervishes, the order founded around Rumi, whose tomb is here and still draws visitors from across the Muslim world.

We continue to Pamukkale. Dinner and overnight in Pamukkale.

Mineral springs have poured over a white cliff for millennia, leaving terraces of calcite, shallow basins, and what look like frozen waterfalls. The water changes color as the light moves.

Above the terraces stands Hierapolis, the Roman spa city built around those hot springs. Paul wrote from prison that Epaphras had a great zeal for the saints at Colosse, at Laodicea, and at Hierapolis (Colossians 4:13). We tour the Hierapolis open air museum.

Then we drive down to Laodicea, the last of the seven churches of Asia. Paul told the Colossians to trade letters with this congregation (Colossians 4:16). John told them they were neither cold nor hot, and that being rich and increased with goods they did not know they were wretched and poor (Revelation 3:14-22). The city sat rich on a crossroads, which is exactly the problem.

Drive to Kusadasi for dinner and overnight.

One column stands today.

Then Ephesus. We walk the marble streets past the state agora, the odeon, the Memmius monument, the temple of Domitian, Curetes Street, the Trajan fountain, the baths of Scholastica, the temple of Hadrian, the Celsus library, and the commercial agora. Paul worked here roughly three years (Acts 18-20). In the great theater the silversmiths shouted him down for two hours (Acts 19:23-41).

He later called the elders of this church to him and told them they would see his face no more (Acts 20:17-38). He wrote to this church, and wrote to Timothy while Timothy led it, and it is the first of the seven churches John addresses (Revelation 2:1-7).

We also visit the terrace houses, where wealthy Ephesians lived among frescoes and mosaics, and the Basilica of St John, built over the place tradition holds the apostle was buried after his last years here. A carpet weaving demonstration follows.

Dinner and overnight in Kusadasi.

A private cruise takes us along the Bosphorus, the strait that separates Europe from Asia, past old wooden waterfront houses, marble palaces, fortresses, and small fishing villages. This narrow channel is why the city exists and why armies and empires spent a thousand years trying to hold it.

Afterward there is free time at the Grand Bazaar for whatever is still on your list.

We gather in the evening for our last dinner together, at a rooftop restaurant with a view over the city, and a chance to say out loud what the last ten days have meant. Overnight in Istanbul.

We have come from Tarsus to Antioch to Ephesus, most of it on Paul's own ground, and the book of Acts will not read the same way again.