Turkish delight

During the last week your blogger has been travelling with a Christian group in Turkey as a kind of residential chaplain, visiting some of the places where the earliest Christian communities were founded.

We started off at Istanbul, the noisy bustling city of 15m people (twice the population of London) that sits bestride the Bosphorus, linking the continents of Europe and Asia (one of the men at the hotel said 'I live in Asia, but I work in Europe')

Here is the wonderful Spice Market - even bigger and more colourful is the vast 4,000 shop Grand Bazaar, dating from the 15th century.

And here is the extraordinary Hagai Sophia (Sacred Wisdom)  built in AD 537 and designed to accommodate 10,000 people. For nearly a thousand years it was a Christian church until the fall of Constantinople in 1457 when it was converted to a mosque and the Christian symbols and paintings were removed or covered up.

With the founding of modern Turkey as a secular state it became a state-run museum in 1935. Restoration work continues with the happy result that with the Christian murals and mosaics uncovered, Christ once more reigns supreme over Hagai Sophia.

The weird rock formations of Cappodocia provided a home for persecuted Christians in the 3rd century who carved out homes among the soft rocks of this extraordinary and beautiful landscape.

St Paul's visit to the city of Ephesus was quite literally a riot - or that's pretty much how it ended up. You can read about it in Acts 19 but here in the great Theatre of Ephesus is where it all took place.

Our party stood for a moment in the centre of the Amphitheatre to sing 'He is Lord, he is risen from the dead and he is Lord. Every knee shall bow, every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.'

This time there was no riot - indeed our fellow tourists gave us a clap when we finished.

And nearby is the magnificent library of Ephesus (above). Paul spent the best part of three years at Ephesus teaching 'publicly and from house to house.' Acts 20 describes the emotional scene that took place at Miletus as Paul bade farewell to the Ephesian elders:  'When Paul had finished speaking, he knelt down with all of them and prayed. They all wept as they embraced him and kissed him.  What grieved them most was his statement that they would never see his face again. Then they accompanied him to the ship.'

It was moving to be at that very place and to hear those words read: