I recently completed a trip to Greece and Turkey. The theme of this trip was following in the apostle Paul’s footsteps on his missionary journey. As you can tell from the theme, the broad focus was on history with a fine-tuned look at the apostle Paul’s travels. Due to the comprehensive nature of this trip, this blog will feature multiple entries. If you want to peruse all 700 of my photos, bless you, this is the link.

Alan’s Greece/Turkey Photos

My wife opted out of this trip, so I was traveling alone. She said something about looking at piles of rocks and told me she was staying home. I went with a group of which I only knew one person. I flew out one day early to spend more time in Istanbul. I flew on Turkish Airlines direct to Istanbul from Houston. The food and service on the flight were wonderful. Turkish Airlines is also a United partner, so I earned usable air miles. After a trip to Israel 10 years ago where, to this day, I am not sure about all the sights we visited, I decided to get organized for this excursion. I took pictures with my cell phone and turned on GPS tracking. This feature is beneficial in recalling the specifics of a photo. I also brought a notebook and took notes at every stop. I was concerned I would be the only geek taking notes, but a few other people were doing the same. I ended up with 20 pages of notes. I highly recommend taking notes on a trip to historical sites.

I was fortunate to be traveling with such a wonderful group of folks. We traveled mostly by bus but also flew on one domestic flight. We covered a lot of historic sites on this trip, and for the sake of brevity, I will only cover the highlights. This is the list of cities we visited.

  • Istanbul
  • Ephesus
  • Smyrna
  • Pergamum
  • Thyatira
  • Sardis
  • Philadelphia
  • Laodicea
  • Athens
  • Corinth

I have always wanted to visit Istanbul as it is at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. As mentioned above, I was on my own for the first day. Since the group was making a tour of Istanbul the next day, I planned to cover sites omitted from the tour. I saw the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque but did not go inside. The highlight of my day of solo touring was the Istanbul Archaeological Museums. My favorite parts of the museum were:

There are a lot of panhandlers and shops aggressively selling things like rugs. Fortunately, I don’t look very approachable. I was trying not to look like the typical American. One vendor told me I looked like an old Russian man. That is not the look I was going for, but oh well. The best way to avoid these folks is to say no and avoid the friendly overtures.

We started our tour the next day. Aristotle Travel arranged our entire tour; they did a great job from beginning to end and showed flexibility in handling several unique situations. First on our agenda was a walking tour of Istanbul. I had already seen many of the key sights from the previous day, but it was enlightening to hear the commentary from our guide. The Hagia Sophia and The Blue Mosque were the highlights of this day. Of the two, Hagia Sophia is a must-see due to its history, architecture, and immense size. We ended the day visiting a spice market. I knew nothing about spices, so I purchased some Turkish delight instead.

The next day we visited Smyrna. The most exciting site in Smyrna was the Agora. We spent several hours touring these expansive ruins. We had an enchanting lunch in an outdoor garden. As a side note, the weather was great the entire trip. We only encountered rain one time. May is a great time to visit Turkey and Greece. Like most tours, we were routed through many gift shops. We saw a rug manufacturing facility that was more interesting than most shops. There were demonstrations of silk extraction and rug weaving.

That will do it for my introductory blog post from Greece and Turkey!

Make the most of this day!