Urfa, or Sanli-urfa (which means beautiful Urfa, pronounced Shanli-Urfa) is an interesting town. According to one Muslim tradition, this is where Abraham is buried (compare what the OT says). In fact this city in NT times and before was known as Edessa.  In this post we will look at the market place in town, and then in the next post we will consider the now famous archaeological site of Gobeckli Tepe which is not far outside the city and the... Read more

Tombs come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, there are even double decker tombs when a family only had entitlement to a small piece of land for burial… There were Jewish tombs with the sign of the menorah carved into the lintel… Even in the city of the dead, there were signs of life… There were house shaped tombs, or mausoleums…. These tend to have benches inside to lay the coffins on… Some even have two floors worth of... Read more

In order to get to the nekropolis, one has to actually go past what was once the main street into town from the nekropolis end of town, so we will look at a few things before we start examining tombs…. From the backside one can even see the snow-capped mountains even in late July…. But right next to the Frontinus gate is in fact the tomb of a wealthy businessman named Flavius Xeuxis 72 trips around Cape Malea on the... Read more

Meanwhile back on the ground, let’s see the ancient city of Hierapolis, which according to tradition a Philip settled here, most likely the one who had the prophesying daughters in Acts, not the apostle, bearing in mind how all those persons got blended together in the second and later centuries.   As you can see from the map this is a long linear site and at the far left end of the map is the necropolis, or the city of... Read more

Hierapolis, or Priest town, is the last of our city visits to the Lycus Valley.  Today it is famous for the ‘cotton candy’ cliffs, really more like the limestone cliffs of Dover.  Pamukkale is what it is called hence cotton candy, and so we will look at the modern attraction now.  It used to be the case that there were all these hotels built right on these cliffs, but it was destroying them, so this site became part of the... Read more

From this end you can see the apse that was built into the house. Perhaps the council of Laodicea met here….  but then when we turn to the later Byzantine church buildings we are in a whole different ballgame… Some of these are very large and very public… Considerable money was invested in these buildings… They have mosaic floors, indoor plumbing, etc.   But now on the northside of town they’ve found another large church… and this worker in the... Read more

We know there was a Jewish presence in this town long before there was a Christian one, as can be seen by looking at this column’s carvings. Earlier menorah and shofar on the bottom, somewhat faded, later Byzantine cross above it… Later Byzantine inscriptions had a particular way of forming the Greek letters that were distinctive, as in this example…. Notice the omicron Right in the middle of numerous Greco-Roman structures–basilicas, temples, homes, columned streets, games… Christians decided they should... Read more

Laodicea, as you may remember comes in for some heavy criticism in Revelation…. It was a very large (by ancient standards) prosperous city that had a water problem, namely the water was brackish. Last time I was there they showed me a Brita  filter of sorts installed in a villa meant to get out the calcium and other minerals that made the water not very potable. But this was not the only problem for this site— earthquakes devastated this site... Read more

Perhaps by now you’ve gotten a bit hungry digesting all that archaeological data— how about some normal food instead?  Well we have just the thing for you.  Mehmet is making you a pide— the Turkey version of a long pizza of sorts… Or perhaps you just want to go through the buffet line…. Yes that’s umpteen different kinds of olives prepared in different ways… everything imaginable grows in Turkiye And all that was for breakfast, but actually my favorite Turkish... Read more

The remains of the Roman road can be seen right beside the entrance way to the lower city of Sardis. And as the picture shows, there were various sorts of shops that line the avenue or road. And these shops even had plumbing— notice the clay pipes on the left. In the first century, many families ran a sort of fast food counter service out of the front of their houses, something you can see several times at Pompeii and... Read more