Crossing to Europe

This morning we said "Goodbye" to Asia Minor and crossed by ferry onto the European side of Turkey. Our ferry ride from Canakale was about 30 minutes long. Some of us haggled and were financial beaten to a pulp by little Turkish women in scarves who took our money quicker than a Texas School Board. Our morning was spent driving up the Dardanelles coast toward Istanbul. We heard a Turkish history of the horrible battle of Gallipoli against the ANZAC forces of Australia and New Zealand during the First World War where over  half a million soldiers died and 6 British battleships were sunk. The "Father of the Turks" and founder of the modern secular state, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, was commander of some Ottoman forces during the battle.

We had a short lunch at a roadside Turkish version of "Stuckey's" and continued to Istanbul, a vast city of high-rise apartments on the Bosphorus. We visited the Hagia Sophia church, the largest church in Christendom for almost a thousand years. We enjoyed the Byzantine mosaics inside the soaring church.

We walked down to the Archaeological Musuem and caught the highlights, especially the biblical materials of the Gezer Calender (10th cenntury BC from Israel), the inscription from Hezekiah's Tunnel in Jerusalem (701 BC), and the "Soreg" Inscription from Herod's Temple in the days of Jesus, forbidding access to Gentiles in the Temple Court of the Women and beyond. We also viewed some of the remains from ancient Troy/Illium), and the so-called Sarcophagus of Alexander, a tomb decorated with battle Greek warriors but dating from the 4th century in Sidon (Lebanon).

Dinner is now over at our hotel in downtown; we are staying here two nights. Tomorrow we will tour the Topkapi palace complex of the Ottoman Turks and its lovely Museums features swords belonging to the Muslim prophet Mohammed and even hairs from his beard--hence the phrase, "By the beard of the Prophet...." We'll also take a boat tour along the Bosphorus and.....well, you'll just have to wait and see!