Revelation Road

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The Second Holy Land

With more biblical sites than anywhere outside of Israel, Turkey's spiritual tourism leads travelers and pilgrims to its ruins.

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A smiling Turk in a plaid shirt and khakis, Ali keeps up a steady patter of Turkish history. He calls the streets through which we roll "Constantinopolis," as if this group of 21st century Christians might still hold a grudge more than 80 years after modern Turkey's fiercely secular founding father, Kemal Ataturk, permanently unseated the Christian emperor Constantine as the city's namesake. I'm sitting next to Rikk Watts, who will take over tour guide duties once the group is on its way to the seven churches; he has done this trip before with Ultimate Journeys and knows Ali's script well. Just now, Ali is holding up the umbrella we are to look for if we get separated from the group.

"We call him Ali Poppins when he's got that umbrella," Rikk says. "He seems to like it, but I'm not sure he gets the reference."

Rikk teaches the New Testament at Vancouver's Regent College, the kind of religiously affiliated institution that requires all faculty members to sign a statement of faith. Regent, in fact, is the main reason the seats around us are full. Rikk is among the school's most popular professors, a dynamic speaker who, more than one tour member tells me, "makes history come alive."

That Rikk and his students believe in Revelation goes without saying, but he is an academic at heart and seems far more interested in context than prophecy. Within minutes of introducing himself, he is explaining to me that many of the sites on which the seven churches were built once held pagan temples.

"What you need to understand," he says with the urgency of an evangelist, "is that these temples were built along lines that were considered almost like a power grid. Rituals were performed to coax power out of the earth, out of the gods. It was inevitable that Christian churches would end up there."

As Rikk speaks of pagan temples giving rise to churches that would later make way for mosques, Ali is at the front of the bus explaining simply that indeed "Constantinopolis" was once a Christian city.

"Gosh," a voice behind me says.

As if to prove it, our first stop is Aya Sofia. Built as the world's largest church by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, it was converted into the world's largest mosque by Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453. Not long after Ataturk's secular government took over following the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the structure was converted again. Since 1935, it has been a museum of its own history, proudly displaying both ornate Arabic calligraphy and painstakingly restored Byzantine mosaics destroyed or obscured through the centuries.

We are deep inside Aya Sofia when I meet two more members of the Ultimate Journeys group. Dave and Tamara Duke of Seattle both work in construction. She's a project manager for industrial building; he oversees major public works projects: highways, bridges, tunnels. I ask David what he thinks of the tour so far.

"Impressive," he tells me. "I keep looking at this place, and all I can see is the cost!"

He pats a carved stone column the diameter of a California redwood.

"Jeez, just think of the infrastructure this must have taken! Build something on this scale today, we're in the billions, right? And think of the overpass you'd need!"