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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"You all seem to get along so well, for a tour group," I say to Tamara Duke, who likewise has been watching the show.

"Oh, a bunch of us have been traveling together for years now," she tells me. "We don't just go on religious trips. We also play golf."

We travel through Istanbul as if behind glass, insulated not just by the tour bus but by the very fact that we are a tour -- a self-contained unit that has no need to meet or interact with anyone who lives among the sites we see.

After a long day with the group, I decide to set off on my own. Maybe solo revelation would be easier to find.

The city of Smyrna, like all the locations named in Revelation, now has a new name: Izmir. Once among most important seaports in Asia Minor, it remains Turkey's third-largest metropolis, yet is now visited by tourists almost exclusively for its airport. I rent a Ford Festiva from the airport Hertz counter, ask for a map, and I'm off on Revelation road. Reaching Pergamum -- now called Bergama -- four hours and several wrong turns later, I find a closet of a hotel room with a dirty orange carpet, a leaky sink and no windows, and I sink into a Bible-black sleep.

The next morning, I get an early start for the long day ahead. Bergama's main archaeological attractions are high up on the hill that overlooks the town, but the site of most interest to faith-based tour groups is down a quiet road just off the main drag. As Rikk suggested, the visible remains of the Christian community of what used to be called Pergamum are located on ground that once held a pagan temple, then a church and now a collection of half-collapsed walls and broken building stones that seem all but forgotten. The ancient buildings felled by history are nearly indistinguishable from the buildings of more recent construction that have fallen from simple neglect. The Church of Saint John the Theologian, as Bergama's seven churches site is known, sits catty-cornered to an abandoned storehouse, a crumbling barn and a dusty field where a skinny horse scrapes for grass in the hot morning sun.

With five more stops to make, I push on, setting out to check off first-century ruin sites like items on a shopping list. From Bergama, I head east, then south, beginning what would quickly turn into several hours of hard driving through a landscape of arid-looking earth that nonetheless has been coaxed to agricultural life. Along the road, women work in green fields with their heads wrapped in blue, red and black scarves.

Driving 500 miles in a single day in Turkey is not unlike driving 500 miles in a single day anywhere in the world. The radio plays different music, but the drivers are just as impatient with foreigners slowing to read every sign. It is not long before I learn my first lesson in Turkish driving. Back home in Washington, the car horn usually means something simple and not very expressive, like, Watch it, buddy. Here, it means something closer to: You'd better get ready because I'm going to pass you on either the left or the right; I haven't decided which yet, so if you're smart you will slow down a bit and drive as straight as possible while my truck full of chickens roars by.

My only breaks from the road are the remnants of communities long gone that dot this region like strip malls. In his letters to the seven churches, John of Patmos provides a fogged window into these vanished worlds. The words he wrote are full of both encouragement and rebuke, but their meaning is far from clear. With the precise circumstances that inspired each lost to history, John's letters at times read like disconnected snippets of conversation, answers to questions unheard. To one church he said, "I hold this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel"; to another, "If you are not watchful, I will come like a thief"; and to a third, "Because you have kept my message of endurance, I will keep you safe." Twenty centuries later, we're left to ponder what was at stake for the scattered bands of first-century believers who earned John's comfort and his wrath.

As I locate each of these cities (Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, respectively), I wonder if Scripture is perhaps necessarily inscrutable. If its original audience was around to answer questions, would it mean nearly so much to those who continue to seek out life's lessons in words on a page? I remembered something Rikk had told me before I left Istanbul about his reasons for teaching the history of his faith in the places where Christianity first arose.

"I tell the group that when we reach Ephesus they should hope a couple of cruise ships have just pulled into port." In addition to being a magnet for spiritual tourists, he explained, Ephesus is a prime excursion for pleasure cruises. In peak season, they transform the quiet town around the ancient ruins into a loud and bustling tourist hub -- one filled with all the merchants and beggars, garbage and pickpockets the term now implies.

"Only when we're walking packed shoulder to shoulder with people we don't know can we really understand what life was like in these places. Cities were dirty and filthy. They chewed up their populations. Cruelty was something taken for granted." The early Christians John wrote to in the letters to the seven churches, Rikk said, were trying to find a new way of living in a dangerous and difficult world. "My primary goal in leading these tours is to show that there is social dynamic to Scripture; it's not just spiritual."