Classical Journeys: Lesbos, Troy, & Ephesus

 

Travel Program

If we look at a map of the northern Aegean Sea today, we see a border - Greece on one side, Turkiye on the other. For nearly all of the history we explore on this tour, that reading would have made no sense. The Aegean was not a boundary but a corridor, the fastest road in the ancient world, and the peoples of both shores spoke the same languages, worshipped in the same sanctuaries, and competed for trade in the same harbors.

This tour is designed to emphasize the connections between island and mainland: we begin on the Greek island of Lesbos for the Easter celebrations, then take a morning ferry to the Turkish coast where we travel north to Troy, later turning south to investigate the prominent Lydian and Ionian cities, sanctuaries, and geologic wonders to the south. These are the same waterways and highways that carried Mycenaean warships, Aeolian settlers, Persian armies, Roman grain ships, and the apostles in the historical eras we explore on this tour.

We have timed the tour to coincide with Orthodox Holy Week as celebrated in traditional Greek island villages. An exploratory trip to Lesbos introduced me to a wild and ancient landscape, with historic castle towns dotting the high hillsides and the best harbors. The celebrations that we will witness, in the able hands of our local Greek hosts, will be memorable, inclusive, and non-touristy. On Good Friday evening, we will be in a mountain village at dusk as the flower-covered Epitaphios is processed through the streets by candlelight to the solemn tolling of the bell. Observing and participating in such living traditions help us, the travelers, to understand how ancient ruins were once thriving communities, reminding us of what it means to be rooted to place, connecting our shared humanity.

 

Religious View

This coast of Anatolia and their neighbor islands is where Christianity became an urban, empire-wide religion, and five of the Seven Churches of Revelation lie on our route. On Lesbos, at midnight on Holy Saturday, we will participate in the candlelit parade marking the martyrdom of Christ, in a ritual that was certainly inherited by the early Christians from even earlier civilizations on these coasts.

When the Bronze Age world collapsed in the 12th century BC, Greek-speaking populations moved east across the water from the Balkans and the Greek mainland and settled among Luwians, Lydians, and Carians. What emerged was a hybrid culture: Greek in language and civic form, deeply Anatolian in religion. This culture produced the Iliad, the first coinage, and eventually, the most industrious of the Greek and Roman colonies.

Sacred shrines throughout the region were adapted to match the Greek pantheon: at Hierapolis, a Phrygian cult to Lairbenos the sun god located at the entrance of a sulfur-emitting cave in Hellenistic times became a syncretist shrine attached to Apollo and prophecy. Meanwhile at Ephesus, the shrine of the Anatolian mother goddess Cybele later becomes the greatest sanctuary of Artemis in the Greek world, and then the same city where Mary is proclaimed Theotokos in the Christian era. The seated goddess flanked by animals who appears at Çatalhöyük in the 8th millennium BC looks remarkably similar to seated Cybele with her tamed lion.

And while Homeric myth portrays Troy as a Greek-speaking city that worshipped Olympian gods like Athena, historical and archeological reality tells a different story. In the bronze age (c. 3000-1180 BC), Troy was known to its neighbors as Wilusa and its people likely spoke Luwian and practiced a distinctly Anatolian religion centered around nature, local landscape deities, and unique regional gods. The Alaksandu Treaty (1280 BC) between the Hittite king Muwatalli II and king Alaksandu of Troy lists several divine witnesses including Apaliunas, a protector god whose legacy would become Apollo in the Greek pantheon.

In Christian times, the basilica cathedrals replaced the temples, but the pilgrimage routes and fervent veneration remained the same.

 

Geographic View

Empires and battles fill the pages of our history books, but rivers and faults also play significant roles. Gold in the Pactolus river made Sardis rich and gave the world its first coinage. The physical proximity of high-quality marble quarries allowed Aphrodisias the raw material to become the sculpture capital of the Roman empire in Asia Minor. A gas vent and a hot spring made Hierapolis a massive city centered around a spa, a shrine, and for those unlucky not to be healed, an enormous cemetery.

Intensive logging and agriculture in the arid inland hills led to extreme erosion that eventually silted up the prosperous harbors of Miletus and Priene, and despite Roman dredging and expensive engineering works, finally stranded Ephesus itself several kilometers inland, ending two thousand years of prosperity. Nowhere is the inexorable silting of a valley more pronounced than at Troy itself, which now sits 4 miles inland. It is hard to imagine that this was once the greatest of port cities, where sailors had to wait for favorable winds to attempt the dangerous up-current passage through the Dardanelles strait into the Sea of Marmara and beyond to the Black Sea. Trojans capitalized on their position to charge protection duties in exchange for expert navigators and security guarantees with allied cities. And while they waited, sea captains traded wares in the markets of Troy and procured supplies for the journey ahead. Thus, the vagaries of the winds influenced the fortunes of the great city.

In modern times, the 4-mile strait between Assos in Asia, and Lesbos in Europe, made this one of the most heavily trafficked routes for refugees seeking to escape the Syrian civil war into welfare-supportive European nations. Our consideration of the physical geography enhances our understanding of this fascinating region.

 

Brochure & Registration

Read more about our program in the pages that follow! To register, request our brochure and registration form by email: admin@johngrahamtours.com