And had a great time. Click here to visit the Boston '06 picture page for commentary and lots of pictures. Here are some of the important ones.

The Murdys

The Rossis

Schola students at the Rossis

On top of the Green Monster at Fenway

Drop on by Jacy Tilton's blog and look at the beautiful pictures she's put up there.

Jacy and her cousin Ray, her dad, and her grandma all came with us on the trip and anchored the back seat of the bus. Her dad and I (and sometimes Ray) would get together every afternoon on the deck of his (Mr. Tilton's) or my (Mr. Callihan's) hotel room, put our feet up (all four, or six, if Ray was there), look over the railing and watch the rest of the Schola yahoos (all two dozen of them) go gallivanting (see dictionary.com) off somewhere (who knows) to explore the new town (see all of Karoline's posts) we happened to be in, and enjoy (us, not the Schola yahoos) a good cigar and one of the good local beers (Efes in Turkey, Mythos in Greece). Jacy just laughed at us.

Karoline's account of our day at Ephesus is excellent but she neglects to mention (or was she trying to forget?) the cheesy modern waterparks we passed on the way to the site. However, I'll let that slide as her story makes quite a splash without it, and I don't want to put a damper on her narrative and be accused of being a wet blanket.

<EDIT- Daniel has some great photos on his site too. Check it out. END EDIT>

"We saw the pagan temple of Artemis, the Ephesus Museum, the Church of St. John, the Isa Bey Mosque, and (yes) the ancient city of Ephesus." -- RightAngles

Below is the temple of Artemis, which at one time was one of the Seven Wonders of the World. "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!" roared the crowd. But now what remains? Even the lone standing column is a reconstruction.  "... the lone and level sands stretch far away."

In the Ephesus museum were portions of houses from the city, including the bit shown below from the "Socrates room", so-called because of a bust of Socrates displayed in it. The frescoes on the walls and the mosaics on the floors are beautiful. Why don't we paint scenes on the walls of our houses?

Among the statuary in the museum is this group depicting Odysseus putting out the eye of the Cyclops.

After the museum we wandered the town of Selcuk and then visited the Church of St. John, which is on the hill in the background of the above picture of the temple of Artemis. Daniel has some nice photos of the church.

The Isa Bey mosque had wonderfully colorful carpets on the floor (you take your shoes off to walk on them), huge columns brought from Egypt where they had been taken from much earlier structures there, brick arches and wooden-beamed ceilings - a fascinating structure.

As well, Karoline mentioned the "mihrab" and "minbar" Below you see a niche set into the far wall (below and behind the chandelier) indicating the direction of Mecca. When the worshippers pray in the mosque, they face the mihrab and thus Mecca. The leader of the prayers (the "imam") occupies this niche as he leads, and the mihrab is the most holy place in the mosque. To the right of the mihrab you see a tall narrow set of stairs ascending to a pulpit-like affair - this is the minbar, where the "preacher" of the Friday sermon stands on one of the lower steps (the highest position is for the Prophet alone, and the "preacher" never goes all the way up). The minbar is normally of stone, but wooden ones like this one are occasionally seen. Both the mihrab and the minbar are architectural features borrowed by Islam from Christian church architecture.

Then Ephesus itself. The city was huge and important, and so many ruins remain that one is able to imagine the city intact. Almost. Below is the main road down into Ephesus lined with the monuments Karoline mentioned. Paul certainly walked this road.

And at the end of the road (you can see it in the picture above) is the library of Celsus. Below you see how magnificent it was by the facade which has been reconstructed from the rubble.

And below is the theater in which, according to Acts 19, a riotous crowd bellowed "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!" for two hours without even knowing why, following the angry charges raised by the silversmiths of the city who stood to lose by Paul's preaching of the gospel. We sat in the theater and I read aloud Acts 19. We didn't shout, however. We were a more decorous lot. For a graphic reminder of who ultimately won the fracas (like you need one, right?) see the top picture one more time and remember what that is on the hill behind and above the swamp of Artemis.

Another great man is gone.

On Saturday, May 13, 2006 (just under a month ago) Jaroslav Pelikan, one of the greatest Christian historians of modern times (perhaps the greatest of the last century) died of lung cancer. Although he is still part of the communion of the saints, we've lost a great man and will have no more books from him. Pelikan was a great scholar and was at Yale from the early '60s till the late '90s, producing the greatest history of Christian doctrine since Harnack, the German historian of the late 19th century, and in some ways it is better - for example, Pelikan was not moved to unbelief by his study of history, but to greater belief. He was a staunch Missouri Synod Lutheran all his life, until he was in his mid 70s when he converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. But like Newman and Chesterton before him after their conversions from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, Pelikan's work after becoming Orthodox was entirely consistent with everything he had done and become all his life.

Read this excellent and delightful article about Pelikan by Mark Noll, from Christian History magazine online: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/152/42.0.html - after the first two short paragraphs you'll love the guy already. Note especially the education his parents gave him and his response to the schools he went to. Then read this Wikipedia article about him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaroslav_Pelikan. You might take a look at this brief description of him that is still up on Yale's website, before they take it down: http://www.yale.edu/history/faculty/pelikan.html, and this page about his Kluge award: http://www.loc.gov/loc/kluge/pelikan.html.

And finally, to really honor the man as he deserves to be honored for his tremendous service to Christianity, you should order and read his magisterial 5-volume _The Christian Tradition_ from from Amazon or from from Christianbook.com. As soon as my bank account recovers from certain recent drainages, I intend to do so myself. I'm reading his _The Vindication of Tradition_  (from Amazon or from Christianbook.com) right now and it's outstanding.

Requiescat In Pace, Dr. Pelikan.

In the first picture below - of the yellow Samos airport - you see "Aristarhos of Samos" on the building. (The "h" in Aristarhos is the modern Greek way of spelling the old letter chi.) Aristarchos of Samos was a mathematician of the 3rd century BC who wrote a book theorizing that the sun is the center of the universe and that the earth orbits the sun; he further argued that the earth revolves on its own axis, thus accounting for the nightly apparent motion of the stars. This book no longer exists but we do have another one that he wrote on the size and distance of the sun, moon, and stars. He had the sun too small and too close but that's due to his lack of accurate instruments to observe angles and so forth. But his description of the distance to the stars is fascinating - he says it is so great that the circle in which the earth revolves about the sun bears the same proportion to the distance of the fixed stars as the centre of a sphere bears to its surface. In other words, the radius of the sphere of the fixed stars is infinitely large compared with the orbit of the earth. If this were not so, he reasoned, we would see the effects of parallax. Brilliant! However, his theories were utterly rejected by the Greeks - in fact, the philosopher Cleanthes wanted him prosecuted on charges of impiety!

Karoline mentions our arrival in Samos, which we flew to - a one hour flight at most, but it took us across the beautiful Aegean, dotted with lovely islands at which we oohed and from our plane. The airport in Samos is yellow.

And the harbor is.... quaint? picturesque? harborial?

And there, as Karoline described, we visited the museum which contained, among other things, the colossal kouros, standing almost three times the height of a man and dating from around 600 BC. Here is an excellent article on the kouros figures, with more good pictures that show the Egyptian-ness Karoline refers to.

After a most pleasant outdoor lunch.....

Some of the group waded at the beach while we waited for our ferry...

And then we ferried across the channel to Turkey. "Asia Minor" is a far more evocative term, however, since "Turkey" is the modern name, and the region of Turkey we visited was really ancient Ionia (in the Greek era) and Asia Minor (in the Roman era). As we crossed we talked about all the associations with the Aegean and the Asia Minor coast that came to mind - "Herodotus lived just down there..", "Ephesus is just over there...", "the Achaian fleet sailed this sea..." And we were delighted. Here, crowded into the bow of the ferry, with the dim blue coast of Asia Minor approaching in the background, are, from left to right, Anna Barry, Peter Kong, Marybeth and Priscilla Kong, Candace Spain, Michael Duryea, Emily Callihan, Daniel Alders, Peter Kong, and Jeremy Foster.

And finally there we were in Turkey. As Karoline says, Kusadasi (which is pronounced KOO-SHAH-DAH-SUH, with equal emphasis on all syllables, or perhaps a bit more on the second one) is a tourist town, a port city, which offers access to many famous sites nearby, so it was our base for several days.

And last, but by nohoho means least, our bus driver Ali. Hoo boy.

Karoline is writing an excellent description of our tour, so rather than repeat what she's doing, I'll just point to her descriptions, add a few comments of my own, and fling pictures wildly about. Here is a shot of a portion of the group assembled at the Athens airport waiting for our bus to take them back to the Hotel Austria in Athens. From right to left are Molly McCloy (with backpack), Daniel Alders (hat and sunglasses), Lisa Duryea (green shirt), George Kong (black shirt), David Kong (black jacket), Daniel Maycock (blue tee), Michael Duryea (green cap), Karoline Will (white shirt), and Ashleigh Burke (far right).

Our hotel has this view downhill of the city....

And this view of the Acropolis from the rooftop terrace (linked to hotel website).

After reluctantly leaving the Abrahams, I caught a flight to Washington Dulles airport and then the long overwater flight to Frankfurt, which happened to pass over my ancestral homeland, as you see in this shot of the screen on the seatback in front of me.

The recent much-mentioned but little-reported Schola Tour of Greece and Asia Minor actually began for yours truly by a sidetrack the previous weekend to Ohio to speak at the graduation of long-time Schola student and Queen of the SBC for several years, Mary Abraham. She played a recital of classical piano and violin pieces that was nothing short of outstanding, not least because some mistakes she made (I found out later) were so well disguised that I thought the whole thing was flawless. I think she even began one major piece in the wrong key, minor instead of major or something, and made it seem like it was the way the piece went. I noticed nothing. She also recited Hebrews 11 (the "Hall of Faith" chapter) beautifully; and the only trouble *I* had with that was that whenever anyone reads or recites verse 12, which should go "as the sand which is by the seashore innumerable" (speaking of Abraham's promised descendants), I can't help but hear, "as the sandwiches by the seashore" - as though the apostolic writer began suddenly talking about picnics. Mary, being more mature than I, didn't snicker. Oh, also I gave a speech. I visited the Abraham's OPC church with them on Sunday and generally had a wonderful time hanging out with them all. In the picture below commemorating the occasion, one of us is good-looking and the other one is wearing a bow tie. Guess which is which.