23 September - Assos & Pergamum

We drove 30 miles south of Troy to Assos. The city is set on a steep mountain top overlooking the Aegean Sea across to Greece. It started POURING rain when we got there! We walked through the cute cobbled roads of Behramkale to get to the top of the hill.

The ruins are of a large temple built to Athena in the 5th century B.C.E. It was amazing. We stood and talked for a few minutes under our umbrellas about how Paul and Luke likely taught the gospel to people here and in the land between here and Troy. It was so wet that my lens was SUPER WET so it wouldn't really focus sometimes. Luckily it wasn't ruined.

Next we went and rode up a tram to the Pergamum Acrololis. We saw the altar of Zeus, then the steepest ancient theater in the world (with also the best view in the world), and then the Athena temple on the tip top. Fun fact! This altar of Zeus was mostly taken apart and is now reconstructed in a museum of Berlin. MORE FUN FACT - I went there two years ago! So I went and dug up the picture I took of the indoor reconstruction. You can see in the model that it has huge steps leading up to the altar, and there is a large, detailed relief face of figures going around the entire temple. It was really exciting for me to connect these two things! I remember our class in Berlin not being too excited to sit on those steps with our museum headsets to learn about this altar of Zeus that stands on some mountain top in Turkey. Who knew I would be standing there almost exactly two years later!

Also, this theater is so steep it made me scared to stand on it. Our tour guide, Semi, was facing us, so his back was to the drop...and I was anxious the whole time. It is INSANE.