Compared to the days that we had in Turkey, the days that we’ve had in Greece so far have felt really light. Today we drove from Kavalla to Thessaloniki, and on the way we stopped at Amphipolis and Apollonia. There wasn’t really much at either place, there was a giant statue of a lion at Amphipolis and Apollonia is a relatively new site, it is still mostly farmland. They have an interesting way of doing archeology in those fields. The Archeologists rent out a field for one season, do all the work they can then cover it back up with dirt and the next season the farmer plants it again.
(The lion of Amphipolis, it's about 30 feet high. A person standing next to it gets up to about the second row of bricks.)
Once we got to Thessaloniki we went to the museum here. It was a pretty nice museum, in Turkey most of the museums that we went to were mostly little places that held things taken from the local site. Most of them could be thoroughly examined in 20 to 30 minutes. The Thessaloniki archeological museum was bigger, cleaner, warmer, and looked very professional. There was a bunch of cool stuff there, Gordon, our teacher, took us to look at about 15 things that had biblical relevance, but the section with the stuff from the tombs, which was apparently the best thing to see in the museum was closed because the rain was messing with the lights in there (it rained most of the day today.) There was some cool finds from Apollonia, which was fun to see, and some really interesting stuff there about Alexander the Great.
(A funeral vase from the museum.)
(A fish mosaic for dad and Emily. Below is a close up.)
After the museum we went to our hotel, checked in, then had lunch (late lunch, it was about 3:00, I was starving.) Then we walked up to look at St. Demetrius church, which was really pretty inside. It is a Greek Orthodox church so there were a lot of icons and mosaics. I really like the artwork on some of the icons, I guess the monasteries that we are going to visit in Meteora (two days from now) are the best place to buy icons and I would like to pick up a few cool ones there. We were going to visit the crypt, but it was closed. Apparently they changed the hours pretty recently.
After that we walked down to the Roman forum (agora) here in Thessaloniki. It is a second century forum, but it is most likely right on top of the 1st century forum that Paul and Silas and Timothy were in.
Thessaloniki is a cool city, one of the advantages of having a light day here is that we had a chance to walk around and see part of the city. I really enjoyed walking around but there are parts of the city to avoid. I guess they have riots here every night in the university district. A few weeks ago (maybe at the beginning of December?) a policeman fatally shot a teenager in Athens (maybe?) and students have been rioting since then. Here in Greece the universities are places where the police can’t come and arrest people, so the kids all wear black masks so no one recognizes them, they riot close to the university, the police tear gas them, they run back to the university, and the police don’t chase them. I stayed away from the university district and walked down to the waterfront and got a Thessaloniki Starbucks mug, it’s not as cool as the Antalya mug, but that’s ok.
One of the cool things about travelling in Greece so far is that our route has been the same as Paul’s was on his second missionary journey. He came into Neapolis, went up to Philippi, then when he got run out of Phillipi he came down to Thessaloniki by way of Amphipolis and Apollonia, then after getting run out of Thessaloniki he went down to Berea. I’m not sure where exactly we’re going tomorrow but I do know that we’re going to Berea and that we’ll be spending the night in Meteora (which Paul didn’t visit, so that will be our first deviation from his journey in Greece.)
Well that’s enough for today. Thanks for reading and until tomorrow…
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