Turkey #5

Amazing..Amazing...our next stop was Goreme.

Goreme was another place where rocks had been carved into and a lot of churches had been created for the early Christians. And they know they are churches because they have paintings on the inside. It was a little bit late in the day, so we weren’t able to stay as an organized group. As we walked around, I was real aware that there weren’t very many entities there.

The very early Christian paintings were only visible in a couple of spaces. And the later Christian theology had been painted on several walls in great energy stories. The one I actually paid to go into was filled with theology. It had Jesus in the center. It had the baptism by John the Baptist. It had the crucifixion. It had the disciples. It was really filled with pictures that validated the beliefs of later Christianity. It had a pope’s picture. So you know it was my feeling it was probably painted there in the 1200 or 1300’s - you know, not early Christian. And I think that was validated when we talked to one of the guides there. He thought it was 1251ad when it was painted.
But in the earlier pieces, there was much more symbolism. It was an iconic type of art with the symbolism, not the pictures of what they thought Jesus looked like. So that was interesting.
I flet that this location had originally been used as beautiful places of worship, and then had been turned into a sort of shrine to support the beliefs that had evolved.