Today is Friday May 3, 2005. Stella and I have been on vacation for fifteen days, the real world is gone, and there is no need to go back now. Someone send me our children and I will find a job here. Today we took a cab to the oldest church in town, a Byzantine era church that is still in use today. It stands on top of a hill in an open square that it shares with a Post Byzantine church and a modern high school. Stella’s mother went to that school. She would be appalled at the sight of all of the graffiti on every exposed surface of the building. Within a 500m area there are eight ancient churches, a modern church and a cathedral. Some of the older churches were open, had candles lit and were available for picture taking; others had pad locks on the doors. There was one that looked like it was half buried on the up hill side, and falling down the hill on the down hill side. What was interesting about this church was I could see the damage that the Turks did to the churches when the occupied this area for 527 years. In order to break the morale of the people they went to all of the churches and carved out all of the eyes of the icons painted on the walls. This church had the paintings on the out side of the building and the carved out eyes were over an inch deep, so it is not like they just rubbed the paint out, they dug holes in every person depicted. Every new corner of this town, this country, has some history to it, a new story to be discovered. It can be almost overwhelming.

¶ 6/03/2005 01:21:00 PM

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