Ancient columns which once held up mighty monuments, stand against the sands of time, in the haze of a late June afternoon. There is hardly a soul, but the ruins are filled with the peace of the day’s final few rays. Anatolia, legacy, shifting sediments, vessels of civilisations long gone.
This is a memory which has lingered in my psyche ever since I visited the ruins of Perge as a toddler.
It felt like a kind of full circle moment to come again twenty years later.
With my sister Suzie , we spent an afternoon under the baking Anatolian sun, exploring the ruins of this once bustling Lycian settlement-turned-Roman metropolis. Perge is a physical portal into antiquity- it featured on ancient Hittite tablets, and hosted Persians, Seleucids and Greek armies headed by Alexander the Great, before becoming a Roman city in 188 BC.
The stadium, baths, coliseum, necropolis and temple of Artemis were breathtaking, no doubt, but the place which struck a chord with us were the ruins of an ancient Byzantine church.
As I kneeled at the remains of the altar, my sweaty forehead resting in the gravel, I was overcome by awe. That primal human impulse to worship that which is greater than us. We both were actually, as believers in Christ, moved by the realisation that here we were, thousands of years later, praying and communing in the same stone structure where our Greek, Jewish and Turkish spiritual ancestors would have gathered. Indeed the apostle Paul, a Jew from modern day Türkiye and founder of the early Christian church, passed through Perge on his travels to spread the gospel. You can read more about it in the Acts of the Apostles, a book in the Bible.
On that hot afternoon, surrounding by sprawling ruins, olive trees and the sweet scent of blooming Bougainvillea, I was reminded that stones crumble, generations pass through, but our creator remains the same, always.
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