A Happy Easter

I must say yesterday was one of the best Easters I've ever enjoyed. And it was a uniquely İzmir experience.

It began about 9 a.m. with choir practice at St John's. Mick McCann, a retired clergyman who has been helping out for several years at St. John's, has been working for some time with an assorted group of singers to prepare music for Holy Week and Easter. We joined the choir when we got here and have enjoyed practising and singing music for Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, and ultimately Easter. The choir did itself proud yesterday. We did lots of service music and a great anthem, impressing the church full of visitors and long-lost regulars. It felt good.

But Mick didn't stop there. Janet Crisler, who was the regular organist when we were here last year, has moved to Selçuk (the modern town near the ruins of Ephesus) to live in a research library she has set up in memory of her late husband. Janet and he worked for years as archaeologists in Ephesus specializing in ancient texts, and that's the focus of this library. She wanted to show us her library and a DVD that's just been released telling the story of one ancient text. So Mick, whose wife is a licensed tour guide, organized a bus to take a group of us to visit her.

We were an assorted group - three of the Turkish regulars and one who is not part of that group of close friends, about a dozen English-speaking regulars (including us), and an American tourist who happened to be in church and thought it might be interesting to come along.

First we went to the ancient Greek town of Sirince. It was just another Ionian Greek village until 1923, when the Anatolian Greeks were "returned" to Greece (most of them came from families that had lived in Anatolia since the Stone Age). Turkish villagers moved in and seem to be enjoying life in this most beautiful hill town. It's a lovely place, and İzmirlis love to go there on hot summer days for a pleasant meal and a walk through the ancient streets. It's clean and friendly and the food - we had lunch there - is delicious. We enjoyed browsing through the handicraft stalls, too. I was fascinated by the way the knitters hold their yarn: around the neck and wrapped around the left thumb, using the left index finger to throw the yarn over the right needle. I think it allows them to walk and knit, and even to carry something in their left hand while knitting. I bought a pair of traditional socks so I could copy the design, which has been around for hundreds if not thousands of years. We also explored the ancient Greek church of St John, which is being restored under the direction of the Turkish culture ministry. Lovely place.

Then back onto the bus and off to Janet's place in Selçuk for a showing of the DVD. It's about the Abgar letters, which were supposed to be a letter from Abgar, king of Edessa, to Jesus and Jesus' response. It was a very moving show. I'm still sceptical about the letters, but I was most impressed with the way the DVD set them in context and made sense of them.

Finally we walked up the hill to the Basilica of St. John. This is where my favourite gospel (John) was written, and I loved the place. We stayed outside this time, not having the time for a really long stay, and I went to sit on a rock beside a bit of waste land. I heard a slithering in the grass, and there was a snake! A Turkish gentleman nearby denied that there were any snakes at all anywhere nearby and insisted I must have seen a tortoise. Very conveniently there happened to be a tortoise just behind me, but I saw what I saw and it was most certainly a vipera lebetina. What kind of stupid tourist did he take me to be?! I picked up the tortoise and turned it over to determine its gender (female) and it emitted a copious stream of pee. Missed me, though. I've never had a tortoise do that before.

There were other neat things to watch outside the Basilica, too: our friend Cathy playing drums with a severely handicapped guy who earned his living that way, and a very healthy stork's nest with one parent tending the eggs and the other keeping watch and looking for prey. And our little group provided some diversion for the locals, too, because it's quite unusual for a mixed group of Turks and foreigners to hang out together. Our Turkish friends got lots of questions.

All in all a most pleasantly diverting day and a great way to spend Easter.