Didyma, Miletus, and Priene

Today started off with a three hour bus ride in the early morning towards the Aegean coast of Turkey. For those that have been keeping track, our journey thus far has looked something like this:

We finally arrived in the early afternoon at our first stop; the ancient city of Didyma where we visited an ancient temple of Apollo.

This is the inside of the temple of Apollo’s courtyard.

This is an early Christian symbol (similar to the fish). When placed on top of each other, the Greek letters standing for “Jesus Christ, God, Son, Savior” can be found in this symbol.



We then went over to Miletus which is found in both Acts 20:14-26 and 2nd Timothy 4:20. This is where Paul stopped at the very end of his third journey and delivered his very moving speech to the elders of the nearby Ephesian church. I had the opportunity to read the passage to our group in the Miletus theatre but won’t post the video because it’s really large and I haven’t edited it down yet.

This is what part of ancient Miletus would have looked like.

This inscription reads “Place of the Jews who are also the God fearers”

We then headed over towards ancient Priene, a small city of about 5,000 founded by Alexander the Great.

This is where Alexander the Great stayed when he visited Priene.

This Menorah is just about all that remains of an ancient house synagogue in Priene.