26. Travel Greece with a Bible in Your Suitcase | Via Ignatia from the Gate of Neopolis to the Gate of Thrace | The Necropolis | Philippi, Greece

by Lorelei GaugerTour GreecePosted on One Comment

From the entrance at the main gate, the Gate of Neopolis, Via Ignatia passed through the village and exited through the Gate of Thrace. The ancient road, Via Ignatia, connected Neopolis and Philippi, Greece.

Via Ignatia traversed right through the middle of the little village of Philippi, dividing it into two parts.  

Architects built a ring road that goes around the antiquities and the ruins of Philippi.

The ring road joins Via Ignatia along its way to Drama, Greece. 

Ancient Philippi is surrounded by city walls.

We hope someday to see the ancient city gate rebuilt by archaeologists. Archaeologists have excavated part of Via Ignatia at the Old Gate of the ancient village.

The acropolis, a sacred place and not inhabited by citizens was protected by city walls.  The city walls go all the way up the hill to where the old acropolis used to be.

Dating back to 4BC, the time of Phillip II, is the foundation of a side little gate. Beside the gate was a tower so that the soldiers could see from above and protect the gate.

The square blocks on the right are the foundation for the protective tower of the gate that was once built here.

Right outside of the city walls is the cemetery, the necropolis, νεκρόπολις, i.e. the city of the death.

We walked, and ran, along the ring road as we approached Philippi.

Philippi was founded in 360 BC by Thasians, remodeled in 356 BC by Philip and renamed Philippi. In 42 BC we have the Battle of Philippi.

At one time there were two towers at the entrance gate of Philippi, Greece, where people could officially enter the city. You could see the right tower, but the left tower was buried under the road. The Apostle Paul, and those from Neopolis entered the Philippi from that gate.

Here are the signs located at the entrance to Philippi.

Since the Neolithic time, Greeks have lived with earthquakes. Philippi, Greece is a highly seismogenic place. The Greeks developed aseismic building methods – still in use today in the countryside.  They built stone foundations that were a little bit deeper than normal, affixed a wooden structure and filled it with adobe. Then they plastered the wall. This method provided flexibility to the whole building and absorbed vibrations from an earthquake, making it safe for the people inside.

This aseismic structure was particularly good because it was thermal insulated and very flexible in an earthquake. But it had a disadvantage: it must always be roofed. Without a roof, gradually the rain melts the building down to a layer of clay. A two or three floor building without a roof can be brought down to water level (where we were stepping now.) Then the knowledge of the use of the rooms in the upper floors totally vanished. We cannot reconstruct them, but today, we can gain a lot of information about them, information that fifty or sixty years ago the people could not even imagine.

You cannot take a shovel and start taking off dirt because every layer preserves elements of time, elements of a level. An archaeological dig today is a terribly slow process and extremely expensive.  

Massive excavation is considered a crime in archaeology. In some places, like in Israel, the state sometimes decides that entire layers, centuries and centuries of layers, be removed without any study, down to the layer that interests the government. You can see excavations in Jerusalem today with excavators, something that is totally improper in archaeological research because we must see gradual developments, studying the layers, from time to time, from period to period, from year to year and record it.

23. Travel Greece with a Bible in Your Suitcase | Palia Mousiki Hall | Old Town | Acropolis | Ancient Port of Neopolis | Kavala, Greece

by Lorelei GaugerTour GreecePosted on No Comments

The Apostle Paul stepped out of his boat at the ancient port in Neopolis, now known as Kavala, Greece. Let me introduce you to Kavala.

The Acropolis of Kavala sits at the top of the peninsula where the old town is situated. Narrow roads take cars, vans and people up to the top of the peninsula.

Below the Fortress is the medieval aqueduct.

The narrow winding roads lead past portions of the town.

During the time of Ottoman rule churches were converted to mosques or mosques were built over churches. Here’s a mosque built on an early church site.

The Palia Mousiki Hall (formerly the Halil Bey Mosque), the terracotta colored building on the right, was built over an early Christian church, which seems to have had a 7 room seminary and a cemetery. Here is the excavation site, which also continues inside the hall, which was closed when we arrived.

The narrow winding road leads through the Old Town towards the Acropolis.

We reached the final stair climb at the top. The former Byzantine Acropolis of Christoupolis was destroyed in 1391. Part of it was incorporated in the early 15th century.

The Acropolis, as a place, as an institution, appeared in the middle of the 2nd millennium before Christ during the Mycenaean Period, the period of the Trojan War, which generally can be described also as the Late Bronze Age.

The term Acropolis is a combined term from άκρη, meaning summit and edge (from which we have in English the term acrobat – the person who likes to walk on the edge,) and πόλεις, meaning cities (and from that term we have police and politician -the guards of the city .)

The literal meaning of the word Acropolis means the upper city and was organized to be the palace sanctuary of the King Priest.

When the monarchy was opposed in Greece, the Acropolis remained the sanctuary of the patron gods of the city. The administration came down into the middle of the city. After Alexander the Great, all the cities, including Jerusalem, had some necessary standards.

The Temple of Jerusalem was considered the Acropolis of Jerusalem by the Greeks and the Romans. Don’t forget, at the time of Christ, Jerusalem was a gymnasium and a theater, both identified in the old city (and also a pagan temple in Jerusalem is identified) dedicated to the god Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. It was built on the side of Bethesda Pool.

As we traveled Kostas told us wecould trace all the standards of a city, down to a village, even Philipp, for all the Mediterranean world after Alexander the Great.

And in that frame, we would place the events described in the Book of Acts. We were going to the very places in Philippi that are described in The Book of Acts. But archaeologically we would see the sites built mostly at the time of Octavian Augustus after the topple of Philippi, 42BC.

We would be seeing Philippi, archeologically, a hundred years after the Apostle Paul visited the city.  We would see ruins of the city walls, just behind the grass, the inside the area of the walls and the terrain of little tiny Philippi, Greece. The Letter to the Philippians was addressed to the church of the little village of Philippi, almost 10 years after the Apostle Paul came there, the first time, from the prison of Rome. Although they were a small group they had never forgotten him.

The Apostle Paul walked the Ignatian Road from the Port of Kavala to Philippi.

The road, mostly buried under the modern road, was built in the 2nd century before Christ. It was the first infrastructure work built by the Romans outside of Italy. It was a military road that traversed the Balkans and connected the Adriatic with the Black Sea, with a length of approximately 1,100 km. Every Roman mile was marked by a milestone giving travel distance information to the travelers of that time.

We are going to Philippi at the River of Lydia where we would have an opportunity for worship on the banks of the river.

21. Travel Greece with a Bible in Your Suitcase | Kavala, Christopolis, Biblical Neopolis, Greece | Philippians 3:20 | Acts 16:11 |

by Lorelei GaugerTour GreecePosted on No Comments

The people of Thasos, initially built the city port of Neapolis, now called Kavala. In the seventh century before Christ, Neopolis was built to help the people transport pine-wood raw material from the mainland to the island of Thasos, for building the ships of that time.

Searching for a good quality of wood, they also discovered that this area also had gold.  The ship builders came to negotiations with the local people and built a city in 360 B.C. The city was called Springs because of the springs that were close by.

When they started to dwell there, cultivating the land around there, they had trouble with the locals, around the town of Springs. So, they invited Phillip II to come and solve the problem. Phillip came, and being a very clever politician, he discovered all about the gold and so he kicked out from the city the people who had found it, the Thasians, and he built the city after his own name, Philippi.

The old city was on the peninsula, still surrounded by the city walls and at the top you see the citadel which is the acropolis of the Ancient Neopolis. 

In Philippi, Phillip II minted gold coins which were used by Alexander to start his campaign to Persia. When there was no more gold in the mines Philippi declined into an agricultural little village. It came back onto the stage of history and became very famous at the year 42 BC when outside of the city walls of Philippi was a very famous battle of the Roman civil wars.

At Philippi, the Army of the Republicans led by Cassius and Brutus (who had assassinated Julius Caesar, who had attempted to become an emperor/dictator, two years earlier) met to fight against the Imperial Army led by the successors of Julius Caesar, Octavian and Mark Anthony. Although the Republican Army was more capable, skilled and bigger they were defeated and both Cassius and Brutus committed suicide. The winners of that battle, finally, were the Imperials with their army, Octavian and Mark Anthony.

So the battle of Philippi marks the end of an entire period of Roman history, the Republican Period, and the beginning of a new period, the Imperial Period, something which made this battle extremely important in Roman history. This is the reason why both Octavian and Mark Anthony decided to remodel the City of Philippi, and to give the city (although it was really a village and not a city) all the rights of a Roman colony – to settle their veterans from both the armies and to give to Philippi freedom from taxes. So, Philippi got special privileges, a special political system, which applied directly to Rome.

In the letter of the Apostle Paul to Philippi we find a word related with policy and the political system, mentioned 2 times but is not mentioned in any other book of the New Testament.  This word, used by the Apostle πολιτευεστε, means, dealing in a political way (worthy of the Gospel) or our political situation/system (is in heaven.) In Philippians 3:20, Paul is saying, “Philippians, we are proud because you have an exceptional system offered to you by the Romans, but don’t forget that your political system actually is in heaven.” This is the little village that the Apostle Paul visited in the middle of the 1st century AD. There he established the first Christian church on European soil starting his mission west.

Before it came here the gospel was only in Asia.

The City of Philippi was a Christian center and a living city until the 8th century AD. At 8 AD there were earthquakes in the area and the city was ruined completely and abandoned and almost forgotten. Now the main city became the port city of Neopolis and so in the next century, 9 AD, Neopolis became a small Christian center and for the first time the city of Neopolis decided to change the name of their city, which didn’t look very much like the meaning of their name, New City, and to name the city the City of Christ. So, it was called Christopolis, the City of Christ, from 9th century to the 15th century.

In the 15th century the Ottomans came to the city and it became a became major station of their cavalry. The Ottomans came to the city, made a military base – a main station for their cavalry and from the word καβαλάριά, ka-va-la-ri-a, the city was renamed to Kavala, which is its present name. So, Kavala, Christopolis, and the Biblical Neopolis, are the same city.

Minarets are a sign of the mosques. The Muslim population in this area of Kavala is about 100,000 people, which is 1% of the Greek population. 

Right after the genocide against the Greeks, in Turkey in 1922, there was an exchange of population between Greece and Turkey. 300,000 Turks from Greece went to Turkey and approximately 2 million Greeks from Asia Minor came to Greece.  These people in Kavala decided to make up their own group, among themselves, and to  identify themselves as Greek Muslims, not Turks. This is the reason they were not included in that exchange of population by the treaty of Lausanne of 1922.

In the street stands a big aqueduct, Roman style, built 400 years ago (16th century.) It was built by Suleiman the Magnificent, who also built the walls of Jerusalem.

In Kavala there is a church dedicated to St. Nicholas in front of which is a monument with a mosaic commemorating the coming of the Apostle Paul to Kavala. On the mosaic the Macedonians are calling the Apostle Paul from Asia, from Troas to Europe. The mosaic shows the Apostle Paul coming out of his boat and stepping to the front of Neapolis. (Acts 16:11)

We are Christians today in the west because one day in the middle of the 1st century AD in this port of Kavala a ship came bringing a person holding some scrolls and the scrolls were the New Testament, the message of the gospel. Kavala, Greece is the gate of the gospel for all the western world. 

We departed from Neoplois to go to Drama, another city close to Kavala, where we had a performance.

Soon we would learn more about the Macedonian calling, the mission of the Apostle Paul to the west.