Full album of the whirling dervish dance I attended my last night in Istanbul.  

The seven days I was in Constantinople/Istanbul was the most moving, exhausting, and colorful part of the pilgrimage. We arrived by bus and went for lunch at the Phanar. Then we visited the small Church of St. Nicholas, one of the 75 still functioning Orthodox churches (served by just 24 priests) in Istanbul. The single […]

After Mt. Athos, we loaded onto the bus and headed off for Turkey. We stopped twice, once in a small city at a fairly decent hotel, and once in a very small town at a very nice hotel by the beach. At the first city, Kavallas, we arrived on the feast day of Sts. Peter […]

We left for Mt. Athos at 5am. I stayed up too late packing, but worse of all, there was music blasting from the theological school where we had taken Greek classes. Police are not allowed to go on college campuses, and if they had campus security they did nothing. After a restless sleep, we were […]