For ages on ages, Turkey has been a land where seers have seen visions and prophets have spoken prophesies. The country, or more precisely the Asiatic portion of it known today as Anatolia or Asia Minor, has been endowed with the homes of people and the locations of events in both the Old and the New Testaments. Only the land of Palestine has been linked more closely to the Bible than Anatolia. From the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers that flowed out of Eden to the churches of Revelation, from Adam and Eve to the Apostle John, biblical images, places, people, the words and their actions have conferred a unique legacy on Turkey. Here Abraham heard the call of God to worship Him alone; here Christians received their name; and from here Christianity spread into the Western world. The gifts and the responsibility of these visions are the heritage of Christians everywhere.
Biblical writers were intent to show that God worked through and was revealed in human history and in real places. The themes of God’s inexorable justice and God’s covenant with those who continue faithful to Him to bring about redemption pervade the Bible.
While some of the people of the Bible are probably legendary or even symbolic, many really lived. The events that they were a part of -the journeys, the battles, the visions- happened in actual places known to the writers. Many of those places can be seen today; their major geographic identities, the rivers, mountains and shores, are relatively unchanged. Likewise, of the Old Testament references, the Anatolian places of Abraham’s home of Harran, the land of Ararat, and the center of the Hittite Empire can be visited. Of the New Testament, some of the sophistication that distinguished the residents of 1st-century Antioch is on display through the mosaics in the Hatay Museum of Antakya; the ravages of time and the collapse of paganism show in the collapse of the beautiful Temple to Diana in Ephesus. John’s message in the Book of Revelation has immortalized the seven churches he addressed in western Anatolia because of his portentous vision of the last days. With all of these, this country shares with Palestine the ancient identity of the Holy Land of the Bible.