Beach Landings & Bursa
Location: Troy & Bursa
Happy Thanksgiving! Having briefly paused our journey with St. Paul (We’ll catch up with him again in Greece), we turned to spend a day dedicated more to secular history. We departed Çanakkale, where we had spent the night, and made for the ruins of the ancient city of Troy. I learned there that Troy was built and rebuilt nine times! The site had labels telling us which parts were from Troy II, which from Troy VI, and so forth. Troy’s oldest structures are about 4,000 years old! I was led to wonder what was going on in salvation history during each of these phases of Troy. Eventually, salvation history overlapped with Troy’s history when, as a Roman city, it became Christian around the fourth century AD.
From the Trojan citadel, we overlooked the plains that sat between us and the Dardanelles Strait, from which the Greeks would have landed to siege Troy. Did the Trojan War happen just as Homer tells it in the Iliad, featuring characters like Achilles, Helen of Sparta, and Paris of Troy—as played by Brad Pitt, Diane Kruger, and Orlando Bloom in the 2004 film? Maybe not to such detail, but but there is evidence for an armed conflict and a burning of Troy VII in about the 11th century BC. In any case, it was remarkable to visit a place about which tales have been told for thousands of years.
From there, our bus took us along the Dardanelles on a four-hour ride to Bursa. We caught a glimpse of the mouth of the Dardanelles and the end of the Gallipoli Peninsula, where the Gallipoli campaign (1915-1916) was fought between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire in World War I. The Allies invaded Gallipoli to gain control of the Turkish Straits (the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus) which connect the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, probably one of the reasons the Greeks sieged Troy some 3,000 years prior. The Allies failed, but the losses were great on both sides. I was moved as I saw the place where tens of thousands of young men lost their lives in battle, an experience similar, I imagine, to visiting Gettysburg, Flanders, or the beaches of Normandy.
Our bus ride continued on, with the Sea of Marmara to our left. Flat country was on our right, the lush green wheat and barley fields reminding us of the rural Midwest: of Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois. Arriving in Bursa, Turkey’s fourth-largest city and once the capital of the Ottoman Empire, we had lunch, briefly visited their own great mosque and bazaar—both over 500 years old—and met up with a missionary priest to have Mass. Since the Catholic community’s church building is closed for renovation, we followed the priest into an apartment building and he led us into a tiny chapel. We celebrated Vespers, Mass, and, for our first time on pilgrimage, Eucharistic Adoration with exposition of the Blessed Sacrament! After so many days of praying in hotel conference rooms and on the bus, the holy hour we celebrated in the chapel was a real spiritual delight to all of us.
After Mass, we made it to our hotel and enjoyed a delicious dinner. Although we did not eat turkey today, we have much to be thankful for. I am particularly thankful for the generosity of our pilgrimage’s benefactors who made this trip possible, and for all who are following our pilgrimage and praying for us as we go along. I am also thankful for the opportunity we will have tomorrow: to see the Pope in Istanbul!
-Jackson Miller, Archdiocese of Dubuque
