Humanitarian Conference in Istanbul

Every year the Europe East Area has a conference for humanitarian missionary couples, and this year it was in Istanbul. It was a wonderful conference, with 25 couples from Armenia, Baltics, Ukraine, several areas of Russia (Moscow, Samara, St. Petersburg, Rostov, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, and Vladivostok), Kazakhstan, Georgia, Belarus, and Turkey. We had good instruction, but best of all we shared experiences and enjoyed being with each other. We loved spending time with President Wolfgang Paul of the Seventy and some of our other leaders whom we previously knew only through the Internet.

Istanbul was beautiful—full of tulips and flowering trees. This was our fifth trip to the city, and we enjoyed all our favorite sites but also added a few new experiences. We went to several museums, among the most interesting the large and impressive Military Museum. There we saw armor worn by Genghis Khan’s warriors. They must have been huge warriors—no wonder the Europeans were frightened!

We also visited the Archaeological Museum, which housed a large collection of Hellenistic and Roman statues as well as a vast collection of other artifacts. Before, we always thought of Greece as the location of the Hellenistic culture—but there are an equal (and perhaps greater) number of Hellenistic sites in Turkey.

One of our favorite museums was a Christian church (now a museum) which was built in 1100 and decorated with frescoes and mosaics in 1300. Much of the inside of the church is still intact, and the frescoes and mosaics are breath-taking.

We walked along the Theodosian Walls, a great chain of double walls with 11 fortified gates and 192 towers, which protected Constantinople’s landward side against invasion for 1,000 years (412-1453) and then protected the Ottoman Empire’s Istanbul until 1700. At one end of the wall there are seven towers enclosing a dungeon, which we explored. We climbed the walls for a spectacular view of the Bosphorus.

We came home tired but very happy after spending four days with other couples. We found that, although we have less contact with other missionaries than most (we are alone here), we have less governmental interference. We love Turkey!