Cristo Redentor

Even on a sunny day, with blue skies and puffy clouds, I wouldn't have been that impressed by the statue. It's colossal, of course; those outstretched arms are 28 meters across—almost 100 feet. But you lose the scale seeing it up close. If I'd had to guess how tall it was I would have said maybe fifty feet, but it's twice that. You really get a much better sense of the drama of it from a distance, or in the many photographs taken from the air.

There's a tiny chapel inside the pedestal, which was packed with people trying to get out of the rain, and I sat there for a while. I much preferred the painting there to the statue outside.

Stations of the cross

On the other side of the mountaintop, there's a giant cross, and the path leading up to it has 14 marble shrines representing the Stations of the Cross.

I don't think I've thought about the Stations—representing the events in the Passion of Christ—for decades, but when I was in grammar school we went to the church every Friday afternoon during Lent to do the stations. It started with the First Station, Jesus is condemned to death, and ended with the Fourteenth, Jesus is laid in the sepulchre, and there was a set of prayers we recited for each station. Our family bible had a set of fairly disturbing and graphic paintings (I used to have nightmares about the Eleventh Station, Jesus is nailed to the cross) but the church just had fourteen metal plaques. I actually liked the Stations of the Cross liturgy, the chanted prayers and the Benediction at the end with incense and music, and especially coming out into the sunshine afterwards and getting to go home early.

I left the church intellectually and emotionally when I was still in high school, but you never forget the rituals. When I took the picture of the Third Station, I knew automatically that it depicted Jesus falling for the first time.

How to dress in Saudi Arabia

This lovely woman was the guide our first day in Jeddah. She explained that the way she was dressed—black slacks and blouse under an abaya that was just a long loose multicolored jacket, and no hijab—is quite acceptable in Saudi Arabia now.

That may be, but she was the only Saudi woman I saw who wasn't wearing a headscarf, and most of them are still wearing all black. She repeated what I'd been told by women in Egypt—that wearing an abaya and hijab is cultural and not religious. But I'm not sure that's a useful distinction if you can be shunned or arrested for how you are dressed.

Culture can evolve, of course, and religion does as well, though much more slowly. But I don't think anything changes quickly in Saudi Arabia. This is after all a country where women have only been able to drive since 2018.

Fortunately, unlike Iran, women tourists do not have to wear abayas or hijabs, though we're expected to “dress modestly.” Most of us wore slacks and a long-sleeved blouse, and that was apparently acceptable.

House of the Virgin Mary

Filling the gap in the itinerary after losing three stops in Egypt has been a kind of Mediterranean hopscotch. We were in Crete for one day, then back to Nafplion on the mainland. Christmas was a sea day. Yesterday we were in Turkey, and had to turn our clocks ahead an hour. Today we're in Rhodes, and had to turn them back. Friday, we're back in Crete.

The Turkey stop, in Kuşadasi, wasn't on the original itinerary, and though it wasn't really a substitute for the Valley of the Kings, it did mean that I got to see Ephesus. But the first stop of the morning was in the hills above Ephesus, at the house of the Virgin Mary. Now whether Mary ever actually came to Asia Minor, and lived in this particular house, I have my doubts. But the early start, and grogginess from the time change, combined with a sky worthy of a 1950's Cinemascope epic, made me somewhat less skeptical than usual.

Well, the Cinemascope visions collapsed pretty quickly in the face of those Christmas lights. This is a site that is considered sacred by millions of people, and it looked like the library in a small town at Christmas. No photos are allowed inside but there's really nothing to see—a small sort of chapel with no seating, and a partial fresco in the tiny adjoining room where tradition has it that Mary slept.

It's mostly reconstruction, of course—there's a red line painted on the walls, which you can't really see in this picture, that marks where the original walls end and the reconstruction begins. According to Wikipedia, “the four-walled, roofless ruin had been venerated for a long time by members of the mountain village of Şirince, 17 km (11 mi) distant, who were descended from the early Christians of Ephesus.” (I won't attempt to summarize how the house was identified through the visions of a German nun, or what exactly the Catholic Church officially believes, but it's all in the Wikipedia article.) According to the tradition, Jesus commended his mother to the care of Saint John as he was dying on the cross, and John eventually brought her with him to Ephesus.

I've been lucky enough to visit many holy sites in my lifetime, and have often been conscious of an atmosphere of reverence, a sense of walking on sacred ground, even if the local gods aren't mine. But not here.

I bought a candle anyway, and lit it for my mom, because that would have made her happy.

Begin the Beguinage

This was not one of the most photogenic places I visited in Ghent, but it was perhaps the most interesting -- the Small Beguinage of Our Lady of Ter Hoyen.

I'd never heard of beguinages before, despite my many years of Catholic education. They were religious orders of women -- beguines -- who lived together, but unlike nuns, took no vows and made no lifelong commitment. They were free to leave at any time, and marry, though part of the reason beguinages were originally created was because so many of the men were off fighting the Crusades and they provided both security and community and an opportunity to live independently outside of a convent or a family home.

There are still about thirty beguinages in northern Europe, most of them in Belgium, but the beguines are long gone. This beguinage, one of three in Ghent and a UNESCO World Heritage site, was founded in 1235 by the countesses Johanna and Margaretha of Flanders and was rebuilt in the 17th century. Some of the larger buildings here are used as art workshops, but the little houses, each behind a green gate in the white wall and named for a saint, are leased as private residences.

There was construction going on, so it wasn't actually that peaceful there, but it still felt like a sanctuary from the world,

Urban poetry

The top of Cerro San Cristobal in Santiago is a Catholic shrine. The large statue of Mary is visible for miles, and the path up to it has the Stations of the Cross.

I don't know why these racks were empty. The waxy ghosts of the hundreds of candles they used to contain were a little eerie, even in the bright sunshine of a summer day.

More gods

I'm guessing that these (still in the Siq) were made later, because the inscriptions underneath are in Greek. The Nabataeans spoke Aramaic, and left very few inscriptions behind.

Caves

There are caves -- some natural, most man-made -- in the rock walls throughout Petra. Many of them are tombs, but some were probably dwellings.

Because so many of the remaining structures in Petra are tombs, it's easy to think of it as a necropolis, but it was a thriving city where people lived and worked.

That niche by the cave entrance is also something that you see a lot along the Siq. The primary god worshipped by the Nabataeans was Dushara, Lord of the Mountain. And it was almost literally the mountains themselves that they reverenced. The statues of Dushara are cubes of stone, sometimes with crude circles for eyes, but usually featureless. Sometimes they actually carved away the entire top of a hill or mountain, leaving a cube-shaped “god block” behind.

Later, under Greek influence, they anthropomorphized the gods and started to add human features. But Petra makes so much more sense when you understand how the Nabataeans felt about these mountains, and why they would create their city by carving rather than building.

Urban poetry

I was walking through Worldwide Plaza on Sunday afternoon when I heard a brass band playing slow mournful music. I followed the sounds and found this, some kind of religious procession (I say procession even though they seemed to have just parked themselves in the middle of West 49th Street; no one was processing anywhere.)

The music reminded me of Michael Corleone's Sicilian wedding in The Godfather -- the church I grew up in had organ music and lots of guitars, no horns -- and the mournful faces and heavy incense felt like a throwback, so incongruous in the bland blocks of gentrified Hell's Kitchen.

These pictures were taken with my phone, and for once the way it flattens out detail into an odd series of facets gives an otherworldly feel that's appropriate for the subject.

You say you want a revolution

Here's how you go about inciting one.

Since I brought up the shah in the last post, here's a flashback to one of the things I wanted to write about in Tehran, but didn't get to yet -- a study in contrasts. This is the interior of the palace where the last shah lived before the revolution. It's impossible to walk through there -- or the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, or Versailles -- without seeing very clearly why revolutions happen.

Power and politics are complicated, and revolutions depend on more than ostentatious displays of wealth by oblivious rulers while the people suffer, but that's always part of it. (And it's not a lesson anyone ever seems to remember, even as income disparity in the United States becomes more and more extreme.) His big palaces and fancy clothes and secret police and gifts from foreign governments (that's a Yamaha organ from the Japanese government below) couldn't save the shah.

Of course, religion played a significant role in the Iranian revolution, and so it didn't end as it so often does, with the New Boss just moving into the palace of the Old Boss and assuming the same privilege.

The two-room house where Imam Khomeini lived is a short drive from the shah's palace, and a world away. There is nothing glamorous about it; it's barely comfortable. But he obviously wasn't interested in worldly goods; there are photos of him meeting with world leaders on that sheet-draped couch.

I think it's impossible for an American not to have a complicated response to Khomeini, but he is still revered in Iran. He is always called Imam Khomeini, rather than Ayatollah Khomeini, and his photo is everywhere. (Where “Ayatollah” just means a high-ranking Shia cleric, “Imam” is more like being the Pope. Imams are considered true successors of the Prophet, possessed of divine authority.) They are building a huge gaudy complex around his mausoleum on the outskirts of the city, and I suspect he would be appalled.

Towers of Silence

Earlier, we'd gone to this site on the outskirts of the city. The two hilltop towers here were used by Zoroastrians until the 1960's to dispose of their dead by leaving them in the open for vultures to eat.

Many different cultures practice some form of sky burial like this. For the Zoroastrians, it was because earth is one of the four sacred elements, and they believe that dead bodies are impure and would contaminate the ground if they were buried. There's a small cemetery nearby that is used now for burials, with shrouds or coffins designed to keep the body from touching the earth.

Farvahar

This is the most common symbol of Zoroastrianism, part man, part bird, part angel. The three panels around the Farvahar are for the three principles of the religion: good thoughts, good words, good deeds.

Fire Temple

No one knows for sure how many Zoroastrians remain in Iran -- anywhere from 24,000 to 60,000 and perhaps only 100,000 left in the world. But it has strong roots here; whether the Persian Empire was technically Zoroastrian is apparently not all that clear, but they definitely worshipped Ahura Mazda, the divine spirit of the Zoroastrians.

This is the fire temple in Yazd. Although the building has all the exotic charm of a library in Southern California (it was built in the 1930's), the carefully tended fire here has been burning since 470 A.D.

Say a prayer to St Anthony

If you grew up in a Catholic household, that was the response whenever you complained of being unable to find something. I always thought it was poor reward for a life of great piety to spend eternity locating the car keys of the faithful.

But that a saint who joined the Franciscans because of the simplicity of their lifestyle should have a tomb more suited to a Moghul emperor seems even less appropriate somehow. Judging by the many thank you letters and photos posted around his tomb, he remains active in the granting of miracles and the finding of misplaced objects.