The House of the Blessed Virgin

Our ship has repositioned and we are on a brand new itinerary. Today we were in Izmir, Turkey. The ship offered a special tour of the House of the Virgin Mary and the ruins of Ephesus at a special rate, and you better believe Beth and I took advantage of the financial discount.

The day started by meeting in the crew bar. There really isn't much to report about this part of the day, except that all of the gift shop employees took a million pictures of each other and Alexia, one half of a singing duo, has laryngitis.

We got on the bus and drove to our first stop, the House of the Virgin Mary. Or should I say, the Alleged House of the Virgin Mary. I didn't catch the full explanation since my earpiece was cutting in and out, but apparently in the 1700s, a German woman claimed she received an image in a dream that that site was where the Annunciation had happened. Again, I could only hear every other word, so I apologize for not giving you the full story. I am going to look this up on Wikipedia.

Okay, so I just checked out the Internet, and the house is supposedly where the Assumption happened, not the Annunciation, so that is a big difference. St. John is believed to have brought Mary to Ephesus after the crucifixion because it was a safe city, and here she supposedly passed her final years. Also, the German woman who had the visions was a nun named Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich who had never even been to Ephesus. A priest in the late 1800s found the site and realized it matched her descriptions, and that was backed up by the cultural tradition of many local villagers viewing the site as a shrine of Mary. The Catholic Church has not named it as such but they have named it a Holy Place and Pope Benedict visited here during his visit to Turkey last November (Beth informs me that there was a rosary from his visit on display, but I did not see it. I did, however, see a nun carrying a guitar walk around the site, and got excited that she was going to burst into a rousing rendition of "Dominique.")

So all in all, it was a very enjoyable visit, although some people (aka Beth) were unimpressed by the site’s lack of historical veracity. I will continue the rest of the tour description in a later entry, for tomorrow, Brendan “Four Car Accidents Before His Eighteenth Birthday” is driving a scooter on Mykonos. Seems like a good idea.