Ancient Legacies with Robert Hahn

In the summer of 2005 I traveled to Greece and Turkey as part of a study abroad program called Ancient Legacies hosted by Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and I was fortunate to learn from a group of five professors in a student group of no more than ten students. I captured thousands of digital images to document the entire experience that is available today called Hellenic Christendom . I interacted with ancient remnants in Athens, Delphi, island culture in Cos and Samos as well as ancient Greek archeological sights in the west cost of Turkey, such as found in Ephesus, that are known to the New Testament. Along with all the hands on interaction with ancient remnants, I visited many different museums in Greece and Turkey including the national museum of Greece in Athens.

Professors and students would dine together at the same table for nearly every meal, and the school would pay for the expenses of the meals out of our tuition. We thus would dine together at places that would be typical for common citizens to eat their dinners at, and sometimes we would dine at places that would be a little more elaborate. Much of the dining would usually occur at night or at dusk at the shore of the sea. Everything went very well for the most part, but the government of Turkey leaves much to be desired.

The best part of the program is that students had experiences traveling by land, sea, air, and even under the earth. Students swam in the ocean on several occasions, and various boats and aircraft had been used as well. Overall, the experience often involved hiking and walking vast distances.

Some of the most unique experiences include going to a family potter shop in Greece to see how a common family would live and work, and visiting the remnants of the first hospital. Lots of opportunity existed for the group to all go their separate ways for the night and to get together at hotels before the early morning events the next day, and this allowed students to shop and to interact with the citizens until bedtime. Opportunities also existed for students to worship locally on the Sabbaths.

In total my study abroad program took two weeks of group interaction to complete, and if I would have continued with the group to go onto Egypt as well, then the total time of the program would have been an entire month. After the two weeks of group interaction, I was given a year and an incomplete grade for two courses corresponding to the program, and I had to do a five page paper for one course and a twenty-five page research paper for the other course to gain junior and senior level college credit. Overall, both college classes could have counted toward graduate credit if I had been a graduate student, and the amount of diverse professors on the trip allowed for college credit to be counted for a wide variety of different subjects depending upon the choice of the student to decide what classes that they would like the trip to count for.

After I completed the program, I wanted to make a program to visit Israel and Palestine and the program would be focused in Jerusalem as an attempt to gain college credit. I had a professor, Randall Auxier, that was willing to host the program, and I was charged with the responsibility of making the logistics that would allow for a program plan. The only problem was that war soon broke out, and the entire idea was scrapped.