Image

Cappadocia’s Underground Cities Saved Christianity

Asia, Culture, History, Middle East, Travel

Today’s visitors to Turkiye’s Cappadocia come for two reasons – spectacular sunrise ascents over the rugged terrain in hot air balloons and stooped-over descents into underground retreats that protected residents from ancient predators traveling through the Tarsus Mountains. These hand-dug hideouts were elaborately engineered, multi-layered warrens of tunnels and rooms, some of which descended more than 275 feet into the earth. Among the people who hunkered down in them were early Christians determined to spread their faith across Asia Minor. The existential threats in the early centuries following Jesus’ resurrection came not only from Roman governors and Jewish Pharisees but also from Silk Road highway men passing through Cappadocia. Disputes could be doctrinal, territorial, or simply monetary. Regardless, the early Christians were not the first to seek underground shelter here.

Brunfels

Wilkommen in Texas Hill Country!

America, Culture, History, Travel

Hill Country settlements between Austin and San Antonio, 80 miles apart in south-central Texas, now form one of the most attractive and historic regions in the entire state. Young families yearn to move there for the good schools and a breezy lifestyle. Chocolate shops, cast-iron-pan factories, and gourmet-salsa-makers thrive. Nouveau-Italian restaurants, hat-and-boot boutiques, and yuppified “saloons” do a land-office business. And tourists are thicker than fleas on a lazy possum. You’ll find scads of them (tourists, not fleas) in Fredericksburg, which bills itself as the most German city in Texas. “On the town’s city limits signs, the population is given as 11,257,” says David Schafer, an author, historian, and driver of the Fredericksburg Trolley tour bus. “We get about 1.5 million visitors annually. Around 25,000 of them show up each year to the town’s Oktoberfest celebration. Fredericksburg has a Texas heart and a German soul.”

Image

Penang Festivals, Food, and Fun

Asia, Culture, History, Travel

By Nancy Wigston The view from our windows at Penang’s Eastern & Oriental Hotel stretches across the pale blue Strait of Malacca all the way to the horizon. It’s early morning and still tolerably cool. Yellow-beaked mynah birds squawk, coconut palms whisper in the gentle breeze and waves break rhythmically below the longest hotel sea…

Old Town

Estonia’s Soviet Flashbacks

Europe, History

Travelers to the Baltic city of Tallinn immediately notice that Estonia is one of Ukraine’s staunchest allies. Perhaps that’s because until 1991 it, too, was occupied by Russians. To find out what life behind the Iron Curtain was like join a Soviet Flashback tour to visit an old hotel specifically built for guest surveillance and a recreated KGB command center.

Four Nearest Green bottles

Two American Whiskey Legends, One Of Them Largely Unknown

America, Business, Culture, History

Tennessee has two products that are famous around the world – country music from Nashville and Jack Daniel’s Whiskey from the tiny town of Lynchburg about 80 miles south of Nashville and 25 miles north of the Alabama state line. The story of how country music blossomed in Nashville is well documented, but the origin story of Jack Daniel’s Whiskey has been one that few people even thought about – until recently.