I love Google Earth, and with the help of a friend, have located most important biblical sites and many other historical sites as well. I have hopes of getting them in sufficient order to share, but time has not yet permitted. (I know that there are places on the web that distribute files with the locations but some that I have looked at are not reliable.) But a friend just let me know that some of the terrain is Turkey is much improved. So if you’ve looked in the past, you might try again. Ephesus looks great, and there’s finally sufficient resolution to see Colossae. A few more for fun: Laodicea, Antioch on the Orontes, Haran, and Carchemish. (The links are kmz files which you can import into Google Earth for the site’s location.)
2 thoughts on “Turkey in Google Earth”
Thanks for the heads up. They must have recently updated the data for around Colossae. I have Google Earth hooked up to my sanctuary computer and will occasionally use it to show people Biblical locations during a sermon. I preached through Colossians last spring and used GE to show people the related cities in the area. The area near Laodecia/Denizli/Pamukkale was fairly high res; you can easily make out the excavated cardo at Laodicea. Colossae was pretty fuzzy and I see now that I missed the site by about a mile.
I did read in another board that supposedly, Hamas is using GE to find targets for their rockets. I don’t know if that true, but you can certainly see how easy it would be.
PS…Go about 2000 ft to the north of Colossae. Doesn’t it look like the outline of some kind of ruins?
Al – yes, there are clearly ancient ruins there as well. I walked around that whole area a couple of years ago and saw pottery and some ancient architecture on the ground. I do not know if this is part of the lower city of Colossae or if it is something else.