Holiest places Reader Joseph (Gurney) has seen…

Probably the only significant holy site I ever visited pertained to my 1/2 Celtic ancestry. In Llanddewi Brefi where St. David of Wales led a synod.

awesome pics!

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Gorgeous. I love you @gurneyhalleck1 Not only are you a great war master and minstrel with decades of loyal service to House Atreides, but you are a beacon of piety in the Orthodox Church!

Seriously, those are gorgeous pics! By the way thank you for your efforts to revitalize this forum.

I can recognize Agia Sophia, Timisoara and Sofia. I was in Timisoara last summer, I wish I could visit the other two.

gurneyhalleck1 said:

Timisoara was LOVELY!!!

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Nice trams also.

Hey, did you travel by train in Romania?

Lukaris said:

Probably the only significant holy site I ever visited pertained to my 1/2 Celtic ancestry. In Llanddewi Brefi where St. David of Wales led a synod.

Llanddewi Brefi - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

St David's Church, Llanddewi Brefi - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

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it was the intended site for St. David's College, but that was moved to Lampeter when land was granted by land owner of the castle field, John Harford.

Dewi Sant said:

it was the intended site for St. David's College, but that was moved to Lampeter when land was granted by land owner of the castle field, John Harford.

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I also visited St. David’s Cathedral in Wales which has western Orthodox origins of course. Attended Evensong there and it was really good ( if only C.S. Lewis still was an example of mainstream Anglicanism )I don’t think I could include it altogether though because of post schism realities.

gurneyhalleck1 said:

... We went on a very cool tour through Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania. ...

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I could be very interested in such a tour, I was close to planning a trip to Serbia and Romania for the Summer, but decided on going elsewhere. Can I ask though, was this a specifically Christian tour? Kind of hoping there's a company offering Christian tours of places I'm interested in.

Uriah S said:

I could be very interested in such a tour, I was close to planning a trip to Serbia and Romania for the Summer, but decided on going elsewhere. Can I ask though, was this a specifically Christian tour? Kind of hoping there's a company offering Christian tours of places I'm interested in.

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I’ve heard of such entities. Even in the US, the Coptic Orthodox monasteries are visited by tour busses filled with youths, and I have heard of organized pilgrimages to other monasteries as well.

That said, what I myself would prefer would be a self-guided trip through the area taking advantage of the railways, which in Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Romania are much like the railways in Germany, Poland, Austria and Hungary were on my first trips to Europe in 2000, 2001 and 2003 - I like traditional EuroCity and InterCity trains with restaurant cars (or in the case of Poland, the Bar Wars car on the Warsaw-Gdansk train was amazing, with delicious food at an incredibly good price - a delicious chicken dinner for about US $2 - likewise the lasagna from the bistro car on an Italian operated EuroCity we took from Munich to Innsbruck was the best I’ve ever had - alas we did not travel on into Italy; I wish we had. I find tour busses to be very uncomfortable - they have the effect of isolating me from the people of the countries I am traveling through, although some European tour busses are quite nice, but my overall experience of tour busses has been sufficiently awful that I just don’t want to travel that way unless absolutely necessary, which it would be in order to visit some of the monasteries and churches I’d like to see. For example, I can’t think of a good alternative to get from the Christian Quarters of Jerusalem to Bethlehem and back, or to get to some of the remote Eastern and Oriental Orthodox monasteries in Egypt and Turkey, and for that matter I’m pretty sure its the most economical way of getting to meteora. And tour busses can get you through otherwise annoying lines at borders and even at attractions, for example, at the salt mines in Salzburg, which is of benefit as I don’t know if i’ll be well enough to stand in line at length ever again, although prayers for the recovery of my strength are of course appreciated.

In Europe if one is independently minded, one can get a EurailPass, which for people over the age of 26 was, the last time I used it, strictly a first class only thing, which is good, because its a remarkably good value for first class rail travel. That said one still needs to obtain reservations, and in some cases pay supplements, for several classes of trains, especially high speed trains, and the Eurailpass has never included the UK, so one is always in for an overpriced and miserable ride in the UK (unless, I suppose, if one gets a BritRail Pass; the pending re-nationalization of the British railways might make things better, but it will probably make them worse, since BR’s reputation compared to SNCF, DB, NS, SNCB, OBB, SJ, DSB, NSB, MAV, VR, FS, SBB/CFF, RENFE, CP, CSD, CFL and PKP was never particularly good, although at present OSE, the Greek railway system, has had some safety problems so severe, that there have been large-scale protests. But this is not the case with the Serbian, Romanian or Bulgarian railways, or the Slovakian railways for that matter, all of which enjoy a decent reputation; they have older trains than those in Western Europe, but I prefer the older trains as I find them more comfortable than some of the newer high speed trains. The only systems which are really problematic which I would probably want to avoid are those in Albania and Kosovo, but while I love the Albanian Orthodox, Enver Hoxha destroyed most of the good pilgrimage sites, and in the case of Kosovo, we are all acquainted with the tragedy that was inflicted upon the birthplace of the Serbian people and the Serbian Orthodox Church by the Muslims in the late 1990s. Also, the railway in Albania does not connect with any other, and if memory serves the railways in Kosovo have also been disconnected from those connecting to the other parts of the former Yugoslavia. But everything I want to see therein is in Serbia and Montenegro and to a lesser extent possibly Northern Macedonia, where there is a beautiful church dedicated to the Holy Trinity in Radovic, which has amazing iconography, which is quite unique in that it features red backgrounds, which one does not frequently see:

Normally I'm very much an independant traveller, usually because I know exactly where I want to get to. I can say a lot in favour of being taken round the highlights of places I don’t know, in order to inform a later, more involved plan.

There is also a lot to be said for visiting sacred places with like-minded pilgrims.

Uriah S said:

There is also a lot to be said for visiting sacred places with like-minded pilgrims.

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I agree with that sentiment. I am planning a pilgrimage for this year to St. Anthony’s in Florence, and perhaps to the Holy Virgin Cathedral in San Francisco to venerate the relics of St. John Maximovitch, and to the OCA monastery dedicated to him, and while I am back east to St. Tikhon’s and/or Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville. And God willling I would really love to go see Abbot Tryphon on Vashon Island; I have wanted to go there for many years and Abbot Tryphon has had some health issues, indeed I am amazed and delighted he is still alive.

By the way for European travellers to North America, Amtrak and VIA Rail Canada offer something like the Eurailpass. Unfortunately I don’t think it covers the Alaska Railroad, but their prices for people not wanting to sit in the silly looking double decker cars, but who are content with the older vintage streamlined coaches, and food from the cafe car, can travel very cheaply. Also the Alaska Railroad along with the tiny fraction of the railway on Vancouver island that is still in use are somewhat unique in that they are the only places where flag stops are possible - people depend on the railroad to access their homes and certain trains can be flagged down (including all services during the winter), in the same way that people in even more remote areas depend on aviation. There are no roads in the area where Alaskan trains make flag stops. I don’t think anything like that presently exists in Europe, although historically some long distance tramway systems, a few parts of which survive, such as the Belgian coastal tramway (which runs the whole length of the Belgian coast serving Oostende, Calais, Dunkerque etc), and the stadtbahn systems in the Rhein-Ruhr area and in the countryside around Innsbruck, were similar, and also some Swiss communities in the Alps are dependent upon the narrow gauge mountain railways for service, but that said my understanding is that the trains that serve them operate to precise schedules as opposed to needing to be flagged down - I could be mistaken. In fact I shall research that. But in general, trains that make flag stops are a relative rarity.