Paul, Neapolis, and St. Nicholas

A friend of mine recently let me look through a couple of books that he picked up while leading a trip to Turkey, Greece and Italy. One book was entitled, Journeys of Paul: From Tarsus to the Ends of the Earth by Fatih Cimok. The book contains some really nice pictures and some interesting texts. Unfortunately, the book is a bit on the expensive side for me, at least at Amazon.That being said, here is a short comment from the book related to Neapolis (Acts 16:11) that I found interesting.

"Neapolis (Kavala), the port of Philippi, lay at the end of a wide bay protected by a small peninsula at Paul's time crowned by a statue of Aphrodite. It was the favourite port for travellers from central and northern Europe and those coming from Anatolia. Paul's party probably spent the night at a local inn and next morning joining the cosmopolitan traffic which traveled to the north on the Via Egnatia. Today an altar outside the Church of St Nicholas, which once stood along the water, traditionally, commemorates the place where they landed. The church is said to have, originally, carried the apostle's name ans was turned into a mosque during the Turkish occupation. When the time that the building could again be turned into a church came, the fisherman who met the expense of the restoration cared more for their patron saint Nicolas than the apostle, and named it thus" (pp. 127-28).