With all the dire news coming out of Turkey, and this summer’s tourism prospects in tatters, what better time to recount a little tale, if only to remind all those holidaying elsewhere of what they’ll be missing?

Some will have heard of Ara Guler, a distinguished Turkish-Armenian photographer now in his eighties, and will perhaps have seen the permanent display of his photographs at Aphrodisias, the ancient city site near Denizli which Guler visited in 1958.  I reproduce a couple of these photographs later in this post.

Aphrodisias wasn’t on Guler’s itinerary.  He had spent the day photographing a newly opened dam – Prime Minister Adnan Menderes had grown increasingly dependent on populist but cripplingly expensive infrastructure projects to keep his doomed administration on track, rather like the current lot with their bridges and airports – in the nearby mountains for Hayat Magazine.  I include the cover shot of a Hayat issue from the period (published by chance on the very day of my birth) so you can see for yourself that there was more to this publication, and to late-1950s life generally in Turkey, than newly opened dams (the cover girl actually turns up in a considerably more provocative pose on page 9 – though you’ll have to await my next blog for that).

I digress.  On the way back from the Hayat assignment Guler’s driver got lost on Anatolia’s backroads, a tangle of unsigned and appallingly maintained tracks.  It was dark by the time they saw the distant lights of a village.  The locals, who didn’t often see cars, especially ones with official black plates (the local governor had lent Guler his car for the day), immediately invited their important guests into the village tea house while they prepared simple lodgings.  In the tea house, amidst kerosene lights, Guler noticed the men were playing dominoes – on Roman column capitols.

The next morning Guler discovered that the village, called Geyre, was located amidst an extraordinary wealth of classical remains.  Columns supported rickety porches.  Sarcophagae served as grape treads or for washing the laundry.  Men scythed wheat in the stadium.   Guler marvelled at the casual customisation of these ancient artefacts, as his images show so movingly:

All photographs © Ara Guler

Guler soon established that he had stumbled across the ruins of Aphrodisias, a Roman city which had been forgotten since preliminary excavations there in the first years of the 20^th century.  Guler’s visit kickstarted a renewed interest in the site, which was to be welcomed, except for the change it inflicted on the inhabitants.  Visitors to Aphrodisias will have noticed that the villagers no longer live among the ruins.  By the 1970s they were being relocated to New Geyre, a purpose-built village nearby, to make space for the archaeologists.

Archaeology has shoved aside the local community, to the distress of Guler and others, and not only at Aphrodisias.  It transpires that a great many of Turkey’s archaeological sites were inhabited until the 1970s or later, when the museum service began to clear communities out.  Some, like Aphrodisias, were home to permanent communities while others, like Labraunda, served as seasonal settlements for grazers and their families.   I’m with Guler in regretting these clearances, and suggest that archaeology should be required to work with and around community.  Life comes first.  Besides, there’s something entrancing and vital about the interplay of old stones and living communities, as Guler’s photographs show.

The good news is that some of Turkey’s ancient sites do survive as living communities, and it’s precisely because life endures there that they rank among my favourites.   I write in my website about Sidyma and Heraclea (where I’ve learned from the locals just how good the fluting on 2nd-century columns is for levering off boots), and will shortly be posting on Stratonikeia.  In this fabulous site, where 19^th-century village streets abut temple platforms and locals still raise vegetable plots among the fallen columns, history’s many strands are entwined with the present, and the visitor’s experience is the more resonant for it.

It’s all about life.  Which, after all, is what hayat means.