Antep & Urfa Articles
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A WONDROUS FIND FROM AN ANCIENT WORLD
Daily Telegraph, 27th February 2013
Jeremy Seal marvels at an astonishing archaeological site near the Euphrates. Go, before the crowds arrive.
‘Wow,’ exclaims the visitor from New Zealand – a place, after all, with a human history shorter than most. For from a wooden walkway we’re gazing down at an archaeological site of giddying age; at 9,000BC, it’s more than twice as old as Stonehenge or the Pyramids, pre-dating the discovery even of metals, pottery or the wheel. This is Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey, generally reckoned the most exciting and historically significant archaeological dig currently underway anywhere in the world, and there are neither queues nor tickets to get in.
Wow for a number of reasons, then, though it’s neither the free and easy access nor the staggering implications of the site’s age – the hunter gatherers of Mesopotamia, it seems, were building these monuments before even settling in communities – which has particularly impressed the man from distant Auckland. Neolithic Göbekli Tepe is also remarkably beautiful. From the partially excavated pit rise circular arrangements of huge T-shaped obelisks exquisitely carved with foxes, birds, boars and snakes or with highly stylised human attributes including belts, loincloths and limbs. We’re profoundly moved by this glimpse into a radically recast prehistory, and mystified too; even the archaeologists hard at work across the site this September morning can only speculate as to its precise function, not least because the temple stones appear to have been deliberately buried. ‘This series of sanctuaries is the oldest known monumental architecture,’ explains excavation leader and approachable on-site presence Professor Klaus Schmidt. ‘Maybe burial was already part of their concept from the very beginning.’ Professor Schmidt died at a sadly young age in 2014.
Two years ago a bare trickle of visitors found their way to this remote hilltop revelation. Now, however, visitors are building entire their itineraries around Göbekli Tepe, surest of shoe-ins for future World Heritage Status, and foundations are already in place for a protective site canopy, a nearby visitors’ centre and ticket office. Numbers are set to explode here, the more so because the surrounding Euphrates region centred on the ancient cities of Gaziantep and Şanlıurfa happens to boast an exceptional wealth of cultural draws, making it the stand-out region across much of inland Turkey.
It helps, of course, that another spectacular summit monument, the vast stone heads in honour of Roman-era King Antiochus on nearby Nemrut Dağı, has figured prominently on must-see lists for decades. In recent years, however, there have been further momentous discoveries such as the mosaics at Roman Zeugma which were rescued from the rising waters of the dammed Euphrates before being installed in the magnificent new museum at Antep – the locals don’t bother with the ‘Gazi’ prefix – in 2011. With major restorations across Antep’s historic centre and its burgeoning reputation among foodies, not to mention another substanial mosaic find in the centre of Urfa (again, no prefix) at Haleplibahce – since 2014 the site of the new mosaic museum, it’s perhaps no surprise that the region’s proximity both to Turkey’s troubled border with Syria and to adjacent areas of Kurdish unrest are doing little to dampen down interest.
Antep, despite the fatalities caused by a recent car-bomb blamed on Kurdish separatists, is awash with western visitors. I pass them in the high-walled alleys of the old city where the painted plaques above the doors announce the owners as honoured hacis, or pilgrims to Mecca. All over a city knee-deep in development money overflowing from Euphrates dam projects masons spectral with stone dust are restoring mosques and the gated artisans’ arcades known as hans. Not that the tarting up has leached anything of Antep’s famous atmosphere. In grimy ateliers copper workers hammer patterns into decorative platters, and sparks fly from the spinning stones of the knife sharpeners. On Crazy Sheep Street shawled women are buying red peppers by the sack load, and hauling them off to the alleys outside their front doors where they and their neighbours squat to hull them for a spicy cooking paste called salça. The lanes are fronted with baskets of spices and nuts, especially locally grown pistachios, the symbol of the city and the star turn in its distinctive ‘meat and sweet’ cuisine; nowhere has a higher density of baklava-style pastry shops – from huge salons to tiny deli counters – than Antep.
I dine at a cavernous Antep institution called Imam Cağdaş, a kebab and baklava diner with wipe-down menus, sweep staircase and waiters in traditional monochrome; the traditional starter, a mince-topped pizza-style flatbread called lahmacun, is followed by a superior kebab – mine is rich in garlic and pistachio – washed down with ladles of sour-yoghurt ayran. I move on to a plate of baklava before being tempted into another pistachio pudding called fıstık sarma. Overload; the good news is that my lodgings at Anadolu Evleri, an admired collection of townhouses with shabby-chic rooms arranged around a high-walled courtyard, are next door.
So next morning to the city’s Zeugma Museum, a stunning ensemble of light and space so new as to be barely out of its box, which only confirms the extent of Antep’s civic ambitions. This world-beating collection of second-century Roman mosaics, rich in geometric pattern and mythological detail, are displayed from a range of perspectives including raised walkways and mezzanines, and contextualised amidst other retrievals from Zeugma such as frescoes, fountains, columns and statues. İt’s a collection, moreover, all the more poignant for the fact that it acknowledges the considerable thefts suffered in the course of the Zeugma excavations, with projected images filling in for the illicitly lifted mosaic sections. A low-lit labyrinthine corridor leads to the stand-out mosaic, the so-called Gypsy Girl, whom experts have more accurately identified as a Dionsyian Maenad; a party girl, in short, if her eyes – eyes which even after all this time spell nothing but trouble – are anything to go by.
We take the road east to visit what remains unsubmerged of Roman Zeugma – a fine villa, complete with frescoes and mosaics – though the eye is rather drawn to the shimmering lake which once was the Euphrates. The road continues through pistachio orchards to the half-drowned town of Halfeti where the few townsfolk that remain now offer nostalgia-tinged boat trips over their submerged homes and orchards. The new topography is beautiful though surreal, and full of bizarre adaptations like the raised duckboards which have been fitted so that the mosque may continue to function.
‘Worship here is permitted,’ a sign on the door confirms, ‘but swimming in the mosque is forbidden’.
At sand-coloured Urfa we are on the edge of Arabia. To their owners’ whistles flocks of homing pigeons rise from flat-topped roofs hung with lines of drying aubergines in the early evening. Beneath the crusader castle families walk by the sacred ponds and the shaded tea gardens which mark the cave where Abraham is said to have been born. In the grand yards of the mosques clustered in the honour of a prophet sacred to all three monotheistic religions men in shirt sleeves and in Arab turbans gather to wash at the fountains; flocks of women from lands to the south pass in all-over black but for the gold jangling at their wrists. Beyond the gardens I wander into Urfa’s labyrinthine bazaar, an exotica of turnip juice stands, stalls serving fried liver, pigeon traders and cot makers.
In the morning Mehmet, a local archaeologist, leads me beyond the sacred ponds to the Aleppo Gardens (Haleplibahce) where the city’s own mosaics are on in situ display. The centrepiece of these recent finds is the so-called Amazon Villa; the best of these fifth-century mosaics – a pictorial life of Achilles, and a magnificent rendering of an African native and zebra – are exquisitely suggestive of another time in the rich and varied history of this frontier city. Then Mehmet points beyond the villa where a site is being cleared for a major new archaeological museum, one which no doubt means to match anything rival Antep can do. The rush is on; in just two years time little-known cultural attractions like the mosaics at Haleplibahce and the obelisks at nearby Göbekli Tepe are slated to be firmly established on the tour bus itineraries. By then, however, who can say what other treasures will have turned up in this history-rich corner on Turkey’s Kurdish and Arabian borders?
Click to view the Telegraph’s online version
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CIVILISATION STARTS HERE
Wanderlust, October 2013
As the oldest man-made site in the world, Göbekli Tepe is a 12,000-year-old game-changer. Reach it via south-east Turkey’s Abraham’s Path to combine legendary hospitality with wild walking and mind-blowing stones.
Deep in south-east Turkey I followed a dusty track towards a distinct rounded hilltop. The approach did not promise much. One hut, some barbed wire, and a makeshift toilet with a threadbare drape for a door suggested one of the fly-blown military outposts – pity the conscripts – which are dotted across these contested lands at the juncture of the Turkish, Kurdish and Arab worlds. Rather less likely was that I had in fact arrived at the most important excavation site on Earth, as many leading archaeologists rate Göbekli Tepe, a place which has revolutionised our understanding of the origins of civilisation.
It was only then I caught my first glimpse of the large pit which had been cratered in the face of the summit. Beyond a queue of tractors loaded with sifted topsoil a crowd of German and Turkish archaeologists, head-swathed Kurdish barrow haulers and gawping foreign tourists milled around some 60 standing stones of an arresting, otherworldly beauty. These limestone megaliths, in some cases sixteen feet tall and weighing ten tons, and arranged in circles, have often been likened to Stonehenge. But where the stone blocks of Salisbury Plain rise plain and unadorned, these ones were as much art as architecture. Their characteristic shape, narrow-topped Ts, suggested stylised renderings of the human form which the exquisitely carved detailing of belts, loincloths and clasped hands on some of the stones movingly confirmed. Then there was their extraordinary age; that these megaliths have been dated to 10,000BC – more than twice the age of the come-lately stone circle beside the A303, at least 5,000 years before the oldest known cuneiform texts – actually left me giddy at the sight of them.
Göbekli Tepe (Belly Hill), which overlooks the Mesopotamian plains around the city of Urfa, has been causing seismic excitement among archaeological insiders since excavations began here almost twenty years ago. As news spreads of this early-Neolithic site’s astonishing significance, however, the specialist interest has rapidly become general. As little as three years ago whole days could pass without the archaeological staff at Göbekli Tepe seeing a single visitor. Now, however, barely a moment now goes by between arrivals, with culturally curious travellers building entire Turkey itineraries around a visit to these ‘game-changing’ stones, as the world’s earliest man-made structure has been described.
Visitors currently enjoy pay-free and only modestly restricted access to this manageably compact site, even to the extent of button-holing the more approachable members of the archaeological team during the spring and autumn ‘digs’. With a rapid increase in the volume of tour buses to Göbekli Tepe, however, this informal arrangement looks unlikely to last. Site foundations are already in place for a protective canopy, a nearby visitors’ centre and ticket office.
As Göbekli Tepe increasingly appears on the tour itineraries, however, some are taking a radically different approach to the site. In the company of local guides they walk there along stretches of a long-distance hiking trail, staying in villages along the way. The walk not only takes in historic highlights such as Göbekli Tepe but also familiarises walkers with the wider landscapes, living cultures and people of this ancient region between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. Walking through the lands where civilisation dawned – think the Fertile Crescent, even Biblical Eden – was surely worth more than a few blisters, especially if the experience yielded fresh insights into how startlingly different that dawn was from the one previously imagined.
So I found myself one September day in the Kurdish village of Yuvacalı, some thirty miles north of Göbekli Tepe, where my hike was to begin with an overnight stay at the home of the Salva family. Yuvacalı marks the northernmost point on Abraham’s Path, a trail which broadly retraces the journey of the Old Testament prophet through the Middle East. The path emphasises the regional tradition of kindness to travellers, and offers a point of contact whereby the warring faiths which revere Abraham – Judaism, Christianity, Islam and its constituent sects – may be reconciled. If this brave vision currently rings hollow along much of the route, especially in war-ravaged Syria, it appears achievable at least along the path’s 170-kilometre stretch through south-east Turkey. Among these neighbouring communities north of the Syrian border – Kurdish and Turkish, Arab and Shia Alevi – walkers can safely experience the misafirperverlik (hospitality to strangers) which their hosts, rather than emptily incant, regard as nothing less than a sacred obligation. Security concerns have closed this path for the time being.
Beneath wide blue skies the farming community of Yuvacalı lay clustered at the foot of an ancient shard-strewn mound or höyük, the signature of these plains. The Salva farmstead, a simple block-built house, was fronted by a yard where cattle stood tethered. There was a shaded orchard hung with plums and persimmons, figs and pomegranates, apricots, peaches and pears. On the floor of the main room I joined the Salvas’ other home-stay guests, two sprightly American septuagenarians called Elaine and Nancy, crossing my legs before an oilcloth ‘table’ laid for dinner.
Over a meal which belied the apparent poverty of our sparsely furnished surroundings – cooked aubergines and peppers, home-produced yoghurt and crumbly white cheese, freshly picked salad, flat bread baked on an open fire, bloom-fresh fruit – 20-year-old Fatih Salva described the life of the village in excellent English. Fatih, who runs the home-stay programme with a sunny maturity, told me that his parents Halil and Pero were both born in the village, which had long been the home of their forebears. Not that this peaceful rural place was free of old shadows; the fact that some of those forebears had once been bilingual, speaking the Armenian of their village neighbours, recalled how the Ottoman state had caused the brutal erasure across Anatolia of that Christian minority in the course of the 1914-1918 war. An exclusively Kurdish population of smallholders remained to make a living raising a few acres of wheat, lentils and isot (the local chilli pepper), though the recent addition of the home-stay and walking programme – the village hosted some 2,000 foreigners in 2012 – has put money into local pockets and done much to transform horizons.
That night the kindly Salva family pushed back the red peppers drying across the flat roof of their house to make a bed-sized space for me where I slept under locally made quilts and a mosquito net. I awoke to the smell of the unleavened bread Pero was cooking on an open fire in the yard and wandered the high mound behind the house before breakfast.
The sun was still low when Fatih led me out of the village along the unmarked trail. The baked plain was brown except where the concrete canalettes of GAP, a massive irrigation project, carried water from the Euphrates to the cotton fields. Bee eaters swooped around clusters of box-shaped hives. Passing out of pistachio and apple groves, we climbed towards a prominent hill where a ‘wishing’ tree stood tied with rags. On the summit a low white-washed wall enclosed a tomb. The headstone, to a local saint called Haci Ömer, was garlanded with necklaces.
‘A Yezidi place,’ said Fatih, referring to the tribal faith – a fusion of Zoroastrian, Sufi and shamanistic beliefs – which even now features in the rituals of many Islamized Kurds.
‘Some come here on Wednesdays, the holy day for Yezidis,’ said Fatih. ‘They pray here in times of drought. Sometimes they walk their sheep around the hill.’ It was then that Fatih made a show of traditional reverence that his fluent English and app-loaded mobile had not prepared me for, retreating from the shrine without turning his back on it until he had cleared the entrance. He then led me to another hilltop called Eski Hilvan, where liberally scattered tiles and mosaic tesserae suggested a Roman-era settlement, though Fatih only knew it as the place where locals went to be cured of whooping cough. Here were reminders, even in a world of apps and high-tech irrigation projects, of the hold high places have had on humankind since the time of Göbekli Tepe.
We picnicked in an apple orchard, dozing there before a long climb beyond the corn and cotton to sun-struck heights where farmers had ploughed hopeful plots across rock-strewn slopes. Our passing put up volleys of partridges before we crested a final ridge for a first sighting of Gollu village, our stay for the night. At the home of the Sirma family, in-laws to the Salvas of Yuvacalı, we delivered family greetings over glasses of much-needed tea. Ali Sirma talked of life here where electricity only arrived in the 1990s and where even now they sometimes heard wolves on winter nights. With the gathering dusk Ali unrolled his prayer mat and prostrated himself while Fatih pointed his mobile phone skywards, using an app to identify the emerging stars that we would soon be sleeping under – on soft mattresses stuffed with local cotton. The Sirma boys gathered wide-eyed around their older cousin while the older girls, excluded by patriarchal tradition, lurked beyond the light.
These were the cultures, an arresting blend of religious tradition and high technology, which brought me after three days’ walking to Göbekli Tepe. I entered the excavation by means of raised wooden walkways and looked down over the site. I saw how the megaliths were carved not only with human attributes but with talismanic reliefs of numerous creatures; lions, foxes and boars, snakes and scorpions, vultures, storks and ibises. I especially admired a fearsome crocodile carved in high relief at the base of one stone. These carved megaliths, I now gathered, were originally set in walls of undressed masonry enclosing a central pair of taller, totemic stones. It was noticeable how these partially exposed compounds, often set with archaeologists’ scaffolds and ladders, stood at different depths in the earth, as if they had been built on top of ones deliberately buried centuries before them.
Thanks to the approachable regime at Göbekli Tepe, I was able to grab an on-site word with Professor Klaus Schmidt, who has led excavations here since 1995. Professor Schmidt described how some of the megaliths were protruding through the earth, their tops scarred by ploughs, when he first visited. The excavations have unearthed no signs of permanent settlement such as rubbish middens, housing, cooking hearths, or water springs which has prompted Schmidt to view Göbekli Tepe as a ritual site, or ‘a cathedral on a hill’. With the anticipated discovery of human remains beneath the circles’ stone floors, Schmidt hoped to confirm the buried stone circles as tombs.
It didn’t take me long to wander Göbekli Tepe, barely the size of a tennis court, but it sure did to ponder it. From a rock overlooking the site I spent hours chewing over these stones and what they revealed about the civilising of humankind. The vital fact was that Göbekli Tepe predated the earliest evidence yet found for agriculture and settlement, which contradicted the standard archaeological presumption that the domestication of plants and animals was the driver which led to society and civilisation. This place, built by hunter gatherers before humankind had begun to form the earliest settled farming communities, told a different story: that people only learned to build for themselves by first building for their gods; that the Temple, as Professor Schmidt put it, actually preceded the City. What inspired humankind to master new technologies, to organise as a workforce, to invent agriculture, ultimately to invent apps for identifying stars, was not some inchoate instinct for social betterment but the pull of ritual and religion. In a wider region mired then and now in the blood of religious minorities, of Armenians in the last century and Syrians in this, I found the lessons of Göbekli Tepe profoundly disquieting even as my visit there enthralled me.
Beyond Göbekli Tepe the path led south through the villages of the plain to the sand-coloured city of Urfa, where I found myself on the fringes of Arabia. In the early evening homing pigeons rose to their owners’ whistles from flat-topped roofs hung with drying aubergine skins. Beneath the crusader castle families strolled the shaded tea gardens to feed the sacred carp in the ponds at Balıklıgöl before making for the cave, legendary birthplace of Abraham. To the call of the muezzin pious men in shirt sleeves and in Arab turbans gathered at the fountains in the grand courtyards of the mosques while women from Saudi Arabia passed all in black but for the gold jangling at their wrists. Beyond the gardens I wandered into Urfa’s labyrinthine bazaar, an exotica of turnip juice stands and stalls serving fried liver, of pigeon traders and cot makers, as grilles clanged down on the workshops of copperworks and carpenters.
Urfa was stuffed with colour and distraction. The highlight, however, was a visit to the city’s archaeological museum where I paused before a statue which had been unearthed in central Urfa in the 1990s. It was of a man, almost life-sized, with eyes of obsidian, his hands clasped at the groin. This statue, the oldest known, may even predate Göbekli Tepe. I was left with a powerful sense of how future discoveries across this remarkable region may further revise our story and allow us to make greater sense of it. Harking back to the beginning of my own journey, and the characteristic kindness of the Salva family during my stay at Yuvacalı, I thought of the mound behind their little home on the Mesopotamian plain and wondered what might lie beneath it.
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SHELL OUT FOR TURKISH DELIGHTS
The Weekend Australian, March 2-3, 2013
It’s harvest time and the baskets, boxes and buckets which line Gaziantep’s labyrinthine lanes and artisans’ alleys sag beneath the signature – almost the synonym – nut of this booming city in southeast Turkey: the fıstık, or pistachio – and the best in the world, as every local likes to insist.
Rival growers from California to Iran may demur. What’s beyond dispute is that ancient Antep – forget the ‘Gazi’ bit, an honorific add-on rarely heard beyond official circles – takes particular pride in its pistachios. No prizes for guessing, for example, that this regional capital’s music and arts jamboree, now in its 7th year, is known as the Pistachio Festival. Certainly, nowhere else pulls off quite so many culinary variations on the pistachio; the nut that’s no more than an ice cream flavour and a bar snack in most cultures does star turns here in everything from the famed kebabs to the baklava-style pastries on display in the city’s hundreds of pudding shops.
Antep’s ‘meat and sweet’ cuisine, a rich fusion of Turkish, Arabic and Kurdish influences, makes for a full-on foodie destination. Be warned, however, that the sheer visibility of the numerous culinary temptations may cause some to neglect competing Antep attractions such as recently restored old quarters like Bey Mahallesi, the world-renowned Roman mosaics housed since 2011 in the city’s magnificent new Zeugma Museum, and the charming courtyard sanctuary on offer at charming boutique hotels like Anadolu Evleri.
Which explains why my first call is to the high-vaulted Almacı Pazarı, the produce and spices bazaar located among the numerous historic hans (artisans’ workshops) of old Antep, wondering that these pinkish-purple things piled up before me bear no resemblance to the processed pistachios I’m used to seeing in bowls on bar counters the world over. It transpires these nuts, newly harvested, are still in their velvet-toned outer husks. And apparently there’s nothing like a fresh pistachio, as local seller Mehmet Aksar urges me to find out for myself. He’s right; the raw nut which I extract from husk and shell is oily, soft and subtly flavoured, the taste and texture nothing like its salted counterpart.
‘Full of energy,’ Mehmet enthuses, and from his crude gesture it’s clear that this spry 65-year old has a particular energy in mind. I’m reminded, incidentally, that fıstık is the common regional colloquialism for attractive young women; confirmation perhaps of an entrenched male chauvinism in these parts but certainly clinching evidence of the pistachio’s prime standing here.
Witness the steady stream of early customers at Mehmet Aksar’s stall who certainly mean to glut on fresh pistachios before their brief window of availability – September-October – is gone. Mehmet supplies me with a glass of tea and parks me on a stool where I’m free to watch the customers quiz the pistachio seller on his stock. In the seeking and giving of quality assurances percentages are briskly batted back and forth; I learn that at least 75% of nuts in a good batch should be çatlak – its shell split as a measure not only of ripeness but also of ease of access to the nut within. A further indicator of ripeness, as one aficionado tells me, is that a proportion of any batch should have been collected from beneath the tree rather than picked from the branches; 40% is the man’s bottom line. The paradox is that the best baklavacis (baklava makers) tend to favour nuts picked back in August on account of the natural oils they contain. At about A$3 a kilo, even taking into account the weighty husks, the fresh nuts are strikingly cheap.
‘It’s been a bumper harvest,’ Mehmet explains, ‘though prices should double as availability tails off. Some trees produced 100 kilos of nuts this year. But these things tend to be cyclical; the likelihood is that the crop will be much smaller and the prices higher next year.’
I’ve barely left Mehmet’s stall and moved beyond Antep’s bazaar area, with its famed concentration of copper workers, before the true extent of this city’s sweet tooth becomes apparent. The streets are lined with baklava outlets which range from huge chain-name salons like Celebiogullari (www.celebiogullari.com.tr) to tiny counter delis like Haydaroglu at 11 Karagoz Caddesi, the windows arrayed with enormous tin trays of pistachio delicacies: filo and honey baklava in bite-sized squares or in cake-shaped pieces known as havuc dilimi (carrot slices); a shredded-wheat variant called kadayif; and a deep-green, leaf-wrapped hit of ground pistachio called fıstık sarma.
I’m on the look out, however, for the particular pudding breakfast in which Antep further specialises: katmer. I find it at Zekeriya Usta. From this no-frills back-street outlet – dough-rolling work surface, wood oven, aged till and proprietor – pastry cooks turn out these hot filo pillows of cream, crushed pistachios and sugar to order. My katmer proves quite delicious, even if I suspect that this venerable institution’s many devotees must also catch up with each other in the local queue for cardiology investigations. I’m not alone in carrying off a good chunk of my serving in a ‘paket’, as Turks call their doggie bags.
With the remnants of my katmer and a liquidised lunch – pistachio yet again, this time in a high-energy smoothie also containing oranges, bananas, figs, mulberries and honey called the ‘Atom’ – I am sustained through the day. Come evening, however, and I’m ready for Antep’s crowning culinary glory. The highly celebrated Imam Cagdas kebab restaurant and pudding shop is a cavernous two-floor diner, with glorious faux-sweep staircase and squadrons of old-school waiters, as full of locals and family groups as it is of tourists. My starter is the statutory hot lahmacun, the local mince-topped flatbread, which I follow with a salad topped with chopped walnuts and pomegranate juice. Then there’s ayran, the sour yoghurt drink served with bowl and ladle. From the range of kebabs – the aubergine one, the spicy minced adana – I choose one flavoured with garlic. And pistachios. The waiter comes to clear my place.
‘Baklava?’ he asks.
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