Eflatun Pınar
Hittite sacred spring
As dams go up across industrialised Turkey, drowning river valleys along with their numerous archaeological sites or allowing the downstream sections to run dry in the service of hydro-electric output and irrigation schemes, here’s a welcome reminder of the reverence water once enjoyed. Deep in the rolling wheat and poppy fields to the east of Beyşehir Lake rises a singular spring. Its tumbling waters are channelled to an ancient fountain fronted by a high wall of ashlar blocks featuring Hittite-era reliefs of weather gods, water spirits and mountain deities. This remarkable structure, dated to around 1300BC, is fronted by a rectangular cistern which now serves as the local duck pond, with the excess flowing beyond one edge as a clear, weed-tressed stream.
The site has recently been ‘improved’ by Konya’s museum service; in a crass mix of the twee and the totalitarian its operatives have installed willow-pattern wooden bridges while a barbed-wire fence with concrete uprights keeps the cattle out. Quarry-fresh blocks have been plonked along the low walls. More welcome are the local women who offer their home-knitted woollen caps with the improbable line that now’s the time – late June, in my case – for the site’s occasional visitors to be readying themselves for winter.
The site’s Turkish name is commonly misunderstood to mean Violet Spring. It properly translates as Plato’s Spring. That’s no petty correction; Plato’s improbable association since Selcuk times with the folk-lore of the Konya plain, which antiquarians have often noted, is fascinating. The ancient Athenian’s name is repeatedly attached to tombs, rivers and numerous springs across the region. In a limestone area known for a mysterious hydrography including sinkholes and subterranean channels, an area rich besides in local legends of the Flood commonly centred on Mount Ararat, we cannot know how it was that the ancient philosopher locally morphed into magical engineer – the man who controlled by divine agency the drainage and irrigation of the plain.
With Turkey’s DSI (State Water Works) in charge, of course, there’s no place for such fancies. But at least this fabulous manifestation of local superstition endures in the name of this 3000-year-old spring, a place where a proper reverence for nature also survives.