The Best of Wanderlust (A GeoEx eBook)

The Best of Wanderlust

Anthony Sat t in

WEST OF EDEN: TURKEY’S ARCHAEOLOGICAL TREASURES

A t the mention of Turkey, you might conjure images of Istanbul and the glories of Byzantine emperors and Ottoman sultans, or the ancient puzzle that is Troy, or Ephesus with its Temple of Artemis, or the cave churches of Cappadocia. Maybe even the soft pleasures of a cruise down the ruin- studded Lycian shore on a wood-hulled gulet . All of this I know and have loved about Turkey. But some years ago, I discovered another Turkey, and now when I hear the name, I look far beyond the ancient to a place that goes back to the dawn of the human story, somewhere west of Eden. It was June and I was on the trail of TE Lawrence, who spent several happy and formative years in his early twenties working as a trainee archaeologist on a British Museum dig in southwest Anatolia. This was before World War I turned him into “Lawrence of Arabia.” At this point he was an awkward, withdrawn character in the process of finding his passion and his voice while working with Arabs and Kurds digging out an ancient Hittite city. That first time I visited southeast Turkey, in 2013, it was summer—and hot in several senses of the word because, a couple of years after the Arab Spring, the region was once

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