The Best of Wanderlust (A GeoEx eBook)

The Best of Wanderlust

West of Eden: Turkey’s Archaeological Treasures

significance, something we now cannot see—was sufficiently sacred for those early people to decide to invest so much time and energy in constructing this remarkable place. ~~ On my first visit, years ago, the man who was guarding Gobekli Tepe waved me over to find out who I was and where I came from, and then he offered me a cup of tea. He turned out to be the owner of the land on which the pillars had been found. On my most recent visit, in September of 2019, I found his son, Mahmut Yildiz, at the site. Sixty years old, wearing a black and white keffiyeh and baggy trousers, and sporting a biblical gray beard, he is also a guardian of the site. I asked how he feels about the development of the site and he beamed. “I am so happy,” he said, waving a hand towards the rounded hillside. “The only people who used to come here were my father, my uncle, and myself. We grew lentils and grazed our sheep. Now look—all the world comes to Gobekli Tepe.” It was hard to disagree, hearing the babel of languages coming from visitors walking around the site. I felt immensely privileged to have seen Gobekli Tepe in its raw state, unprotected, unvisited, and still only partly understood. But even though some of the adventure has been lost, now that the site has been prepared for crowds, there will be even more excitement to come as excavations continue on the hill and in the surrounding area and more discoveries come to light—as they already have a dozen miles west of Gobekli Tepe at Sanliurfa. Urfa, as it is called locally, is one of the most atmospheric cities in Turkey’s southeast. This may be due to its location, on a plain immediately below a cliff-like hill that dominates the city. But it may be because Urfa also bears witness to our earliest history: Look up to the summit of the hill from the center of town and you can see the remains of ancient fortifications and two massive Corinthian columns, reminders

monuments will, inevitably, be uncovered—then it is the first step in a line that stretches from here to the pyramids and Stonehenge and on past Europe’s medieval churches, Asia’s great mosques and funerary monuments, Hindu shrines, and gigantic Buddha statues, to the skyscrapers of New York and Chicago and the imagination-stretching architectural achievements of the past few years. ~~ On my first visit, nine years ago, Gobekli Tepe was known to very few people, and Klaus Schmidt had been obliged to tour Europe asking charitable foundations for funds to keep his excavations going. At that time, the hillside was protected by nothing more than its own lack of celebrity and a man in a small cabin. There was no ticket office because there were no tickets. No security. No facilities. Now, some years after Schmidt’s unfortunate early death, Gobekli Tepe has attracted so much attention that the Turkish state is keen to help promote it. The site is now surrounded by fences, car parks have been built down the slope near a large visitors’ center, and a huge canopy arches over the main excavation. None of this detracts from the wonder of the place, nor from the thrill of standing at the northernmost curve of the Fertile Crescent and trying to imagine who and how and why this place was built, and how many people may have climbed Gobekli Tepe over the millennia to look out over the rolling hills of Anatolia. We know that the people who built the site were hunter- gatherers who had learned to cut and wanted to decorate stone, we know that they brewed beer on a large scale, probably as part of a ceremony, and we believe that it may well have been here that wheat was first domesticated. And all because something in the landscape—a volcano smoking in the distance, perhaps, an alignment of lay lines, an event of great

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