Day Six: Gobekli Tepe To Gaziantep, The Old To The New. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

This is day six of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

We turned off the Urfa highway and suddenly the modern parade of gas stations and stores fell away, revealing a landscape of mud-brick huts, lavender-scarfed peasants, green irrigated farmland, with the hard dry roll of unimproved hills in the background.  The asphalt quickly turned to dirt and rocks.  Barefoot children played in the fields while their mothers worked in the heat.

This could have been almost anywhere in the plains surrounding Urfa.  And in some ways it felt like it could have been any time, too.  Peasant children had probably been playing in these fields for thousands of years, ignoring the tides of kings and princes who had claimed the Urfa plain.

The car clattered up hills, and soon the village shrunk in the background.  Our poor over-worked compact car, stuffed with five full-grown humans and their baggage, struggled.  Soon the winding hill leveled out, and the road bulged into a parking lot.

We stepped out onto a high, wind-blown hill.  Here was Gobekli Tepe—the oldest temple on earth, built over 11,000 years old.

We were met with a middle aged man named Veyal Yildiz, whose family has farmed Gobekli Tepe for generations.  Our Turkish friend spoke with him a while, and we were worried that we would not be allowed inside—Gobekli Tepe is no museum, but a working archeological site where the ruins of dead civilization are day by day being pulled from the earth.  After five minutes of greetings, where are you froms, and what is your names, Yildiz gave a nod and led us to the excavations.

Twenty circle-shaped structures have been discovered under Gobekli Tepe’s dry soil, and four have been excavated.  Large sculpted limestone monoliths three meters high poke from the dry ground, most of them shaped like a pot-bellied T.  They are arranged in circles, with two pillars standing in the center of the circles.  Many of the pillars are decorated with carvings eked out of the rock with flint tools. 

A stone circle, older than bread.  Photo by Jenna Staff.

This site is older than Babylon, older than Stonehenge, older perhaps than agriculture itself.  The people who made it were probably hunter-gatherers who had not yet resigned themselves to settled life and government.  Somehow they dragged the eight-ton slabs of rock up from the quarry a hundred meters away, and then shaped the rock, with only hand-made flint tools.

A path ringed its way around the four open excavations.  Veydal pointed out the interesting carvings.  Here are lizards, foxes, sheep, donkeys, snakes, and boars; nets, pelts of animals, and birds.  On a number of the T-shaped rocks, hands clasped around the front of the spines, and at the sides, you could make out the crooks of bent arms.

At first the rocks just looked like rocks.  But slowly the monoliths took on human characteristics.  The tops of the Ts become the nods of massive heads.  The hands clasping the spines of the T seemed to be resting on bellies, the foxes around the base were pelts covering the privates.  Here, Veyal pointed to two monoliths standing next to each other.  “They think that this one is a man, and this one is a woman.”

We walked to the very top of Gobekli Tepe and sat down to rest in the heat.  A wish tree hung with scraps of plastic bags shaded us from the heavy sun, and four graves piled with loose stones shared the shade with us.  We looked out across the dry landscape, and I thought about the people who built this mound.  No one knows who they were.  No one knows what language they spoke.  No one knows why they spent so much time dragging stones up a mountain.

Only five percent of the whole 22-acre site has been excavated.  Klaus Schmidt, the site’s devoted archeologist, thinks that even after fifty years of work we will still only know the vaguest outlines of this huge temple.

We were the only people there.  We saw no cars.  No tour buses.  Veydal said that about five people a day come here, to Gobekli Tepe, the oldest sacred place on earth.

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A new black-asphalt three-lane toll road took us from Urfa to Gaziantep, the third largest city in Turkey.  As we dove into the city we encountered the worst traffic we’ve seen since Istanbul.  Every one of the million citizens of Gaziantep seemed to push their way through Istasyon Caddesi, Gaziantep’s pulsing artery of traffic and trouble, the cars merging and honking and swerving before suddenly stopping to let pedestrians hurry across the road.

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Our GPS told us to take a left down a road clogged with construction.  We circled around, looking for another route, but this too was blocked with earth moving machines and torn-up cobblestones.  We parked the car at a random parking lot and lugged our bags through the busy streets, reluctantly taking a room at the first hotel that we saw.  Our room was decorated in the style of a 1970s-era Turkish pimp, and the air heavy with the stale smell of cigarettes.

There were sights to see, of course.  Why else would we come?  The old archeology museum stood proud and ignored across the street from the sports stadium.  The museum was had once boasted some of the finest mosaics in the world, but these had been moved to the new museum, so now it was a lonesome place, with emptied, echoing spaces, informational plaques whose corresponding objects were missing, plaster marks on the polished floor.

Gaziantep is arguably one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth.  People first settled here in the third millennium B.C., and since then they have been trading, eating, marrying and dying, leaving behind the litter of their life which was then unearthed, identified, and set under glass for display.  We looked at the old cut-stone sarcophagi, the piles of old coins, the grave stele, the old glass-ware, the broken potsherds, the marble heads.

A lonely corridor was lined with grave stele from a half-dozen passed civilizations.  The rocks showed gods and warriors who had not been celebrated or worshipped for thousands of years.  Carved into the rock, their features worn by rain and the indifference of time, they eat, drink, banquet, fight, hold emblems and pieces of food and weapons, cups, trinkets and grapes.  Sometimes I caught a particularly fine detail—a eye that lifted with joy, a hand delicately holding a trident.

Kings enjoying themselves.  Photo by Jenna Staff.

But nobody else was at the museum.  I was a little indignant.  The stadium next door is busy with men eating kebabs and talking about sports, but here, where the monuments of history stand, there is silence. 

But then again, why should people care about the past, when the past is dead and they are alive?  Like the figures on the stele, they too must fight and drink and feast and die.  When the stele and the statues in the museum stood alive in the open air, they were not monuments, they were pieces of daily life.  The people of their time appreciated them with the same lazy eyes with which we now look at billboards and street signs.  So why should the musty virtue of antiquity make these cracked slabs of rock suddenly worthy?  Why should I expect people to turn their backs on the fun of their lives to look at dusty rubble?

After the old museum, we went to the new museum a twenty minute walk away.  We plodded along the tramway, passed under the train station, and skirted the slightly sketchy neighborhood around the train station.  Then out of the obscurity of the low-rent apartments, the mass of the museum imposed itself, huge and white, not yet even a year old.

Most of the mosaics had been rescued from Zeguma.  Zeguma was a Greek city perched on a crossing of the Euphrates river.  It became rich with trade, and over the centuries its citizens became rich, built their villas and their fountains, and laid their houses with mosaics of startling beauty.  Their patron god was Fortuna, the goddess of luck, and so the wheel of fortune repeats itself along the border of mosaic after mosaic, a tumbling interlocking circle.  Zeguma was taken by Rome and the city grew even more.  But the wheel of fortune turned, Rome became weak, and in the third century Zeguma was overrun by the Sassanid Empire, burned, its greatness lost.  People lived there, but they lived in the shadow of a great city, people unable even to remember the distant greatness of their ancestors.

The Wheel Of Fortune.  Photo by Jenna Staff.

The city wallowed in obscurity until the 1990s when archeologists discovered the city’s well preserved frescoes and mosaics.  But the careful excavation of the archaeologists was slow—faster were the antiquity traffickers who ravaged the new discoveries before they could be preserved.

Fortune was still crueler to Zeguma, the city who had once worshipped her.  A new dam was built, and the city was set to be flooded.  An international consortium of archaeologists flocked to the city to rescue what artifacts they could, finding seals and statues, lifting frescoes and tiles—but when the dam was finally opened over three tenths of the city was submerged and destroyed.

Those mosaics that had been salvaged were moved here, to the new museum in Gaziantep, and they stun the visitor with their incredble craftsmanship.  They show the strange gods of Asia Minor in all their glory and folly.  Oceanus and Tethys pose, swimming with dragons and snakes.  Europa is eternally being dragged off with Zeus the bull.  Eros and Psyche sit on a couch, and Aphrodite is birthed from a clam-shell.  These fine works were once on the floors of dining rooms and bedrooms, stepped on by the sandals of visitors, submerged with fountain water.  Now they were on the wall of a museum, to be admired.

Oceanus and Tethys pose.  Photo by Jenna Staff.

We see these gods marring, posing, eating and arguing.  Eros and Psyche sit on a couch and the expressions on their faces look like they are sitting at home and they can’t exactly decide what to watch on TV.  Eros has his hand lightly on Psyche’s back, and Psyche has her left hand open imploringly, like she’s just about to suggest that they put on a rerun of Olympus’ Got Talent.

They are like us.  And I imagine that the long-dead city of Zeguma must have once been a lot like the city of Gaziantep:  bustling, commercial, and hot; the citizen’s lives rich with traffic and trouble, the people only sometimes pausing to admire the work of their mosaics and fountains and frescos.  And then they move on to the real beauty of their daily lives.

The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary continues...

You can also get the whole series as an e-book.

Day Five: Urfa, A City Of Pilgrims, A City Of People. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

This is day five of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

We woke up in Urfa, the heat already rising, and gorged ourselves on a huge Turkish breakfast with three kinds of cheese, roast peppers, katmer—a delicious sweet green pancake—honey, eggs with Turkish sausage, olives, cool kaymak, tomatoes, cucumbers, french fries, and a basket of bread that the dutiful waiters insisted on refilling again and again.  We started to talk, but our tired conversation was overcome by the TV, which played a selection of the most manufactured US pop, and soon we just ate, and craned our heads around to gaze gap-mouthed at the latest Keisha video.

The city if Urfa is a palimpsest of names and histories stretching back over a eleven thousand years.  In 1984 the city was renamed Sanliurfa—Glorious Urfa—in honor of its tenacity in the Turkish War of Independence.  Urfa itself was named after the biblical city of Ur, Islamic scholars believing that this was legendary settlement where the prophet Abraham once lived.  Before that, Urfa was called as Edessa, a bustling metropolis of the Byzantine Empire.

After breakfast we headed outside, but the heat, even this early in the morning,  burdened our shoulders like a real weight.

We walked through the busy, broad streets, passing medieval towers, remarkable mosques, women dressed in purple headscarves with noses pierced with gold.  An old man in droop-crotched shalwar pants putted his motorbike up the sidewalk at a little more than walking pace.  We stopped in a shop hanging with dried peppers and eggplant husks, selling three different kinds of famous Urfa hot pepper in three qualities—’Home’, ‘Lux’ and ‘Extra’.  The city gave us too much to look at, and too much to think about, so that we walked around like people half-asleep, snapping photos of this oriental scene and that one.  It is hard to recognize Urfa’s monuments, bazaar and people as real living things, and not merely touristic photo opportunities.

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Close to the bazaar is the sacred quarter of the city, a lawny tree-shaded expanse of marble courtyards, mosques, fountains and benches, filled with families and pilgrims.  The people here were conservative looking.  There was hardly any bare-headed women.  Many men were dressed traditionally, in saggy shalwars and bright lavender head-wraps.

Urfa is a city of pilgrimage.  According to Islamic tradition, Urfa is the birthplace of the profit Abraham, and this scared complex full of indolent tourists presses up against the cave in which he was supposed to be born.  There are two small doors entering this holy site, one for men and one for women, and a tired security guard sits in between them, dealing with questions and donations.

After taking off my shoes and ducking through the entrance to the sacred cave, I walked into a small room crowded with feet and shoulders.  At the front of the room a thick plexiglass barrier covered the dim grotto—the place of the birth of the prophet Abraham.  Children and old men washed their hands in the sink in the right corner, and then hold their palms face up in prayer.  The room smelled lightly of feet.  I tried to sidle up to the window so I could get a better view of the green-painted stone platform that stood in the grotto, but I was worried that I was getting in someone’s way, and interrupting the seriousness of the prayers, so I left.

Outside I stood a moment in the heat, waiting for my friends to finish their explorations, watching the kids dip their feet into the fountain.

“Well, that was boring,” someone says before we walk off to our next site.

In the shade of the mosque abutting the shrine, two men laid asleep or ill, their coats thrown up over their heads against the sun, their feet bare and black with callouses.

We wandered two minutes or so from the Cave of Abraham before we made it to the Sacred Fish Pool.  Tradition says that the cruel king Nimrod tried to catapult Abraham into a burning pyre.  But God turned the fire to water, and the coals to fish and landed safely Abraham into a rose bush, so accordingly Urfa’s scared quarter is decorated with a large rectangular pool full of holy fish.  We took tea beside the fish pond.  Young men pushed boats to the fountain in the center of the pool, propped a ladder against it, and climbed on top of it, unwinding a long green hose with which they cleaned.

Cleaning the fountain.  Photo by Jenna Staff.

The water was a soft green, and well-fed happy looking carp bobbed their heads out of the water.  Urfa’s heavy sun was mottled through the trees, and the wind blowing over the water gave a freshness that eased the heat.  The carp would crowd around the edge of the pool, waiting for the tourists to throw them a handful of fish food, opening and closing their yellow-lipped, toothless mouths.  A pudgy fish food seller had positioned himself under an umbrella, carefully measuring brown pellets from a hessian bag at his feet into small metal tea saucers and plastic baggies.  He had the radio on, that softly blared with the latest international pop.  Keisha came on and he subtly tapped his foot, while his mustachioed face kept the same hard mercantile expression.

I walked around the pool, looking at the carp.  Then I saw a knot of fish, jostling and nervous.  In the center I could see the pale white gash of flesh.  The fish were fighting over a fish corpse, tearing at its scales before dragging it to the bottom of the pool where it disappeared.

Fish!  Sacred fish!  Photo by Jenna Staff.

The Urfa citadel stood atop the hill, looking over the scared gardens.  We had to climb it.  According to the informational plaque that stood in front of the ticket office, the citadel was first built in 9500 BC, but it was more likely erected first in the time of the Roman Empire.  Each new ruler of Urfa renovated the citadel, adding monuments and improvements to the old edifice of strong rock, so that the place now stands as a patchwork of stones and arches of different ages.  Two tall Corinthian columns topped it, beautiful and strange, like a set goalposts for some massive invisible football game in the sky.

Urfa.  Photo by Jenna Staff.

Once we reached the top of the citadel, the whole city was laid out in front of us like the spread of food at a hotel buffet.  The watered healthy green of the trees in the sacred gardens sprouted in tufts, the glinting metal domes of the new mosques in the distance, the clouds clutched against the horizon, and the burst of new development around the city’s edges high and glassy.  Behind us was what looked to be a slum, a crumbling mess of concrete shanties propped together with rotting wood and tarps.  A mother led her child out of a dark doorway and took down a piece of washing from a clothesline, ignoring the ancient castle in whose shadow she lived.

We walked back to the hotel by way of the maze-like bazaar, checking the prices on trinkets that might serve as good presents for the folks back home.  The stalls were busy with shops of every kind, gold, tea, shirts, cups, plates, bags of cheap tobacco as yellow as bread, folk crafts, fabrics.  And the winding passageways were cluttered with people as varied as the goods:  peasants from the surrounding countryside, rich conservative tourists in fashionable hijabs, and us, the short-clad, picture snapping sun-burnt barbarians.  Two women in headscarfs budged their way through the crowd, each shouldering huge rolls of thick grey foam as big as a donkey.

In the bazaar we met a hustling sixth-grade shopkeeper who, like the majority of men in the city is named Ibrahim, after the prophet Abraham.  He was short for sixth grade, and when he relaxed he looked like one of my students during the break between classes.  But then his eyes would glint with the penetrating canny of a businessman.  His English was simple yet confident in a way that suggested he learned things very quickly.  We tried to bargain, but Ibrahim just smiled, and his prices were fair, so we all bought a little thing from him—a Turkish coffee pot, a sugar dish.

I interviewed  him in a combination of my haltering Turkish and his English.  His favorite school subject was Math.  He liked Ben 10.  I could easily imagine him then as one of my own students back in Istanbul, his life a clamor of schoolwork and friends and breaks between classes.  But as we were talking an urchin sidled up to Ibrahim’s store and started to finger some of his goods.  Ibrahim’s boy’s face hardened.  He barked.  The urchin cringed and melted back into the crowd.  Once the threat was gone, the child in his eyes came back.

We got him to pose in his shop.  “Be a businessman,” I said.  He set his face as hard as he could, crossing his arms over his chest.  He was proud of his shop, of his stock of goods.

By then the heat of the day was up.  We splashed around in the hotel pool until the evening.

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Harran is a small village nine miles north of the Syrian border, a good half an hour drive from Urfa down a straight new road lined with rich green farmland.  We turned down a smaller road, following first the signs for Harran, and once we found Harran, we followed the signs for ‘Tourist Center,’ keeping a look-out for the touristic sites we’d read about in the guidebooks.

But Harran is not a museum.  Harran will only reveal itself slowly.  Harran is a living village, where people work, marry, have children, and try to live the same as they had for centuries.  The new addition of tourists drawn by the city’s distinctive beehive mud huts will not change that.

We stopped and asked a man for directions.  Directions where?  Directions to Harran.  To the mud huts.  To the sites that we had to see.  He smiled curiously.  We were there, he explained.  We nervously regarded the mud-colored huts and the rank of cheap eateries on the roadside.  Could this be it?  I thought of turning back around, returning to the safety of our hotel.  The man still stood helpfully at our open window, and after a moment he offered to find us a guide.  We don’t need a guide, we decided, and the man shrugged, pointing down a dirt road.  There’s where you can go if you want to see the village, he said.

Our car rumbled over the uneven, potholed dirt road.  Around us were dozens of those hand-made mud-brick huts crowned with kumbats—large distinctive domes found in only three other places on earth.  These huts have become symbols of Urfa.  But we felt uneasy.  This was no museum we were driving into.  This was life.  Women were slowly walking home from the fields.  Children were playing bare-feet in the dirt behind their houses.  And through it all clambered a dusty, small blue car filled with foreigners snapping pictures out their windows of this very authentic village life.  A trio of dirty young children ran barefoot in the plume of dust we left behind, jumping with exuberance.

We returned to the main road and parked.  Long-haired goats chewed on something in the muddy embankment.  “I guess this is it,” one of us said.  We ventured up a dirt road to look around and we were quickly met by a class-room’s worth of small children, sullenly selling good-luck charms.  We tried our best to ignore them, but they followed a few steps behind us, polite and silent.  A small girl with huge eyes not more than seven years old had a baby tied to her back with a blue handkerchief, and the handkerchief would sometimes slip, so she would foist it up again.  She wasn’t trying to sell anything to us, or to ask us for money.  She, like us, was looking.

We have interrupted these people’s lives and we don’t want to interrupt them any more.  We turn back, get the number of the tour guide from a food truck, and wait by the car while the children orbit us with a quiet curiosity.

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A man led us past a honey-colored tumbling stone castle and into the heart of Harran.  The castle was first built by the Hitties who established there a temple to Sin, the goddess of the moon.  When the Romans replaced the Hitties, they converted the temple into a church.  When the Umayyads took the castle from the Romans, they made the church into a caravansary.  Now the castle stands empty and crumbling, a monument to nothing, while children play in its shadow.

We parked next to a large mud hut with eighteen kumbats rising into the late afternoon sky.  This was Harran House, a traditional hut made to satisfy the curiosity of tourists.  Outside camels, cows, horses, goats and chickens mingled with tea-drinking men.

We were introduced to our young guide Eyup.  We walked a little up a grassy hill towards the crumbling foundations of a once-large building, a huge crumbling tower rising beside it.  Eyup told us that these was the remains of the world’s first university, amd there—he pointed to the far corner of the ruins—was a the library, a legend of the world, which  drew scholars from across the world to study alchemy, religion, and astronomy.  The tall tower, still standing, its top broken like a cut reed—that was once a state-of-the-art astronomical observatory.  One of the tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh was unearthed over there, by that hill.  It was here that the Roman Emperor Crassus was defeated by the Parthians, and had molten gold poured down his throat.

We climbed a mound that rose beside the ruins, where weather-worn stone walls were being scraped out of the earth, the ancient bricks the same color as the falling light.  Beneath this hill, Eyup told us, lie the ruins of eight successive civilizations.  It is strange, I think, looking at the ghostly shape of the excavated old city, how bricks look pretty much the same over the whole span of human history.  They look exactly like bricks.

This done, we returned to Harran House.  We went inside the first kumbat where Eyup dressed us up in traditional clothes and we posed for pictures.

The inside of the house looked much bigger from the inside than it did on the outside.  The walls were hung with mementos.  In the kitchen it was cups, lamps, and a goat skin used to make the traditional Turkish yogurt drink Ayran.  The man’s salon was covered in old rugs and pillows.  The marriage room decorated with tapestries, a trousseau and a wedding dress hung on the wall.  “The house is hot in the winter, and cool in the summer,” Eyup told us proudly.

After that we rested in the declining light, drinking tea and talking.  We asked Eyup about himself.  He is in high school.  He has 14 brothers and sisters.  He speaks Arabic, Turkish and English.  He learned English from speaking with tourists, and he dazzles us with the snatches of Italian and French he’s picked up from other passing travellers.

Before it felt like we were trespassers into Harran’s daily life, but now, we are guests, sipping tea, letting the night rise around us.  People have been drinking tea here, I think, since the silk road wound its way up from China and first brought packets of tea to Europe.  The sunset bulged, the color of rose-petal jam, blowing the fresh night wind over the landscape.  The sun burned the sky orange and purple, flooding the day’s last light over the nearby ruins.  Here, I thought, we had seen something more than ruins, more than a citadel, more than the legendary birthplace of Abraham.  In Harran we were welcomed to look at a glimpse of real life.  It was not the remarkable and preserved touristic life of travel brochures, but a real life that like the ruins of Harran, had been built atop the past.


The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary continues...

You can also get the whole series as an e-book.

Day Four: Mardin, Too Marvelous. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

This is day four of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.


Mardin clings to the side of a mountain, looking out over the Mesopotamian plains and the meander of the Tigris below.  But Yenishehir—the New City where our hotel was—hides behind the old city on the easy flatland, a wealthy spread of new apartment buildings and restaurants.


A five minute drive brought us to the base of the old city, and we stepped out of the car to admire a view of the bread crust-colored buildings and the crowning mass of the citadel that stood at Mardin's peak.

Local legend has it that Mardin was founded before the Great Flood.  The earliest archeological excavations date the settlement at least back to 6,000 years ago.  And it’s easy to see why people wanted to live here.  The plains keep you fed.  The mountain keeps you safe.  It is a wonderful place to build a city.

But the mountain could not keep Mardin safe forever.  And over the long history of war and empire, generations of generals have stood on the Syrian plain below Mardin and looked up, lustily envying the strategic brilliance of this mountain town.  Here are the names of the civilizations which have conquered Mardin, one after the other: the Subarians, the Hurrians, the Elamites, the Babylonians, the Hitties, the Assyrians, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Seljuk Turks, the Artukids, the Mongols, and then finally—in the 16th Century—the Ottoman Turks who themselves were replaced by the Turkish Republic in the beginning of the 20th Century.

We turned from the city to the Mesopotamian Plain behind it.  After driving through the hilly plateau for so long, the flatness of everything was stunning.  The plain stretched to the horizon utterly untroubled by hill or rise or roll, completely flat, squares of wheat-colored farmland broken by squares of dark irrigated land, dark cloud shadows moving slowly from one end of the plain to the other.  The dusty horizon joined with the sky in an indistinct haze, like the world couldn’t exactly decide what should be land and what should be sky.

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We climbed up alleyways of stone steps, the roofs of the city rising above us at various angles, two or three nipple-tipped minarets piercing the skyline in the distance.  These streets were not made—they grew up over the slow course of decades and centuries, going where they would—not necessarily going straight to anywhere in particular—but just going.  And so we walked without any other direction but up, marveling at the ancient-looking character of the buildings around us.

Mardin looked exactly how I imagined an ancient Near Eastern city should look.  The houses were old, with finely-made arched Ottoman windows, clustered together like mushrooms.  Many were in various stages of disrepair:  cracked walls, gaping windows.  We passed under a drooping stone balcony supported dubiously by a nest of wooden planks and plastic pipes.  “Careful of the scorpions,” our Turkish friend told us as we stumbled up through a pebbly patch of waste land.  It was easy to imagine that we were back in the Twelfth Century.

But then small details would force the modern world back:  spent Cheetos bags fluttering in the street, the sound of a Turkish soap opera blaring through an open window of an ancient-looking house.

An exceptionally happy young man on a donkey strolled by us.  Polite girls in loose headscarfs said hello to us.  We said hello back and followed them to the nearby mosque,—the Abdullatif Camii.  There were a gaggle of girls in the mosque’s front courtyard lingering under the shadow of a vine trellis, asking us questions and giggling.  After a few minutes a young woman peeks her head out of an open door and announced “Girls!  It’s time!”  The girls are enrolled in a summer Koran course at the mosque.  But the girls dawdled as much as they could, asking us foreigners our names, laughing, posing for pictures and then running away from pictures and hiding their smiles behind their hands.

The mosque was old, the outside decorated with beautiful clay work in the Artukids style.  We ventured inside the mosque, and look around for a moment before heading out again into the dry desert heat.

We came to a main street, hung with plastic awnings, blaring with staticy radios barely picking up ancient music, vegetable sellers sitting at their shop doing their accounts by hand, and somewhere in the distance the anxious braying of a donkey.  The feeling washed over me again:  this could be a hundred years ago, or a thousand.  Or it could be today.

And then I realized I had been wrong about Mardin.  Being in Mardin was not like being transported back in time.  Instead it was like being smeared through time, at once living in the present and the past—as if time which normally is so punctilious and fussy had gone sloppy and forgetful.

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There are things to do in Mardin, important cultural landmarks that the guidebooks insisted we check off our lists—but it was more rewarding to simply fall through the alleyways and let ourselves get lost in the remarkable feeling of the city.  Nevertheless, we were tourists, and so we had to do touristy things.

First we went to the Mardin Museum, which boasted artifacts from the area’s six thousand years of human settlement.  Looking into the glass cases showing paleolithic tools, I felt a sense of sadness.  Because what survives from the ancient world?  Clay and metal and nothing more.  Stone axes, broken shards of curde jugs, small statues, thin metal needles, a stone toy cart, obsidian cutting tools still sharp after six millennia, baked clay writing tablets and seals—and nothing much more from the clamor of human life.  A few small cuneiform inscriptions show the grubbily commercial origins of writing.  They are nothing more than contracts, announcements, statues, and deeds.—They come from before the time that writing had become art.  I wondered what would survive of our life, after the centuries pulled their forgetfulness over our civilization?

After the museum, we tried to find Ulu Camii—the Great Mosque.  We were directed down a merchant-clogged alleyway selling an oriental range of sundries:  sheep and calf heads in plastic bowls, black with rot, flies buzzing around the eye sockets; repair shops and metal workers, a ten-year old fixing a saw blade onto a machine tool; a metal worker stamping patterns onto a plate by hand; cages full of ducks and baby chickens, squawking; cookware, plastic pipes, woodworking tools; kebab restauranteurs carving off slices of meat; tea shops; clothes shops; anything a person might need.

We got to the mosque a few moments before the call to prayer, and the broad courtyard was filled with locals washing their feet in the fountain.  We decided to wait in a nearby cafe until the prayers were over.  There we looked out over the Mesopotamian Plain again and drank Mirra Coffee—the most bitter sip of coffee that I have ever had in my life.  A serving is little over two or three teaspoons, and the taste stayed in our pallets for at least half an hour.

Our refreshment done, we visited Ulu Camii, remarked about in guidebook after guidebook.  But after having enjoyed the city for the majority of the afternoon, I was disappointed by how boring the great mosque was.  It was a large mosque made of white stone, decorated in high Artukid style, the walls crawling with amazing calligraphy.  But the inside of the mosque was bare and cool, and I couldn’t feel excited for it.  We splashed water over our faces at the fountain, and then left to again plunge into the city.

Our final act of tourism was to climb to the top of the city where the Mardin citadel perches, looking over the Syrian farmland.  We rested there, snapping photos of ourselves against the grand backdrop of the valley where civilization began.

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We had planned to do more around Mardin:  we would find a city where an ancient bridge crossed the Tigris river; we could tour a working Syriac Christian monastery; we could admire an ancient mosque.  But once we got back into the car, we shrugged off all our remaining touristic plans.  We didn’t want any more cultural heritage:  we had had enough.  We were full of beauty already, and full of wonder, and our camera full of pictures.  Insisting on seeing more striking sites would be too gluttonous.  Instead we followed the wide new road west, to the city of Urfa, some three hours away.

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Day Three: Scavenger Hunts For Car-Bound Tourists. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

This is day three of The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

We drove.  We drove.  We drove.

We left Erzurum at eight thirty in the morning, bellies half-full from a soup breakfast and heads half-rested from our lumpy hotel pillows.  We hopping into our little car and drove.  Through the rolling mountains we drove.  We drove through the grasslands waving in the wind.  We climbed hills and skirted valleys, passing through market towns and farmland, dusty villages of a single building and military bases clinging to mountain faces.

We stumbled into Mardin at eight in the evening.  We had been driving for the whole day.  We grumbled at each other, hungry and testy, with aching backs and strained tempers, taking the first hotel we saw.  It had been twelve hours of driving—maybe more—and at the end of it I almost forgot anything had happened.  As I thought about it more, I could only make up a collage of disconnected images, but I could make no story out of them, nor could I impose any sense. 

I had thought that yesterday had been empty.  Today was empty, truly empty.  We often saw no cars at all for half an hour or so.  We would pass lumbering trucks overloaded with bags of cement.

As soon as we left Erzurum the landscape became as green as a cartoon lawn.  Teepees dotted the hills—the homes of cowherds who followed their stock along the plateau.  But the greenery soon turned sun-light yellow, and the heat came.

As our small car put-putted its way south, the cows on the side of the road turned to sheep, and then the sheep turned to goats, until finally the goats became small children, who pushed to the shoulder of the road, holding out plastic bags of sour plums to the passing motorists.

I remember a heap of burning garbage on the side of the road, clung with black birds.  A small puppy sat contentedly in the heat, looking playfully at the birds like that pile of garbage and those birds were the whole world.

For a few kilometers the road was a confusion of donkeys inching their way up the shoulder.  There were cars, but no people.  “Who on earth is herding these things?”  Three donkeys lay in pile of dust, the sun beating down on them.  “Are they dead?”  The one nearest to the road reared its head up lazily, flicked back its ears in annoyance, and then laid down again.  “Are they dying?”  “Are they napping?”  

After eight hours we stopped in the metropolis of Diyarbakir.  While my friends took pictures of the huge citadel, the mosques, and the guileless street-children who followed us through picturesque-tumbledown alleyways, I remained grumpy.  “Hello!  Hello!  Hello!”  The children called after us.  I crossed my arms over my chest and reminded everyone that it was probably time to go.

But my memories didn’t seem enough—not enough for twelve hours.  And really, a lot of the time stretched on in a bare wasteland.  Five grown humans sealed into a compact car whose radio doesn’t work.  We ran out of jokes.  We developed headaches.  We grew testy with each other.

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For those of you considering a drive from Erzurum to Mardin in a day—don’t.  Or at least get a big car.  You might save yourself a mental breakdown by playing Anatolian Road Warrior Scavenger Hunt.  The rules are simple.  Each object can only be found once.  Spotted objects earn you anywhere from one to five points.  At the end of the day the person with the most points earns a free dinner.

1 point:

More than 10 cows.

An overloaded truck.

A farming vehicle driving through a town.

A car passing itself.  (The “Self Pass.”)

A two-minareted mosque.

2 points:

More than 10 sheep.

Two meat restaurants next to one another.

A woman doing farmwork by the roadside.

A car passing another car that is passing.  (The legendary “Double Pass.”)

A vegetable seller.

3 points:

A person running.

An idle road worker.

A driver standing up.

A Mercedes.

A car properly using its turn signal.

4 points:

A person reading a book.

Improbable child!

A car with fur seats.

A person with blonde hair.

A man peeing in public.

5 points:

Dogs having sex.

Another group of people taking a photo of something.

Guns.

A woman driver.

Another foreigner.

Enjoy!


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Day Two: A Lesson In Turkish Automotive Adventure. Afterwards, Erzurum. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

This is day two of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

The road south from Trabzon climbed slowly onto Anatolian plateau, and as the day wore on we drove up loftier and loftier mountains, plunging further and further east.

We discovered that the number one Turkish road-trip pass-time is overtaking other cars.  Two lanes?  One lane?  Dirt road dusty with construction?  Turkish drivers think all these places are great for passing by motorists languishing at the speed limit.  Inevitably every few minutes we would suddenly be passed by a clutch of cars which would veer into the oncoming traffic.  This happened everywhere we drove:  in cities, on long straight highways, on blind curves hugging the sides of mountains.

At first, these incidents were scary.  Our driver would brace herself and grip the wheel testily.  Us passengers would hurl opprobrium at the passing car.  “Why is he passing us?”  “Turkish death wish.”

But after three straight hours of driving an absurd humor crept into the incautious bravery of the Turkish driver.  Once while driving down a wide mountain highway we were passed by an impatient driver who himself was passed while passing us by an even more impatient driver.  This was a thing of beauty.  A rare "Double Pass."  Of course, a few bends in the mountain later we saw both cars stuck in a clog of traffic, only ten meters ahead of us for all their automotive bravery.

The art of Turkish overtaking reached its most fantastic hight when we saw a motorbike puttering its way up the side of the mountain, its left turn signal on, meandering suddenly into the left-hand lane even though there were no other cars on the road.  “Look guys,” our resident snark pointed out, “this guy’s passing himself.  It's a Self Pass.”

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Then the beauty of the changing scenery quieted us.  We had mounted the Anatolian Plateau, an otherworldly dry scrubland stretching restlessly in every direction.  Slabs of rock jutted out of the pasture at odd angles, as if there had been some great ancient war that had torn up the earth.  The sky was bigger, prouder, full of huge castle-like clouds.  The light looked different.  It was clear, and sharpened things.

For long stretches of the well-paved highway we saw no other cars, and for a while we could be imagine that civilization was very far away from us.  But Turkey is one of the oldest civilized landscapes on earth, and the road threaded its way through numerous small villages, like beads strung on a bracelet.  A little before noon we stopped in one to pick up nuts and cherries for our lunch, and outside a local bakery we gawked at a wheelbarrow stacked with burning logs for charcoal.

Later we passed through a dust-grey town, the perfect setting for an Anatolian wild west film.  In the other lane we saw a thin horse pulling a beaten-up cart  On our right a seven-year old boy diligently changed the tyre of an eight wheeler, while his father gummed at the filter of a cigarette and admired his work.

But too quickly, the loneliness of the vast landscape returned, and it was back to the rolling hills and the scrubland and the feeling that we were far away from everything.  The only hint that we were nearing something big were the handful of billboards chucked along the roadside.  One was for a bank.  “ATM!—30km!”

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Erzurum is an ancient town perched more a mile above sea level like an eagle on a high rock.  As we pushed our way into the crazy traffic trying to find a hotel, we became worried.  The streets seemed a little too pot-holed, a little too crammed with cars, the driving a little too intemperate, the people a little too interested in us and our small car.  We drove the wrong way up a one-way street, argued about directions, finally found our hotel, and parked, struggling out of our seats with half-shaking legs and testy humor.  We heard a passing child remark in wonder.  “Tourists!”

The history of Erzurum is one of conquest.  First settled by the Armenians, it fell under the sway of the Roman Empire in the late fourth century and was quickly renamed after the Emperor Theodosius.  The city was reinforced, and strengthened to become one of the bastions that Rome held against the Persian Empire.  And for the next two thousand years, the tides of history have pushed ambitious empires over Erzurum.  The Persians, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Turks, the Russians.  Each has come, only to leave again while Erzurum remains in its lofty rock, proud and slow.

We found our hotel.  The proprietor was kneeling on a prayer mat in the lobby, and slowly straightened himself up to meet us.  He was very old, with white stubble on his face, no teeth, and the striking intelligent eyes of a much younger man.  Our Turkish friend negotiated with him, and the old man refused to lower the price of our rooms by a single lira.  Weary with travel, we checked in, dropped off our bags, and made a hurried search for toilet paper before gathering ourselves for one last jot of tourism.

Somewhat refreshed, we drove into the nearby city center to look at the historical sites before the light died.  Our first stop was the Çifte Minareli Medrese, the Twin Minaret Madrasa, a strikingly strong red-brick building raised in 1271.  We found the Madrasa—so emblematic of Erzurum that it’s on the Wikipedia page—closed for renovation, covered in scaffolding and sheets of green mesh tarp that fluttered in the cool mountain wind.

Rebuffed, we crossed the street to the Three Kumbats—medieval octagonal tombs topped with steep conical roofs that look a little bit like hats.  One of the roofs had grass sprouting in the grout between the bricks, looking like a bad hair transplant.  The Kumbats were built sometime between the 13th and 14th Centuries, but who built them and why is unknown.

We discovered a young man sprawled napping on the curb of the leftmost Kumbat, in bright red shoes, jeans and a red shirt, his arm thrown up over his eyes to block out the high afternoon sun.  He stirred as we gawked at him, shifted his arm a little to give us a surly look, and then returned to sleep.

The doors of the Kumbats were all locked, but we could look inside through the barred windows.  Nothing.  Any sarcophagi that had once rested here had been removed sometime in the past eight hundred years, leaving nothing but bare stone and shade.

But they were still remarkable, because they were so solid, and so old.  As we made our way around the Kubats and settled into an appreciative silence, I imagined the workers who placed the stones there a thousand years before us, and I wondered what they were thinking of as they worked, and of how when they stretched themselves up and wiped the sweat off their foreheads, they looked to the same background of high rain-washed mountains as we looked.

The third and final cultural event of the day was the nearby citadel, a vast building of heavy stone overlooking the city and the plain below it from where the passing generations of Empire had looked out onto world.  We circled it, looking for an entrance.  It was shut.  The citadel had closed a quarter of an hour before.

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Our humor had thinned.  At the citadel a group of dirty-faced children had swaggered up to us, cornering a straggling member of our group shouting “Money!  Money!  Money!” with threat and anger.  Our jokes had lost their laughter.  We checked out a mosque built in 1179 and tried to appreciate the ancient domed roofs and the quadruple arches, but we were just playing the role of tourists without actually enjoying what we saw.  We all sat sat on the rug at the front of the mosque and waited.  We were hungry, but we hadn’t exactly realized that we were hungry, so we lingered in a half-exhausted pile before coming to the inevitable conclusion that it was time to eat.

Erzurum is famous for Cag Kebab, a spit-roast lamb dish that might very well be the ancestor of the ubiquitous doner.  Two restaurants claim to have invented the kebab.  We went to one, Gel-Gor Kebab, a bright clean building near the city center.

Once we were seated we craned our heads around us, looking for a waiter to present us with a menu.  No menus came, but soon a waiter efficiently whisked plates of salad and thin bread onto the table.  A moment later another waiter offered us skewers of slow-roasted lamb.  We ate one skewer, two, and then three, gorging ourselves on the grease and hot pepper paste, eventually falling into contended food comas where time seemed to have no meaning, and our tiredness seemed to have no meaning, and the hassle of the traffic had no meaning, and all there was that mattered was the pleasant bluges in our bellies.  We had passed through the mild discomforts of travel into a painless nirvana of gluttony, our pain gone.


Soon our dirty plates were removed and we were asked if we wanted dessert.  Yes please. Dessert was Kadayıf Dolması, another local delicacy that is nest of deep-fried pasta soaked in syrup, stuffed with chopped walnuts.  The texture, the taste, the sublimity of Kadayıf Dolması is impossible to describe.  Maybe it's like the Turkish dessert version of a perfect sushi roll:  an infinitely subtle combination of simple falvors.  After polishing off two of these each, we gazed at each other in a contended stupor.

Now that the dusk was coming, the city seemed easier than it had when we had first struggled in.  The roads had cleared themselves of cars, and silence had fallen on the terraced streets and the quiet houses.  We pulled open the curtains of our hotel room and looked out on the skyline, and below us the ancient plains, and we know that we had accomplished something that day.  We had struggled, and we had enjoyed it.


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Day One: Trabzon and Sümela Monastery The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

This is day one of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.


A year ago me and my girlfriend moved to Istanbul to plunge into what we imagined would be lives of oriental adventure.  But during the school year we plodded through our jobs as elementary school teachers at a plodding nine-to-five pace.  On the weekends we would sometimes muster up the energy to explore the ponderous great city of Istanbul.  But after twelve months, we had become jaded with the mosaics and the palaces.  We had seen it all before, and taken pictures before, and read the information plaques before.  The smog-filled sticky heat of summer laid over the city, and we were listless.  Last Friday finally, school ended.

We rented a car and gathered a trio of friends recruited from Wisconsin, Istanbul, and Arkansas.  We will see the country—all of it—or as much of it as we can manage.  We met in a hotel in Trabzon late Saturday morning, excited and hopeful.

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Trabzon is an ancient port on the Black Sea, founded in the 8th Century BC.  Once known as Trebizond and a key part of the Roman Empire, the city has stood while Empires have surged and crashed around it.  From Alexander to Augustus, from Justinian to Mehmet the conqueror to Ataturk, each has laid his own claim to the city.  And when he left, the city remained behind, facing the blue sea as always.  The streets follow a tangled course, jumbling around squares and apartment buildings, rising and falling and overlapping.  Through these arteries cars weave around each other brazenly, avoiding accident again and again at the very last minute.

Beyond the jigsawed skyline of the city center, we could see the broad blue stretch of the Black Sea.  Above the city stood bulging piney mountains.

We drove south.  Soon the city was done.  The landscape rolled on, wave after wave of increasingly prouder hills.  The road-side offered intermittent and mysterious industrial scenes:  concrete factories, car door factories, and half-finished skeletons of buildings crouching in the hill-folds.  After forty minutes we made it to the foot of the mountain.

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The air was misty and cool, a light drizzle making the air feel wet and fresh.  Families were barbecuing overlooking the quick flow of the river, and I could taste the delicious taste of cooked meat just by breathing.

We walked up the road, the other cars racing beside us at irresponsible speeds.  But in those moments when we could see no cars, the mountain let us forget ourselves in its trees and the surge of river.  A slither of rainwater ran down the shoulder, grey with dirt.

Sumela Monastery and its mountain.  Photo by Jenna Staff.

And then there was a gap in the trees, and we got a view of the monastery we were climbing towards.  It was improbably flattened onto the mountainside high above us.  This was Sümela Monastery, ancient, built in the forth century to commemorate a miraculous icon of the Virgin Mary discovered in a high mountain cave, as if made by Anatolian angels helpful enough to make a nice icon, but tricksy enough to hide it in the highest cave they could find.

A little further up the road, a bridge crossed the river over cascading waterfall  The sluice of water rumbled fell over the dark wet rocks, throwing up spray that tickled our skin.  It looked like a picture.  So posed for pictures.

The scenery inspired many observations.

“Looks like Wisconsin.”

“Looks like Korea.”

“Looks like Lord of the Rings.”

Then a steep mountain trail broke off from the road and we left the asphalt and the other cars behind us to plunge into the trees.  After five minutes we could barely hear the cars anymore, and we were panting as we hiked.  The whole world seemed only to be trees, and the dripping wet, and us.

After ten minutes of climbing path became steep, and we clambered up the muddy ground.  Then the forest opened into a clearing of white queen anne’s lace and morning glory.  The sounds of cars was gone.  We can hear the strains of a Turkish violin, and clapping.

We climbed the trail to a small pavilion.  An old man sat under it, safe from the rain, sawing at his Turkish violin with earnest, businesslike concentration.  Arranged around him was a Turkish tour group, laughingly beginning a half-remembered folk dance, linking arms, kicking up their feet, smiling.  And like that we were back on the main road, entered again into the artery of tourism.  The path curved around the mountainside, and we followed it to the monastary.

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Rooms carved into the rock.  Photo by Jenna Staff.

The rooms were bare.  The windows were empty.  There were no beds, no bibles, no monks.  The complex stood as a symbol of something that had once lived, but was by now dead enough to be merely history.  The monastery had been abandoned in the bloody chaos of the First World War, after the area had been conquered by the Russians, and then the Russians had revolted and become Communists, and then the Communists pulled out and were replaced by the new Republican government of the great general Ataturk.

A set of steep stairs led finally to the Rock Church, the center of Sümela.  A facade of frescos stood in the open air, half-faded after the century and a half of rain and wind.

Historical desecration of history.  Photo by Jenna Staff.

As I made it closer, I saw that the fresco had seen better days.  The faces of the prophets and Jesus were scored away.  The paint had faded.  The whole bottom half of the frescos was scratched with thousands of words of graffiti.  In places the plaster had fallen off in chunks, revealing hints of paint—earlier frescos, now forgotten.

The painting itself was crude.  The figures were stylized and grave.  The buildings were lopsided, colorful, impossible—a Jerusalem of the mind, painted by monks who had never seen Jerusalem, and who had climbed the mountain to get away from buildings, whose faces were all stern and holy, whose colors were bright and unreal.

But then, after a closer look, I saw something.  Some of the graffiti was dated.  1876.  1891.  It was written in cursive Greek and Armenian and Roman letters.  This desecration was itself historical, I realized.  My disgust faded to confusion.

The facade led into a large cave, the whole face of it plastered and painted with huge images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and robe-clad saints with helpful Greek inscriptions next to their faces so you could tell which saint exactly they were.  The figures here were more confident than those outside, and better preserved.

Ceiling Jesus.  Photo by Jenna Staff.

We stood together, me and the other tourists and my friends, wondering at the monks who had long ago made their way up to this holy mountain, and had managed to hold on for a millennium and a half, looking with awe over the same valley as we were, climbing the same rocks, breathing the same air.  I thought of them turning their backs on the diseased cities below them, losing themselves in the forest and the rocks, imagining sometimes that there never had been such things as Emperors or roads or chariots, or their old banal lives.

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The Secret Origin Story Of Secret Origin Stories

A high priestess sworn to celibacy bears a child.   She puts the baby in a basket of rushes sealed with tar, then puts the basket in the river, trusting the waters to deliver her child to his safety--or his fate.  But the child is beloved of the gods.  He will not be forgotten or drowned.  He is discovered in a strange land and raised by parents who are not his own, demonstrating his strength of will and arms.  Only later does he learn his birthright, which delivers him into great power.

Sargon of Akkad demonstrates the power of Mesopotamian beardage

This is the story of the first great king of Mesopotamia, Sargon the Great.  Sargon lived in the 22nd Century BC, and was the first person to unite the warring city states of the fertile crescent under one government.  But this is how it started:

My high priestess mother conceived me, in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid. She cast me into the river which rose over me. The river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, took me as his son and reared me. Akki, the drawer of water, appointed me as his gardener. While I was a gardener, Ishtar granted me her love, and for four and ... years I exercised kingship.

The story sounds familiar, right?  In Exodus, Moses is put into a basket of rushes sealed with pitch and put on the Nile, only to be rescued by the Pharaoh's family.  Only later does he realize his true identity, and the power of his birthright.

And there went a man of the house of Levi, and took to wife a daughter of Levi.  And the woman conceived, and bare a son: and when she saw him that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months.  And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river's brink.  And his sister stood afar off, to wit what would be done to him.  And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river; and her maidens walked along by the river's side; and when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it.  And when she had opened it, she saw the child: and, behold, the babe wept. And she had compassion on him, and said, This is one of the Hebrews' children.

Moses in the Nile

While Sargon is born to a high-status family and raised by a low-status water-drawer, Moses is born to a commoner and raised to be a king.  But besides that, the stories are incredibly similar, even down to the material of the basket, and the method in which the basket was sealed.

This is also one of the origin stories of Romulus and Remus.  According to Plutarch, a young princess is forced to become a Vestal Virgin so that her uncle can secure his grip on local power.

She was, contrary to the established laws of the Vestals, discovered to be with child, and should have suffered the most cruel punishment, had not Antho, the king's daughter, mediated with her father for her; nevertheless, she was confined, and debarred all company, that she might not be delivered without the king's knowledge. In time she brought forth two boys, of more than human size and beauty, whom Amulius, becoming yet more alarmed, commanded a servant to take and cast away; this man some call Faustulus, others say Faustulus was the man who brought them up. He put the children, however, in a small trough, and went towards the river with a design to cast them in; but, seeing the waters much swollen and coming violently down, was afraid to go nearer, and, dropping the children near the bank, went away. The river overflowing, the flood at last bore up the trough, and, gently wafting it, landed them on a smooth piece of ground, which they now call Cermanes, formerly Germanus, perhaps from Germani, which signifies brothers.

Later, after becoming super awesome and renowned, they are reunited with their grandfather, and the truth is revealed.

"Formerly, then, we (for we are twins) thought ourselves the sons of Faustulus and Larentia, the king's servants; but since we have been accused and aspersed with calumnies, and brought in peril of our lives here before you, we hear great things of ourselves, the truth of which my present danger is likely to bring to the test. Our birth is said to have been secret, our fostering and nurture in our infancy still more strange; by birds and beasts, to whom we were cast out, we were fed, by the milk of a wolf, and the morsels of a woodpecker, as we lay in a little trough by the side of the river. The trough is still in being, and is preserved, with brass plates round it, and an inscription in letters almost effaced; which may prove hereafter unavailing tokens to our parents when we are dead and gone." Numitor, upon these words, and computing the dates by the young man's looks, slighted not the hope that flattered him, but considered how to come at his daughter privately (for she was still kept under restraint), to talk with her concerning these matters.

After this, the two boys go on to found Rome.

The discovery of Romulus and Remus

This is also the story of a baby named Kal-El from the planet Krypton.  His planet doomed, Kal-El's father puts him into a space age basket of rushes--a rocket--and sends him to a strange land to face his fate.  He is found, renamed Clark Kent, and grows up to be Superman.

With only minor variations in the future occupation of the child (conqueror extraordinaire; defender of truth, justice and the American Way) this could be a modern reboot of the story of Sargon the Great.

Sargon's story was pressed into clay tablets over four thousand years ago, and ever since we have been re-telling it in countless new ways.  It is the origin-story version of  a jazz standard: a recognized heroic riff which generations of enterprising myth-makers use as a comfortable base for their individual genius.  But what about the origin story of Sargon has touched us so much that we have been repeating it to each other for four millennia or more, with variations both major and minor?  Perhaps it's that a hidden parentage explains the greatness of some men so well.  Why are these people marked out from the mass of history, while most are not?  Well they're not from around here.  They are special.

But I suspect that the popularity of this story has a deeper resonance.  When we become adults, we are all a little bit like Sargon.  We set out on the world, lost and alone, without the familiar marks of our family to distinguish us.  We face trials and challenges, all in hopes that someone will recognize our birthright, and we find some place that we truly belong.

I was inspired by this post by the Ancient World Podcast, episode 3.  Listen to it if you are curious about the whole story of Sargon the Great.

The Shifts

Harry Byrd Senior:  Racist, Democrat, Budget-Slasher

In 1963, the United States Congress was deadlocked.  A tax cut was being held up in the Senate Finance Committee.  Advocates of the bill insisted that it was essential for the nation's prosperity.  Opponents of the bill countered that it would lead to profligacy, bankruptcy, and ruin.  Budget hawks insisted on bloody cuts to government programs.  Young college educated know-it-alls dreamt of a vigorous government and the huge budgets that went with it.  There were calls to close military bases.  There were also calls for war.

These issues are familiar to news-reading Americans today.  Looking at them we automatically plop them in one of two camps--liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican.  The strange thing is that in 1963 the ideological lines were drawn slightly differently than they are today, leading to a Twilight Zone politics, a politics in which the words liberal and conservative and Democrat and Republican do not mean what we assume them to mean.

The 1963 tax cut bill was the policy of liberal darling John Kennedy, thought up of by Kennedy's brain-trust of young intellectual firebrands.  The thinking behind the 1963 tax cut was that cutting taxes would lead to more economic growth, and so raise revenue.  This is the same argument used to defend tax cuts by conservatives today.  The only difference is that Kennedy's bill cut top tax rates from a little over 90% to 70%.  Today they stand around 30% (or 15% from capital gains.)

The opponent of the tax cut bill was the conservative Senator Harry Byrd Senior, the chairman of the Finance Committee.  Byrd was an arch Virginia conservative.  He wanted limited government, was wary of racial equality, and was one of the most powerful Democrats in the Senate.  He insisted that the government cut its budget below 100 billion dollars before he release his bill from committee.  Many of these cuts would come from slashing defense spending and closing military bases.

On one side, you have Eastern smarty-pants college-educated young men, who want tax cuts.  On the other side, you have a bigoted southern military base-closing deficit hawk, who fights these tax cuts.  Both sides are members of the Democratic party.

When we look at politics today, it seems that the policies associated with each ideology are necessary to it:  that conservatives have always and must be against wide-ranging social programs, raising taxes and protecting the environment; and liberals have always and must be against war, tax cuts and racial discrimination.  But in the massive tangle of politics and history, ideologies change.  They change slowly, usually so slowly no one can notice them, but if you look out from the broad view of decades and centuries, you see that many of the political positions that seem so entrenched and certain are merely contingent--they have changed and will change and must change.  Ever so slowly, history drags us on, and what it means to be who we are shifts--so slowly we only notice it after it's done.