Old Friends in High Places

The Road to the Highlands

A few weeks ago we attended a gathering of international faculty here at Bilkent. Small talk shifted to what everyone was planning for Kurban Bayramı, a.k.a. the Feast of the Sacrifice (in Arabic it's called Eid al-Adha). The holiday honors Abraham's religious devotion, immortalized by his willingness to sacrifice his son upon God's command. Interesting side note: Muslims believe it was Ishmael, Abraham's firstborn, whose head was on the block that day, while Christians say it was Isaac. Thankfully, both religions agree that a lamb was ultimately substituted for the boy when Abraham called God's bluff.

In any case, schools are closed and everyone gets a long weekend to celebrate. Traditionally this entails butchering a goat or a lamb, keeping a third of the meat for your own feast, sharing a third with family, and giving a third away to the poor. Less fundamentalist families simply donate food to charity and get together for a big meal like the American Thanksgiving (children often get candy and small gifts as well) but a substantial number of devout Muslims still adhere to the old practice. This can get pretty messy in a city of over four million people, so in urban areas the butchering is done by professionals, often in mobile slaughter houses that station themselves all over the city and lend the holiday an unintended touch of the macabre. Technically speaking, it's now illegal in Turkey to do your own killing and cleaning for Bayram, but we saw dozens of instances in rural areas that prove that law is not strictly enforced.

Unsurprisingly, given their love of animals, Callie and Ella were horrified by the whole idea, and don't eat lamb at all (except when they don't realize what they're eating) so we figured it would be best to get out of town. At the faculty picnic, we mentioned that we were planning to visit the Phrygian Highlands. Despite their collective years of working in Turkey, few people within earshot had even heard of the area, and those that knew of it just shook their heads and laughed at the kind of place archaeologists (and their spouses) consider a vacation spot.



Phrygia was a fairly large kingdom in west-central Anatolia that probably reached its peak in the late 8th BC. It is most famous for two of its legendary kings: Gordias, whose namesake knot was cut by Alexander the Great, and Midas of the golden touch. The Phrygian Highlands are a distinct subregion within the western part of the kingdom, roughly delimited by the triangle formed by Eskişehir, Afyon, and Kütahya. The area is unnervingly remote, sparsely inhabited, and perfectly haunted.

I first visited the Highlands with Lizzie fourteen years ago, during the year we lived in Athens and she attended the American School of Classical Studies.
It was a bus trip, organized by the school and rigidly scheduled. Even within those awful confines, my mind was blown to smithereens. Imagine a place with all the geological beauty and grandeur of Zion National Park but add in some of most enchanting, mysterious, and least frequented archaeological sites in the ancient world. That one visit to the Highlands left such an impression on me that fourteen years later I find myself writing a novel that is largely an effort to process the experience and do justice to this landscape. It goes without saying that Lizzie is both the spark and fuel of my fascination; she's been back three times without me while researching her own book. She did all the driving, all the talking, and makes one hell of a guide.

While we were excited to share our love of the Highlands with our daughters, we were both worried that things might have changed in the intervening years. Turkey is in the midst of a big economic push and, as in many other countries, decision makers seem more concerned with promoting tourism than good taste or proper preservation. The spirit of a place too often gets trampled in the process of that adulteration. We were thrilled to find that very little had changed; the Highlands are still raw, pure, and overlooked. The holiday timing of our trip practically insured we'd have the sites to ourselves. For me, this is everything. I need solitude and silence to grok a special place. I find it impossible with tourist hordes and would rather skip a destination if crowds are an unavoidable component. Fortunately, all it usually takes is a little extra effort to leave most people behind. The Highlands are a perfect example.

Yazılıkaya

OK, enough preamble. We rented a little diesel Hyundai and drove three and a half hours west/southwest out of Ankara to Yazılıkaya, a village out of time that sits in the shadow of Midas Kenti (or Midas City). "City" is a bit of a misnomer here, as the site is more of a cult sanctuary than a simple settlement. Cars are no longer allowed in the village, at least according to new signage, so we parked outside and took a walk through its atmospheric streets where every building is made with mud and timber framing. It's almost impossible to overstate the awe I felt when I first caught sight of the so-called Midas Monument, an elaborately patterned rockcut facade that rises six stories and recreates a pedimented temple on a red stone wall. The girls were equally struck and raced forward to climb into the niche where a statue of Cybele, the Mother Goddess, likely stood. A dedicatory inscription in Old Phrygian containing the word "Mida" has long been interpreted to mean the monument was carved to honor King Midas, but Phrygian is still poorly understood. It's possible that the word is a epithet for Cybele. Within a stone's throw from the Midas Monument is Kırkgöz, the Cave of Forty Eyes, a fantastically pockmarked outcrop with spaces for the living and the dead. The girls wasted no time in turning Kırkgöz into a playground for their imagination. 

Those two features alone are worth the trip, but they are just the beginning. Midas City is an archaeological wonderland that we took half the day to explore. It has dozens of rockcut tombs, deep dark cisterns, ancient staircases, hidden inscriptions, mysterious thrones, step monuments, zoomorphic outcrops, and much more. It was hysterical to see the two other visitors that day arrive, take a quick photo of the monument, and then leave within five minutes. We shared the humor with the mayor of the town, who also acts as a sort of docent for the site. I wish we had taken a picture of him, because he was a lovely man, proud of his home and appreciative of those who honor it with careful attention.

Later that day, as we made our way to Yuntas Gazligol Kaplica Isletmesi, the historic hotspring-fed hamam/hotel (with the tiniest bathrooms and in-room kitchens known to man) that would serve as our lodging, Lizzie insisted that we stop in the small village of Kümbet and drive up through its winding, narrow streets to see the Arslan Kaplan Kumbeti. I have to admit I was a little fried by that point. We'd been at it all day, had two more days of sightseeing ahead of us (that would take us to the equally amazing sites of Arslantaş, Arslankaya, and Aizanoi) and the girls were already losing their enthusiasm at the idea of trekking to yet another rockcut tomb. As much as I was intrigued by the idea of a tomb existing smack dab in the middle of a village, I was also worried about getting stuck. The village "roads" were nothing but deeply rutted dirt tracks and they went straight up. Ever since all this ISIS craziness started, I've had a (somewhat) irrational fear of getting ambushed by wacko fundamentalists. The sight of a woman driving (with a man for a passenger, no less) is weird enough in the rural regions of Turkey to draw the attention of every single villager. A rental car full of Westerners with Ankara plates takes the cake. My anxiety wasn't exactly alleviated when we made a wrong turn and hit a dead end, but Lizzie calmly turned around and found her way. I am so glad she did.

A commonly held belief posits that people living in rural, pre-industrialized societies must have experienced the passage of time differently than we modern ADHD folk do. How else to explain their ability to undertake Herculean tasks with humble nonchalance, whether those be hand crafting timeless monuments from solid rock or tilling a field with a donkey and a stone-age plow.

A strange and haunting proof of this theory was provided by the old man whose modest home abutted the tomb in Kümbet. Feeling self-conscious about our intrusion, I tossed him a sincere merhaba as we passed by. The greeting, at least when I use it, is as often met by a hostile stare as a friendly response, so I was surprised to see him spring forward and follow us. He gave me a long searching look when he caught up to us that I ascribed to the simple coincidence of us wearing a similar outfit, but when he let loose with a flurry of emotional speech I knew something else was up. I apologized and told him I didn't speak Turkish but that didn't seem to phase him one bit. He just kept talking, getting more and more animated. He offered me a cigarette. At several points he reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. The gesture was so brotherly that I ended up doing the same, though I had no idea what he was saying. Fortunately, I had Lizzie there to translate.

If everyone has a superpower, mine is the ability to look exactly like someone else. Evidently I don't have just one doppelgänger, though. I have hundreds of them. I couldn't begin to recount the number of times I have been approached by someone who thinks they know me when they really don't. Sometimes this is funny (I'll admit to occasionally playing along, when the mood strikes), sometimes it is extremely annoying (who wants to look like everyone?), sometimes it is both (like the time a completely spaced out dude at the urinal next to me at the Fillmore West absolutely insisted I was who he said I was), but until this weekend it has never happened in a foreign country and it has never touched me on a deep emotional level. This old guy really truly thought I was a fellow he knew from when he worked at the air force base in Incirlik, half his life ago. The trippy part was he appeared oblivious to the paradox that he had aged but I hadn't. He asked my name twice, just to be sure. He got so choked up talking about this guy that I kind of wished I was him. We chatted a little while longer. I told him how beautiful his homeland was (I can say that much, at least). He bemoaned the general state of affairs, with all the young people moving away. He talked about the terrible things happening in Syria and Iraq. He seemed to want to keep talking forever. In the end I shook his hand with as much sincerity and warmth as I could, wished him good afternoon and happy holidays, and went on my way. I never did explore the tomb, but hopefully I made a friend in Kümbet, in this life and the last.

(Click the link below to see the entire photo album.)

The Phrygian Highlands