What Survives the Flood

Armenian Gold

Akiva Sanders — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 14:07:43 GMT

We climb into the tomb.

Panting, soaked with sweat from the steep ascent, our eyes need a moment to adjust. Gradually, the scene comes into focus. Fragments of stone cover the floor. The carved benches that once held 2,000-year-old skeletons have been smashed to bits. Someone is searching for something.

They won’t let the dead rest.

~*~

Most places that survived the 20th century are full of ghosts. My ancestors are among the many that inhabit Turkey.

My grandmother’s parents were from Kırkkilise. It’s a sleepy small town in Thrace, where Turkey, Bulgaria, and Greece meet. Today there’s a replica of the house Atatürk grew up in on the town square. The original is across the border in Thessaloniki, Greece, where my grandfather’s family was from.

It was a region wracked by the worst kinds of atrocities during the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, when the Ottoman Empire was collapsing and the borders of Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey were first being drawn. Kırkkilise was controlled by all three countries between 1912 and 1923. Each change of hands was a catastrophe for residents who did not speak the language or profess the religion of the conquerors.

My family was Jewish, neither Greek nor Bulgarian nor Turkish.

The dust had settled by the 1930s. Turkey had changed the town’s name from Kırkkilise (40 churches) to Kırklareli (the place of forties). The Bulgarians were forcibly removed in 1913, the Greeks in 1923. Most of the Jews had left too — including my great-grandparents. They were replaced by a flood of Muslim refugees forced out of neighboring countries.

But the minorities that remained were still distressing to Turkish authorities who dreamed of building a nation united in language, history, and values.

On June 14, 1934, the Turkish parliament passed the “resettlement law,” mandating the destruction of non-Turkish Thracian communities through forced relocation and assimilation.

On July 3, riots broke out in Kırklareli to enforce the law. Jewish property was destroyed and bands roved the streets searching for women to rape.

While doing research on my ancestors I was relieved to discover that my great-grandmother had escaped the riots.

She had died in Istanbul on July 1.

~*~

My brother and I visited Kırklareli in 2022. On the street where our great-grandfather once owned a tavern, we asked one bartender after another how we might be able to see the town’s synagogue. Finally, one directed us to the gas station down the street owned by the synagogue’s caretaker.

The caretaker opened the doors of the synagogue. It was dark and dusty, but everything was organized and in good repair. Most of the scrolls and books had been taken to Istanbul, but the chairs, the lamps, the podium, and the ark stood as they always had, waiting to be filled again with light and chatter. The caretaker led us to a back room. Its walls were covered with yellowed photographs and newspaper cuttings.

“This was the old man whose children moved him to their apartment in Istanbul, but he kept sneaking back here every time he left to get milk or cigarettes.”

The newspapers read: “Last 18 Jews in Kırklareli.” “Last 12.” “Last 8.”

Now, only the caretaker and his mother remain.

~*~

There’s a way I feel whole during my long research stays in Turkey, reunited with those I lost before I was born — the ones whose names I know but whose voices I never heard. As if the stones of a city can absorb a voice’s echo. I certainly miss the feeling when I’m somewhere else.

But as someone living in a now-foreign place that was once home, I am often lonely when I’m there. So I rely on some of my time-tested strategies: Go on walks long enough that you are part of the blood pumping through the city’s arteries. Go to the synagogue to hear the old people laugh. Hang around in bars until someone talks to you.

The last strategy led me to “Mustafa,” a middle-aged bartender at a fish restaurant on the Bosphorus. I was sitting alone at the bar, sipping my way through one beer after another, watching the music videos flashing on the TV.

We connected over the music. He told me he was from Urfa, trying to get by in Istanbul to feed his family.

Urfa is known all over the Middle East as the birthplace of Turkey’s most popular and bombastic singers. In antiquity, it was the capital of a kingdom nestled between the Roman and Persian Empires. At its center lies a cave that was the birthplace of Abraham, according to local lore. Half the city was destroyed in 1915 when the local Armenian community violently resisted deportation.

Mustafa grew up as a shepherd, and his brother was still in the family business back in Urfa. I said I was interested in coming along some time.

Shepherding is an interest of mine — learning to spend a long day outside, to develop a private language with another species — and I join whenever I can. It also has the cachet of Abraham and Moses and King David. He said he would arrange it.

I mentioned I was an archaeologist, and our conversation changed immediately. He leaned in and started showing me pictures of strange rocks on his phone that his brother had found while following the sheep. Stones carved with crosses and snakes and one-word inscriptions. I was entranced.

In archaeology, the first step when trying to understand the history of an area is surface survey. A team of three or four drive around the landscape for about a month in a jeep with a GPS receiver, a camera, and a notebook, recording anything that strikes their educated fancy and politely cross-examining locals.

But shepherds conduct a surface survey every day for decades. They know every strange rock, every unnaturally shaped mound, every flint blade scatter. No one can claim to know a landscape better. So I was delighted to see the spoils of Mustafa’s brother’s many expeditions.

And then came the question I eventually learned to expect: “Does it mean that there’s gold?”

~*~

A fever for treasure hunting has swept across Turkey. You can find it everywhere once you know to look for it. Ancient rock-cut tombs and sanctuaries smashed with sledgehammers or dynamited to bits. Treasure-hunting videos on Instagram and Facebook. The incessant questions when someone hears you’re an archaeologist. And the text messages: An image of a rock carving and a request to confirm that it is, in fact, a clue from National Treasure.

Like stone-quarrying, treasure-hunting activities concentrate in the places that are most awe-inspiring to look at — the places that scream out to everyone who passes: “There is something special here!”

Something archaeologists and officials are hiding, threatening you not to tell.

At first, the absurdity was amusing. I told a senior archaeologist about what was happening and he became very stern. It’s a serious problem, he said, and if you correspond with any of these people you can be thrown in jail.

And then I learned why treasure hunters assume there is treasure to be found in the first place: There is a belief that Armenians, when they were forced to march into the desert in 1915, buried their prized possessions and left clues, hoping to find them when they returned.

They did not return.

~*~

In Central and Eastern Turkey, the exile of the Armenian population left a gaping hole. Empty villages and churches are hard to miss in the landscape.

But an openhearted, official recognition of what happened never came. In the century since, foreigners have used the Armenians’ dispossession as a justification for humiliating military occupation, executions, and assassinations aimed at the Turkish state. Each of these events felt like an existential threat, reopening the wounds of citizens who had themselves fled their homes in the Balkans or the Caucasus even as the Armenians were being driven out of Anatolia.

In response, the Turkish government has made broadcasting its narrative of “The Events of 1915” a top priority. Toeing the party line in public is a prerequisite of good citizenship.

The hole the Armenians left has festered.

Some know that they have Armenian ancestry and whisper it to whoever stops long enough to listen. Some have an inkling of what their grandparents did and shudder when they hear 1915 mentioned.

But all know that the place isn’t the same without them.

Most readers understand what it means to live in a place once inhabited by communities that were driven out by the very people who made it a home designated for us.

I certainly do.

We maintain a relationship with those driven-out people, even as it is warped and twisted by time and distance.

In public, we might explain what happened. We might mourn the tragedy that it had to be this way, strike our chests for the crimes of our ancestors. We might apportion some blame to the exiles. Say that they were too dangerous to stay, that our ways of life were simply incompatible. That they would have done the same to us if they had the chance. These comments may each have some basis in reality.

But they fail to address our deeper feelings. In truth, we romanticize them, we fetishize them. We yearn for them more than we care to admit.

We fear that they belong here more than we do. That they might have some right to claim what was taken from them: our comfort, our homes, our identities.

And we envy them because they still live in this place’s sepia-toned, enchanted past, while we are imprisoned in its sanitized, pessimistic present.

Today’s Turkey is filled with skyscrapers, video ads, and a desperate hunger for self-understanding. Perhaps the land’s history has the answers. Dreamers across the political spectrum hope to find them there.

But the ghosts of the Armenians have subsumed every remnant of antiquity. Treasure hunters search for their presence in every ruin and carving, no matter how old.

The ghosts have come to stand in not only for what is missing in the present, but for everything that is seductive, mysterious, and forbidden about the past.

It’s a treasure that will never be recovered.

~*~

In two weeks: Dragging the monuments away.

Previous: Monuments and Quarries.

Start from the Beginning: Watching a City Drown

^{All ideas shared here were developed jointly in conversation.}

Further Reading:

Haker, Once upon a Time Jews Lived in Kırklareli (Gorgias Press, 2010) — The book that guided me in the search for my Kırklareli family.

An article from Daily Sabah discussing the confrontations between treasure hunters and military police.

Monuments and Quarries

Akiva Sanders — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 14:09:23 GMT

Every stone comes from somewhere. Every marble countertop, Michelangelo sculpture, and particle of concrete was cut from a rock face. A million-year, unmoving witness chiseled off, pulled away, loaded and shipped.

A place turned into a material.

It is perilous, backbreaking work. In antiquity, large stones were often the heaviest objects to move long distances. Each time, hundreds of laborers pushed their bodies to the limit, fearing an even-worse punishment or expecting a handsome reward from the reigning king.

Sometimes, before the work was done, the unimaginable occurred—there was no longer a king to pay for it.

~*~

Hattushili III was Muwatalli II’s brother and successor on the throne. They fought side by side at the dispiriting Battle of Kadesh. On the way home, while his brother was measuring out his first rock-relief at Sirkeli Höyük, Hattushili was falling in love with a woman from a neighboring town. Her name was Puduhepa. She became one of the most powerful queens of the ancient world.

As queen, she gave order to the realm of the thousand Hittite gods. She placed the storm god Teshub and the sun-goddess of Arinna at the top, imagining a divine parallel to the Hittite king and queen.

Her son, Tudhaliya IV, carved their images into stone all over the empire. Of all the Hittite kings, Tudhaliya was by far the most prolific stone carver. He was the one to etch the Hittite pantheon into the rock folds of Yazılıkaya.

There, an endless procession of gods climbs along the curving stone towards a marriage ceremony: Teshub and the Sun Goddess facing one another, arms outstretched, love in their eyes, standing on the bowed heads of lesser gods.

Tudhaliya was also the last successful Hittite king. The empire crumbled under the reign of his son Šuppiluliuma II. In 1190 BCE, Hattusha was sacked. It’s the last we hear from the Hittites.

Šuppiluliuma had been trying to outdo his father by working on the largest sculpture of Teshub that had ever been made. The stonemasons were carving it in place at the Fasıllar quarry when news arrived that the empire was no more.

Perhaps they put their chisels and hammers to new use defending their homes from the roving bands that replaced it. Or maybe they used them to stake a claim on a temple’s hoarded wealth, no longer protected by the king’s authority. In any case, they abandoned the half-finished Teshub in the quarry.

Instead of becoming a towering king of the gods, dragged away to a temple somewhere, it remained part of the place, an accidental living rock-relief, a monument to the hubris of a vanished empire.

~*~

When SaraNoa and I arrived at the quarry, the sun was just disappearing over the lichen-covered cliffs. There it lay, the immense sculpture of Teshub, stretched out on its back, half-carved, with its right arm raised and its left foot stepping confidently forward, just as the masons had left it at the dawn of a new kingless world. Exhausted from a long day’s journey, we collapsed into its calm, lifeless embrace. We looked up to admire what was left of the twilight blues and magentas.

Above us, on the vertical face of the quarry we could just make out a solitary witness — a relief of an archway and a striding horse, watching over the lying Teshub.

It was carved under the Roman Empire, after Teshub had been alone in the quarry for a thousand years. We returned in the morning to document.

The horse was carved in the memory of a young man. The inscription reads: “Lucianus, who died before marriage.” In his honor, chariot races were held around the stillborn statue. The charioteers knew nothing of Teshub or Šuppiluliuma II or even the Hittite Empire. Yet the monument that was abandoned before its birth lived again, as a memorial to a man who died before growing old.

~*~

Many of the most beautiful places on earth still exist because they are inconvenient for agriculture or habitation. The same cliffs and soaring peaks that lift our souls are unsuited for the straight furrows and street corners that organize our lives. So empires claim them as their own. Kings carve their faces into the cliffs. Bureaucrats cordon off the peaks as national property.

Yet these awe-inspiring places are not entirely immune to the appetites of civilized life. It is precisely the bare rock faces that have so much visual power where stone, minerals, and metals are most accessible for extraction. The mountains that escape the surveyor’s ruler often fall victim to the miner’s pickaxe.

This leads to an awkward situation. The glorious front end and ruthless back end of empire — the monuments and the mines — often inhabit the same places.

National parks like Yosemite are littered with mineshafts. The closest commercial quarry to Mount Rushmore lies less than a mile from the presidents’ heroic faces.

As SaraNoa and I traveled across Turkey, we repeatedly stumbled upon these jarring juxtapositions. In some cases, industrial quarrying operations had eaten entire mountaintops, stopping a mere foot or two away from an ancient Phrygian rock-cut tomb.

But sometimes, as it did at Fasıllar, this volatile overlap produces a scene whose poignance is undeniable.

~*~

Like Šuppiluliuma II, the early emperors of Rome had an appetite for grandiosity in stone. It was how they quieted their nagging doubts that their wars weren’t so just, they didn’t in fact have a right to rule the world, and their empire was just a flash in the pan. Everyone knew the emperor was no god. A military coup proved it at least once every generation. But maybe people would forget if there were enough temples carved in the emperor’s name.

Augustus once boasted that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble. The empire that followed him left marble cities across the Mediterranean coast as its calling card for the ages.

One of the most monumental was Ephesus. Its crowning jewel was the 118-pillared Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The city was situated on Turkey’s west coast among the marble quarries that provided the raw material for the empire. The nearest one was along the main road into town, just on the other side of Mount Pion.

It had been a rock-cut sanctuary to the Earth Goddess before the stone extraction crews started chipping away.

Early Christians called Rome’s bluff. They said that there was a true global empire where your rank doesn’t depend on how much wealth you extract, but how much you give away. It made sense to enough Romans that they became a real threat to the whole imperial project. So Rome persecuted them. When that didn’t work, the emperors learned to justify their rule in Christian language.

By the 5th century CE, most of Rome’s marble cities, built to be eternal, had become quarries themselves. A new generation with different values had already begun to drag away their stones to use in farmhouses and fortresses. The Temple of Artemis had been abandoned. Graffiti proudly declares that the image of Artemis was desecrated and replaced with a cross. According to medieval legend, its pillars were shipped to Constantinople for the construction of Hagia Sophia, that monument to a new Christian Rome.

In 431 CE, Emperor Theodosius II convened a council in Ephesus to decide imperially endorsed doctrine on the day’s most pressing religious debates. They were discussing if Jesus was part god and part human or all god and all human or somewhere in between. There were few discussions related to the things we might credit religion with: a sense of belonging, kindness to others, a disregard for the illusion of wealth. And yet the council was a defining moment in the history of global Christianity.

It tore the Christian community apart. The council condemned and defrocked the popular theologian Nestorius, and his followers tried to blend in or fled the empire. The council reconvened 18 years later. The decisions taken at the second council stood for only two years until they were repudiated by the next emperor.

In the marketplace of Ephesus, theology and religious persecution were the topics of the day. There was widespread doubt over the empire’s drastic actions. Just as marble monuments couldn’t convince the people of the empire’s legitimacy, neither could arcane debates.

They needed a miracle.

It came from the abandoned quarry on the other side of Mount Pion.

According to legend, a farmer decided to reuse the quarry as a shed for his cows. There, as at Fasıllar, he found a relic frozen in time. Seven Christians had fled from the persecutions of the Emperor Decius 250 years earlier and were sleeping until the farmer woke them. They headed into town, trying to buy a meal with centuries-old coins.

The quarry became famous immediately, and the miracle was recorded as historical fact within a generation. Pious Christians carved a new church into the stone that was soon overflowing with new rock-cut tombs of the newly dead, whose final wish was to be close to the sleeping place of the early saints.

The story was retold over the centuries, by Christians and Muslims alike, and pilgrims have visited ever since.

At the very moment when the built-to-last monuments of Ephesus were becoming quarries, one of its quarries became an enduring monument.

We had journeyed to the quarry to find the origins of the marble facades of Ephesus. What we found was a palpably miraculous place. An ancient sanctuary violated by stonecutters to feed an insatiable empire, then recognized as a sanctuary once again when the empire exhausted itself.

It’s the very definition of a miracle – a reversal of fate at the moment of greatest helplessness. The restoration of a dignity that was taken for granted and exploited. It’s a story that reappears everywhere from the Odyssey to the Psalms to the Arabian Nights. Here, evidence of this reversal was carved clearly into the time-worn stones.

As we neared the place, we entered a forest of trees covered with the rags of pilgrims. Each one expresses a desperate hope that this sanctuary-turned-quarry-turned-sanctuary would reverse something in their own lives — an illness, a family dispute, a crisis of faith.

~*~

Next: Armenian Gold

Previous: Intimacy and Triumph.

Start from the Beginning: Watching a City Drown

^{All ideas shared here were developed jointly in conversation.}

Further Reading:

Rojas and Sergueenkova, “Traces of Tarhuntas: Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Interaction with Hittite Monuments” (Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 27.2, 2014) – Returning to the Hittite reliefs over the millennia.

Miltner, Das Coemeterium der sieben Schläfer (Österreichisches Archäologisches Institut, 1937) – The original excavation report of the Cave of Seven Sleepers, Ephesus.

Intimacy and Triumph

Akiva Sanders — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:56:42 GMT

The Hoover Dam is an engineering marvel. It powers the bright lights of Los Angeles and quenches the limitless thirst of Las Vegas, those incarnations of American hubris.

It was built as a monument. Its Art Deco towers stand triumphant over the wide water of Lake Mead. Between bronze reliefs, plaques honor the 21,000 workers who labored on it and the 96 who died. Its crest is a walkway for tourists to marvel as if they were at the rim of the Grand Canyon. The visitor exclaims: “We have conquered nature and surpassed it.”

It was built at a time when the mastery of humans over our world was still in doubt, when we still had something to prove. Today, it’s hard to imagine the thrill of first believing that we might be capable of dominating nature. From the cradle, our generation was taught to take this power for granted, and to be disgusted with its excesses.

Newer dams are built to look as inconspicuous as 50 million tons of steel and concrete could possibly be. We rely on them, but we’re ashamed of what they say about us.

We are sorry that the dams around Niagara Falls have tamed half of the water’s force. We write laws to protect rivers and lakes against the worst of our own exploitation. We turn the industrial harbors at the center of our cities into shoreline walking paths.

But it’s hard to give up any control. We are still afraid to swim in the rivers we have cleaned. The manicured lawns along the harbor paths spark no enchantment in our hearts. Meanwhile, theologies of a lost state of nature dominate all sides of the political conversation.

We ache for a different relationship with the water — one of familiarity, not domination.

Not so long ago, the roles were reversed. The life-force and unpredictability of water was the realm of the gods. It’s why so many ancient myths, omens, and incantations revolve around rain, floods, and wells.

All these works place the power over water squarely in the divine world, but they contain a desperate hope that if we do something the exact right way — butter the gods up just enough or build a relationship with the right demon or wash our feet just right before pouring a libation — we can trick the gods into signing some of this power over to us.

When Medieval travelers came upon Eflatun Pınar, a strange, ancient rock carving around a spring among the wheat fields of Central Anatolia, this is what they thought it was: a dam built to protect the wealthy city of Konya from the fury of floods, sealed with magical runes by Plato, whom local legend remembered as a miracle worker from Baghdad.

The monument wasn’t a dam at all. It was actually built by the Hittites in the 13^th century BCE, 800 years before Plato was born, to fill a very different need.

~*~

The Hittite kings were without peers. It hadn’t always been the case; in the early days, their ancestors competed with other warlords for dominance over the rocky Anatolian Plateau. But by the 13^th century BCE, those days were long gone. At least in public, the supremacy of the Hittite king was unquestioned. Those around him addressed him as “my sun-god.” The people of the kingdom were his servants, and the punishment for a presumptuous servant was the death of their entire family. If a king found a stray hair in his washbasin, the water carrier would be thrown in a river.

Fear made any intimacy with the king impossible.

There were other kings in Late Bronze Age Babylonia, Egypt, and Assyria. They sent letters back and forth, but they spoke different languages and rarely met in person. Besides, the correspondence was too public and too formal to be called friendship.

For that, the Hittite kings had to look to another plane of existence. Someone, out there, to finally speak plainly with.

And so, they tried to talk to the gods.

The gods answered, but only in riddles — in the flight of birds and the slithering of snakes. These messages were hard to trust. The kings often asked the same question again and again. The answer was different every time.

So the kings looked for a more direct connection. At first, they went for breadth, speed-dating every god whose reputation came across their path.

Every time they conquered a new group of people, the kings learned the names of their deities and built temples for them in Hattusha, their capital. Their empire became known as “the land of a thousand gods.” By the 13th century BCE, the metropolis of Hattusha, one of the world’s largest, was a city no longer. It was an endless collection of temples.

The temple rituals were thrilling. They included acrobats, tambourines, and flutes. There were wrestling competitions and comedic skits, maybe even public sex. But these festivities did not create the closeness the kings craved.

They believed that there was a divine realm in the watery place under the earth, and they began to search for a door to that world in every rock crevice, spring, and pond.

Hattusha was filled with such openings: a hidden tunnel under the Upper Town gate, a vast pool built among the temples, an artificial cave, every inch engraved with Luwian hieroglyphs, a series of rock crevices at Yazılıkaya, just outside the city, carved with the thousand gods of Hatti.

This was the true original purpose of Eflatun Pınar. Not a dam to confront the water, but a monumental gateway to approach it — to talk and to listen.

The water still bubbles in front of the watchful eyes of those stone gods, worn smooth by many patient years of coaxing us inside. Picnickers and stocking knitters recline against the sides of the pool. How could Medieval visitors have missed its intimacy?

The Hittites only began carving into the bare rock faces of Anatolia in the final century before the empire collapsed. But the carvings remained long after the Hittite armies went home and the tribute stopped flowing. In the centuries that followed, nostalgia-seekers and dreamers continued to visit them, admiring their dignified solitude and whispering rumors of the great kings who had carved them.

Centuries later, when Iron Age warlords wanted to think of themselves as kings, they added new rock carvings to the old.

The Hittites started a carving tradition that would continue to transform the mountains of Anatolia for over 2,000 years, into the Middle Ages. It would outlast the Assyrians, the conquests of Alexander, the conversion of Rome to Christianity, and the Muslim conquests.

But their meaning changed, somehow. Eflatun Pınar ceased to be a portal to communicate with the watery world and became a wall that demonstrated our power to keep it away.

In 2019, SaraNoa and I set out to experience as many of these rock carvings as we could to understand how this happened. We rented a car and traversed the landscape of monuments for five months, from the breezy seacoast to the stark, towering mountains to the high dusty plateau.

~*~

The first Hittite rock carving was commissioned by King Muwatalli II, just as he returned from the Battle of Kadesh against Egypt’s Ramesses II. It was the greatest stalemate of the Bronze Age, the permanent high-water mark for both empires.

Ramesses had commissioned a rock carving on the nearby coast of Lebanon on his previous campaign in the region. Perhaps Muwatalli was inspired by his encounter with that most prolific of Egyptian stone masons, even as he was disappointed by the end of the steady march of Hittite expansion.

But Muwatalli’s relief does not resemble Ramesses’s strident image, bursting forward, crushing enemy skulls. It’s not on a monumental temple wall or high on a cliff face.

It’s quite hard to find even if you’re looking for it.

Muwatalli stands far beneath the acropolis of Sirkeli Höyük, a city in the Cilician plain, on the road back from Kadesh. The city drew life from the Ceyhan River, which tumbles from the Taurus Mountains, winding its way through the plain to the Mediterranean.

To find Muwatalli, you must balance on a narrow pathway that separates the acropolis cliff from the muddy, reed-filled river. There you stumble upon him, life-sized, eye-level, approaching the water with outstretched arms. He was the king of the largest empire on earth. He held the lives of tens of thousands in his hands.

Yet here he is, approaching the river as a friend. Unassuming, humble, attentive.

~*~

This image remained in the landscape far longer than the king’s authority.

Sirkeli Höyük lies on the old east-west road that traces the Mediterranean coast in the shadow of the Taurus Mountains. By the 4^th century BCE, 900 years after Muwatalli’s death, it was a highway linking bustling mercantile cities, bounded on one side by water and the other by stone. Travelers continued to pass by Muwatalli’s relief, though they had long forgotten his name. The leading families followed his example and carved into the rocks that faced the sea.

In Myra, they carved tombs in the shape of traditional log houses. They started, like Muwatalli, at life-size and close to the ground. Today, you can find them between the branches of orange trees heavy with fruit.

But unlike Muwatalli, these merchants did not feel any lack of friendship. They roamed from town to town alongside thousands of others. Each was searching for a personal advantage — a special bargain, a new market for their wares. They viewed the sea not as a source of solace, but as a life-threatening obstacle to be crossed, with copious treasure on the other side. All to outshine their drinking companions, to have a better story, a brighter necklace, a more striking robe.

In the years just before Alexander’s conquests, one merchant had passed through the Aegean and was impressed by the proud Greek temples he encountered there — straight and tall, simple in form, their crowns engraved with elaborate reliefs of heroes and monsters. He hired Greek stonemasons to make his own resting place in that style, sticking out from the house-tombs that already lined the cliffside.

But this wasn’t enough. He wanted to be higher up the cliff, directly on top of the tombs of his peers.

As we scrambled up the rock face and pulled ourselves into the temple tomb, we discovered that in trying to outdo his friends, the merchant had seized a new attitude towards the landscape itself. The river snaked below us to the broad, shining sea. The merchant and his mason had broken the sweet spell of intimacy and staked a claim on domination.

On the road back to Sirkeli, another necropolis cracks the towering rock face: Adamkayalar, built by a succession of merchant-priests in the decades around 200 BCE, beginning a century after the Myra temple tomb was completed.

The world had changed. By then, Alexander had conquered as far as stories of faraway wealth carried him in his short life. His successors fought for the right to his legacy, a never-ending game of “what would Alexander do,” played out in battles, self-portraits, and construction projects. Ostentation was the only path to survival. Greek-style temples began to crowd the Mediterranean landscape.

At Adamkayalar, not a single carving can be accessed or even seen from the coastal plain. It’s a rocky, arduous journey to the tombs. Even when you get there, the figures tower over you with grotesque, colossal limbs, like over-inflated balloons.

The waves of the sea crash onto the shore far below. It’s hard not to feel the pride of the stonemasons and the tomb-dwellers, to marvel at what they accomplished.

When you are up there, you can see for miles. Centuries of competition with the waves unfold before your eyes. The Hoover Dam, still two millennia in the future, appears as a grandchild with a striking family resemblance.

But it’s hard to see anything beyond the struggle for dominance. You start to forget that another relationship is possible.

One where the lonely masters of the world finally remember what it means to be humble, to be receptive, to be close.

~*~

In two weeks: What we do with the stones when the gods leave.

Previous: Picking Through the Remains.

Start from the Beginning: Watching a City Drown

^{All ideas shared here were developed jointly in conversation.}

Further Reading:

Harmanşah, Place, Memory, and Healing (Routledge, 2015)—the book that inspired many of our rock monument visits.

Sanders and Mark, “Living Rock Monuments and Water in Mediterranean Anatolia: Three Case Studies.” (Contributi e Materiali di Archeologia Orientale XX, 2023) — Our academic paper on competition and changing relationships between monuments and water.

Miller, Royal Hittite Instructions and Related Administrative Texts (Society of Biblical Literature, 2013) — The original texts on the separation between the Hittite kings and everyone else.

Warbinek, “Hittites and Their Oracles: They Believed in Them, Although They Did Not Trust Them” (Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 23, 2022) — Asking the gods the same question again and again.

Picking Through the Remains

Akiva Sanders — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:08:13 GMT

For half a century, an artificial lake has hidden the place where the Euphrates is born from two major tributaries. It’s a tranquil spot to swim at sunset. The trout is perfect. Underneath lie over a hundred villages, holy places, and ancient sites.

The lake was created in 1974, when Turkey built its first hydroelectric dam at Keban. Much of the rainwater that had once flowed from the mountains of Anatolia to nourish the ancient cities of Mesopotamia now stops here.

In 1966, the year construction began, the Turkish archaeological community snapped into action. A team of first-year grad students from Ankara crisscrossed the soon-to-be-flooded valleys of Aşvan and Altınova in jeeps, documenting every old building and strangely shaped mound that impressed them. They printed a pamphlet about what was going to be destroyed and started asking archaeologists from around the world to excavate the mounds they identified.

It was practically an archaeological terra incognita. But work in nearby regions since the 1930s suggested that it might be an important area in the search for the world’s first permanent villages. About a dozen teams answered the call. Many of the oldest generation of Turkish archaeologists still alive today were trained there.

They dug from 1968 to 1974. The water set the deadline.

It was a turbulent time to try to save the past. The hippie trail brought thousands of young Europeans across Turkey in search of transcendent meaning. Leftist and nationalist gangs fought in the streets — violence that would escalate into civil war by the late ’70s. The government lost control of Istanbul for two days in June 1970. In 1972, the mountains surrounding the excavations erupted into open Maoist revolt while teams were digging. Survival handbooks warned foreign students to cut their hair and leave their cannabis at home.

Nevertheless, the first couple years of digging were a burst of excitement. Through continuous visits, cups of coffee and heated conversation in English, German, Italian, and Turkish, the excavators constructed a new 10,000-year chronological framework for the region.

One team borrowed a helicopter and produced the first aerial archaeological photos in Turkey, now a mainstay of any self-respecting excavation. From the air, they photographed waving villagers on the flat roofs of homes that would soon be abandoned.

Expedition directors hired dozens of local farmhands to excavate the mounds as their last act before being driven from their homes by the rising water. Ethnographers photographed the last days of village life.

~*~

Archaeologists often quip that “excavation is destruction.” In order to understand and tell stories of the past, we have to destroy the evidence. We dig through houses and temples and marketplaces that have survived under the ground for thousands of years — disassembling them piece by piece — so that we can reassemble them in our heads. We just have to hope that we documented them perfectly in the process — we only get one chance. Scarred by the strip-mining practices of archaeology’s early years, we usually err on the side of leaving things in the ground for future archaeologists with more advanced methods.

In recent decades, this has become an obsession. Archaeologists now save every ounce of sediment, run it through half a dozen sieves, and pick through the remains under a microscope — tiny bits of eggshell, mouse teeth, debris from sharpening a knife. Entire PhDs are built on the dirt from a few 5x5 meter squares. Many students burn out before they publish.

The result is that digging has become extremely slow. It is harder to understand entire neighborhoods than it was 80 years ago, though we can know much more about an individual room — if the work ever gets finished. At Keban, they didn’t have that luxury.

The Keban excavations held a unique place in this dance between destruction and knowledge. No matter how carefully the teams dug, in 1974 it would all be over. The waters of the reservoir would eat away the sediments of each ancient town, layer by layer, mixing thousands of years of fragments at the bottom. There would be no future archaeologists. So the teams dug faster and wider. Archaeologists excavated far more of the region’s dirt in this 7-year period than in the half-century since.

Of all the teams, the one at Norşuntepe dug the most furiously. Harald Hauptmann, a young German archaeologist from Heidelberg, knew the clock was ticking. Each year, his team stayed longer and dug deeper, anxious to document as much as possible. They worked until snow covered the mound and the earth froze solid. In a few years, they uncovered broad Early Bronze Age neighborhoods — work that would take decades today. And they revealed a monumental palace that swallowed these neighborhoods generation by generation.

Then the water came in 1974. The objects deemed worthy of saving were placed in a new museum in Elâzığ, the provincial capital. The villagers left their homes for Elâzığ or Istanbul. The archaeologists packed up and went downstream to document sites that would be flooded by the next dams: the Karakaya Dam, completed in 1987, and the Atatürk Dam, completed in 1992.

They never got around to publishing most of what they learned during the Keban excavations.

Thousands of pages of daily journals, object registers, plans, drawings, and photographs started collecting dust in university archives in Istanbul, Ankara, Heidelberg, and Chicago as the water wore away at the ancient sites and spoil heaps the teams left behind. As the decades passed, excavators grew old and died. Departments moved buildings. Administrators dumped the piles of notebooks into Bankers Boxes to save space. Pages got lost.

~*~

In 2017, 50 years after the first pickaxes struck the Keban sites, I began my journey across the globe to reopen the boxes.

From the clues that made it into print here and there over the years, I knew they contained something special: the story of the revolutionaries who destroyed a nearby palace — the world’s first — around 3200 BCE. How they remade society from the ground up with no permanent social hierarchies. And how their descendants finally built and expanded the new palace at Norşuntepe 1,000 years later.

For 10 years, I have been piecing this story together. In the process, I have waded through the chaotic archives from five Keban sites, spread across three continents, handwritten in four languages.

By the time I started, only one excavation director was still alive: Harald Hauptmann. I wrote him in April 2018. In May, he sent a single-spaced, five-page letter supporting my work. By August he was dead. I never met him.

But I did spend two summers in Heidelberg squeezing the secrets from the Norşuntepe archives.

I first came to Heidelberg in the summer of 2019. It’s a sweet little town on the slopes of a canyon overlooking the winding Neckar River. Its tranquil beauty inspired Goethe and Hegel. It represented the German spirit to the Nazi intellectuals that crowded its alleys in the 1930s. It’s one of the only towns of its size to escape the Allied bombing raids intact.

When I got there, the department chair greeted me with a warm smile. He was always happy to chat about my research. But he told me I couldn’t visit the archive. A fire marshal needed to be present. Instead, they brought me dozens of photocopied notebooks. Each day, I sat and catalogued every room, every level, every find; each evening, I found myself wandering an old village or ruined castle along the Neckar.

I worked with what I had for three years, but by the summer of 2022 I knew I needed more.

I returned to Germany and insisted on seeing the archive. When I got there I understood why a fire marshal was necessary.

Hauptmann’s former student unlocked a door to a crumbling, decommissioned cancer research lab. Inside, lab benches and cabinets were stuffed with notes, plans, and photographs. But there was a catch: strict estate rules forbade removing — or even moving — a single sheet. So, I photographed each page with my phone, one by one, under a flickering fluorescent light, racing against the clock. This would be my only day there.

I’d spend years sifting through the photos I took that day, wondering which pages had gotten lost when they moved the archive — and which I’d missed in a drawer or crevice where an inopportune shadow happened to fall.

~*~

The previous year, I had been in Istanbul for an extended research stay, immersing myself in the archives of Tepecik, another Keban site. By the summer, I was ready to put together what I had learned and go back to writing. But there was one last thing I had to do in Turkey: visit the reservoir.

I needed to clear my visit with the relevant authorities. I budgeted a long day for a dozen cups of tea and my endearing, hesitating Turkish to do the trick. Everyone I talked to opened with the same apology: my visit wouldn’t be possible. The Elâzığ museum was closed since a 2016 bombing. The nearby military police base was on alert after a devastating earthquake in 2020. Ten hours of haggling later, I was the most caffeinated I’d ever been. But I made it to the reservoir.

By 1975, water covered every ancient site explored in the seven previous years. But after half a century of intermittent drought and diversion for agriculture, Norşuntepe began to peek its head over the surface during the long, hot summer.

It was an island in the lapping waters of the reservoir. I hired a fisherman to take me in his boat. But first, we ate fish and had a warm beer. His daughter was getting married that week, so he was in a celebratory mood.

I was anxious to go. The sun was threatening to disappear over the mountains. So we set off on his small boat, motoring through the sparkling evening ripples.

The moment the boat hit the shore, I jumped off onto a fresh layer of the ancient town, exposed for the first time by that year’s receding water. I climbed to the top of the mound. The palace was gone. Whatever mudbrick walls the excavators left had melted away into the water of the reservoir. What was visible was from before the palace existed — the layers I was most interested in. The ones that hadn’t been excavated and never would be.

On the ground I spotted a round painted object. It was a spindle whorl — a weight used for spinning thread. It had been carefully sanded from the fragment of a shattered jar, too precious to let go of when the vessel broke.

It’s an impulse I understand all too well.

From the style of its painted design, I knew the jar was made and decorated by hand around 2800 BCE, halfway between the destruction of the old palace and the construction of the new one.

We will never know who made it. The remains of their home, their kiln, and their loom have all been swept away by the water. Yet there it was, lying on the surface after 5,000 years — a hand-crafted, well-loved remnant from the thousand years without a palace.

~*~

We look to the past to understand ourselves — to know where we came from, what we are striving for, and why. To do this, we have to relive a world that is gone.

Imagining what came before us is difficult. We try to recite stories that our elders managed to tell us before they left. Beyond that, we have to rely on fragments: little pieces of existence that someone left behind in a moment of tragedy. Wars, fires, and famines preserve the most clues because they end the corrosive continuity of daily life.

But despite our best efforts, these fragments refuse to remain preserved. A mouse makes a home in an ancient wall and decorates it with plastic bottle caps. A flood washes away the broken pots that fell from the shelf when a family fled. Archaeologists dismantle a burnt-down neighborhood brick by brick. Their notes get shuffled and misplaced.

We can spend our whole lives chasing these relics down, guarding them from the elements, trying to learn from them before they’re gone. That’s what I’m doing most days. It’s like trying to collect all the leaves from a perfect autumn day in a Ziploc bag as they blow away in the wind.

Yet, every once in a while, a remnant we thought was lost comes back to the surface — an apparition of a long-gone world, suddenly in focus. Then it disappears again into the abyss.

In that brief moment of presence, will we be there to hear its story?

~*~

Next: Intimacy and Triumph

Previous: Watching a city drown.

^{All ideas shared here were developed jointly in conversation.}

^{Special thanks to Harald Hauptmann, Mehmet Özdoğan, Marcella Frangipane, Joseph Maran, Michael Morsch, Lutgarde Vandeput, Francesca Balossi Restelli, Eylem Özdoğan, Necmi Karul, the US Department of Education, and the American Research Institute in Turkey for making this research possible.}

Further Reading:

Keban Project Activities Series (Middle East Technical University, 1970-1982) — The preliminary reports on the Keban excavations: dry and brief, but they hint at many secrets.

Dissard, Submerged Stories from the Sidelines of Archaeological Science: The History and Politics of the Keban Dam Rescue Project (1967-1975) in Eastern Turkey (UC Berkeley Dissertation, 2011)

Sanders, Violence & Imagination After the Collapse (Brepols, 2024) — My book that tells the story of the 1,000 years without a palace with details from the Keban archives.

Photos of Norşuntepe in 1972 taken by Tepecik excavation director Ufuk Esin from the borrowed helicopter, part of the Tepecik Excavation Archives (special thanks to Mehmet Özdoğan and Maria Bianca D’Anna).

Watching a City Drown

Akiva Sanders — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 14:07:27 GMT

The water was swallowing the town of Hasankeyf after 12 millennia of continuous habitation. We watched it from the old cemetery, after all the bodies had been ripped out, one by one.

It was late February 2020. We were starting to see what was coming.

To prepare, I’d bought The Decameron — Boccaccio’s stories of a group of friends who fled Florence when plague shut down the city in 1348. I was reading it on the bus from Batman, the provincial capital, to Hasankeyf, while SaraNoa watched the landscape pass through the window.

In two weeks, the Fulbright commission would tell us to come back to the US or have our funding cut. In three weeks, we would spend the night in hard plastic chairs among the cries of pleading parents and apologizing gate attendants, hoping we didn’t miss the last flight out of Istanbul.

This was going to be our last expedition in Turkey.

We were going to watch Hasankeyf go under.

~*~

On the bus, terraced, golden-gray hills raced by. It was on these hills where people first experimented with planting wheat and barley 11,000 years ago. This was where they trusted that they could give up some of what they gathered this year so they could have more next year. Where they first built permanent houses next to their fields. Where they built tubs to store their harvest and sharpened spears to defend it. It’s the place they started watching the skies, looking for any sign that there would be enough rain to stay in the homes they had built.

This tied-down way of life allows us to build great cities and monuments—but it also makes our existence more inflexible, in many ways more precarious.

~*~

Finally, the gleaming water of the Tigris River came into view.

Of the two rivers that Mesopotamia depends on for sustenance, the Tigris is the moodier one. It falls more rapidly from the mountains to the sea and it’s harder to tame. Nevertheless, it has fed three of Mesopotamia’s greatest cities—Nineveh, Ctesiphon, and Baghdad—capitals of empires that matched its restlessness and violence.

Its source lies between the jagged cliffs of the Taurus Mountains, about 75 miles northwest of Hasankeyf. Out of a rough rock tunnel, the water swells, impatient to begin its wild journey to the sea. Three thousand years ago, two Assyrian kings made the arduous journey to the tunnel.

They carved their image into it.

Floods have been a concern and fascination of Mesopotamians since they began recording their thoughts on clay tablets. They relied on the twice-yearly flood to water their fields and save them from hunger.

When the water didn’t come, cities were abandoned. If the deluge rushed in too fast or too strong, the work of generations could be destroyed. It’s no coincidence that a “great flood” was the quintessential catastrophe in Mesopotamian literature.

The earliest sciences—reading goat entrails and shooting stars—were desperate measures to make some sense of this life-threatening uncertainty.

To live in this fertile heartland of cities, communities—and later temples, states, and empires—had to learn to control the waters of the Tigris. They dredged channels to direct the floods to the fields and piled up reed bundles and earth dams to keep the deluges out. When Mesopotamia’s kings first tried to make their names eternal by carving them into clay, they bragged about these tasks more than anything else.

This role never disappeared. The first modern hydroelectric dam in Mesopotamia was completed in 1959 on the Little Zab, a tributary of the Tigris that runs through the Assyrian heartland.

By 2020, the governments of Turkey and Iraq had built seven on the Tigris, turning it into a series of lakes. Every dam made the river a more predictable resource for agriculture and power generation. But for the villages and towns, ancient and modern, built along its banks, it became an angel of death—once and for all.

Mesopotamia is not unique in this. When the Glen Canyon Dam was completed in Northern Arizona in 1966, thousands of ancient sites were submerged or washed away. Glen Canyon Dam is one of about 2,500 hydroelectric dams in the U.S. Altogether, they generate about 6% of our electric power.

A modern dam is constructed to last 50–100 years.

~*~

So when work began on the Ilısu Dam in 2006, the residents of Hasankeyf knew that the end was near. They had years to fear the waters before they finally started to rise in 2018.

The Turkish government made its own preparations. They had to decide which fragments of the town were worth saving, and which ones would be left to drown. It’s the same thought process we go through when we create landmark districts, write historical plaques, and fill museum inventories. When we decide what not to include in our parents’ estate sale.

What do we need to hold onto? How do the fragments we preserve define our values and our histories—our collective identity? How can we strip these of the messy, living purposes they were made for and put them toward a new function as mementos, as touchstones, as nostalgia pieces? Who has the right to make these decisions?

The case came before the European Court of Human Rights. Activists argued that the Hasankeyf community has a right to transmit their heritage to their children by using places created by their ancestors—houses, grave markers, streets, markets—places that would be destroyed by the dam. They were talking about millennia of history built into the fabric of the town and the caves that surrounded it.

They used the same logic that city governments apply when they prevent a homeowner from replacing a window on a century-old building. The same principle that justified our horror when we saw the images of pit-filled ancient cities looted by ISIS.

The court decided this is not a universal human right and declined to hear the case.

~*~

The bus approached Hasankeyf, nestled into the canyon walls surrounding the Tigris. The first thing we saw was the new town just completed by the Turkish government. It was a suburban housing development, the kind you might expect to find on the outskirts of Dallas, built directly adjacent to the highway—a new, artificial artery, now that the old one was destroying everything that relied on it.

Behind the rows of cookie-cutter houses we found the new cemetery. The bodies from the old graveyard had been meticulously moved there one by one and provided with identical bright white tombstones.

Then we saw the archaeological park. A museum of the old town’s grandest edifices, ripped out of their urban fabric. There they stood, among immaculate concrete paths, each to be viewed alone as a painting in a frame. They had ceased to be mosques, burial shrines, and community centers, and they had become triumphant monuments to a collective national memory.

Something to give transcendent meaning to a new highway-and-subdivision way of life.

The monuments were placed high on a promontory directly above the canyon. From there, we could finally see the old town far below us, and the water now coming to the tops of the pylons of the medieval bridge that collapsed four centuries ago.

But the largest feature that confronted us was the enormous concrete ramp that had been poured to drag the town’s monuments to the archaeological park. It covered the rugged orange canyon face like a cheap tarp tossed onto a grand piano.

The construction workers had carted the mosaic-covered, domed, 15^th-century tomb of Zeynel-Bey up this ramp in one piece. They took only fragments of the El-Rızk Mosque, including its minaret and carved portal, and replaced the rest with newly carved stone.

The bustling marketplace, used continuously since Roman times, was demolished to make way as they dragged the El-Rızk minaret through the heart of the town.

They covered the Mardinike complex, a medieval community center already in ruins, with sediment to preserve it, and they let it go under, never to be seen again.

Even before the water came, the city had been plundered.

As we descended the canyon slope, we came to the old cemetery. It was pockmarked with pits where the bodies had been unearthed. But the tombstones remained, witnesses to generations of care for the dead. Their styles and shapes recorded the radical transformations of the past few centuries, a microcosm of history.

Many had been shattered during the corpse extraction process.

Between the pits, much of the town had gathered with their families to eat picnics packed in shiny new kitchens. We watched the rising water snake up the winding streets and fill their old homes—lived in, falling apart, filled with memories.

Four women sat discussing the new appliances that the government installed in their new houses. A young man told us that he kept going back to his old house every day, though the security forces had blocked the bridge with a pile of debris and it would only be a few days until the water covered it.

We sat in the cemetery until the sky flooded with color and then faded into darkness. But it didn’t feel like a funeral.

~*~

We all lose most things eventually. Our memories dissolve and shift with time until they no longer resemble the lives we have lived. We do spring cleaning, we renovate, we move. Our parents die. Things that we counted on to tell us our stories slip away—photos, furniture, cassette tapes, school assignments. It happens gradually and we may not anticipate the loss until long after, when we try to use the slipped-away things to remind us of a past world we can no longer access.

So we mourn. We feel nostalgia in its original Greek meaning—the pain of homecoming. We return hoping to find comfort, and we discover that the things we left for later are no longer there.

The residents of Hasankeyf experienced this loss differently. They had over a decade to mourn. They had already emptied their houses and sold what they couldn’t carry and wouldn’t leave behind.

Now was the time for spectacle. Not just a goodbye, but a catharsis: The secrets of alleyways and crannies. Places where innocence was lost, friendships made and broken. Moments of tenderness and
anger, pride and regret. All swept away at once with the flood. Melting into an undifferentiated blue surface.

It had long been foretold—not by a goat’s liver or a street-corner prophet, a Noah or a Jeremiah, but by bureaucrats and builders armed with the measurements, schedules, and bulldozers to make it happen.

“This is the day we’ve waited for. We have found it. We have seen it.”

So instead of dirges and tears, circus-style tents popped up along the water. Residents figured out how to make a quick buck—they built a café on a barge made from discarded shipping pallets and plastic sheeting and dragged it every morning to the new shoreline to sell tea.

There was an almost-festive atmosphere, much like the surreal, bleak whimsy of the Decameron. And why shouldn’t there be?

When the world you know is being destroyed, what is there to do but watch?

~*~

Next: Picking through the remains.

^{All ideas shared here were developed jointly in conversation.}

Further Reading:

ECHR’s 2019 Ahunbay and others v. Turkey judgment.

Handžić et al. “From Living Town to Open-Air Museum: The Displacement and Musealization of Hasankeyf’s Heritage.” (2026)—A record of what happened to 12 Hasankeyf monuments during the flood.