Southeast Turkey - Day 6

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Today we head back to Ankara. But first we visit two museums in Gaziantap, where we stayed last night.

Hasan Suzer Ethnographic Museum – Hasan Suzer was a very wealthy businessman who bought a large house, built in 1905/06, and turned it into a museum. He never lived in the house, but had it fully renovated, furnishing the rooms in period pieces, with mannequins in regional garb. Having seen a lot of such restored Ottoman houses, we breezed through this one, impressive though it was in its own right. To me, the most interesting room was the arched cellar, which wouldn’t surprise me if it were a whole lot older than the house above it. In the rooms upstairs, I was impressed with the size and grandeur of the "Mother-in-Law Room." Ottoman families were extended families, all living in the same building, but with different quarters surrounding the central open courtyard. As for the artifacts within, the most interesting to me was Lawrence of Arabia’s motor bike, which he used when he worked as a spy. (I never made it through the entire movie, which I thought was colossally boring, so I don’t know who he was spying for).

Gaziantap Museum – After leaving the Hasan Suzer Museum, we wandered down a beautiful alleyway, renovated and cleaned up for the tourist trade. On either side were pretty cafes and shops, which I would have liked to wander through. However, we were on a mission to visit the Gaziantap Museum, with its treasure trove of mosaics taken from Zeugma in the last fifteen years or so.

I thought the mosaics in Antakya were spectacular. These are even better! They are huge, far more colorful, and by and large in excellent condition. One exception, although definitely huge and colorful, is the large mosaic entitled "The Marriage of Dionysos and Ariadne," which, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, was partially looted the night it was discovered by archaeologists. It is mounted on the wall, next to a photograph of the previously intact mosaic, with a big question mark in the stolen gap, requesting information about its whereabouts and asking for its return.

One of the highlights of the large mosaic collection is a fairly small one entitled "Cingene Kizi" , or "Gypsy Girl." It is only a fragment of a larger piece but has quickly become an icon of the museum and of Turkey. We see it now in tourist brochures for the country and on advertisements, and its image was recently painted on the side of one of the Hacettepe academic buildings. It is called Gypsy Girl because of the type of scarf on her head and the large hoop earrings she wears. On the other hand, because of the part in the middle of her hair, some speculate that it depicts Alexander the Great (???). It sure looks like a woman to me, but then, I’m not an archaeologist or classical historian.

In the same room as the Gypsy Girl is a large collection of coins displayed in about a dozen cases. I arbitrarily looked at one case on the side of the room, when my eye fell on one coin that looked little different from the hundreds of others on display. Except it depicted a huyuk (flat hill), with a little temple on top! Can I have found this easily the very coin archaeologists used to determine the exact location of this temple at Zeugma? I called over our guide, Onur (also an archaeologist) and he said, "Yes, that’s it!" Wow.

Tonight we are catching a bus to the far eastern part of Turkey, even farther east than trip took us. And so, I will refrain from saying more about the incredible mosaics in this very special museum, other than to add that only 5% of those found in Zeugma are on display. A new museum is about to open (designed by the husband of one of Larry’s Hacettepe colleagues), enabling more of these treasures to go on view. And, once the Zeugma "in-situ" museum is completed, some of the mosaics will be reinstalled in the excavated villas under the museum’s roof.

One interesting bit of information I forgot to put in yesterday’s blog about Zeugma is that historical date for the site ends in the year 1048; that is more than 1,000 years ago when this city was last known to be a key metropolitan area in the region.

Cilician Gates – Back on the road to Ankara, we approached the Taurus Mountains, the chain of mountains separating the southeastern plains we have been visiting from the rest of Anatolia. After climbing into the mountain chain, we passed through the famous Cilician Gates, the only pass through these mountains, and one widened and fortified by various conquering or defending armies. Perhaps the most famous was Alexander himself, as well as the armies of the First Crusade. Equally famous, but carrying out a very different mission, was Paul of Tarsus (St. Paul), who passed through here on his way to the Galatians.