Thirteen eras of Turkey, from the most recent to the oldest: the republic, the Ottomans, the Seljuks, Byzantium, Rome, the Hellenistic period, the Persians, Lydia and Phrygia, the Hittites, the Hattians, the Copper Age, the Neolithic, and Göbekli Tepe. For each: how it ended, how it began, and where you can still see it today.
Middle Eastern archaeologists have a word worth learning before a trip: tell. It is a hill, but not a natural one. For thousands of years, people built houses from mudbrick; they collapsed, new ones rose on the rubble, and after a hundred generations the settlement stood tens of metres above the plain. In Turkish, such a mound is called a höyük, hence Çatal Höyük and Alaca Höyük. Troy is a tell too, though the word is not part of its name, while Göbekli Tepe is a mound of buried sanctuaries and buildings around them. The layers lie one on top of another, with the newest at the top. An archaeologist starts at the top of a tell and removes the layers one by one until reaching virgin ground—bedrock, the base of the hill.
Imagine all of Turkey’s history as one such hill, and I am excavating from the top. At the surface is the republic we walk through; beneath it are the Ottomans, then Byzantium, all the way down to the pillars beneath Şanlıurfa, erected by hunters who did not yet know agriculture. Each chapter is a layer: we move from how it ended back to how it began, and its base is already the next layer. Real hills do not have perfectly level layers either: Byzantium runs alongside the Seljuks and Ottomans, while Hittite remnants existed alongside Lydia and Phrygia. So the dates in the headings mark the edges of a layer, not walls between them. Geography does not match depth either: the upper layers are most visible in Istanbul and Bursa; the Hittites and Neolithic lie in the centre, between Çorum and Konya; the Greeks and Rome are on the coast; the bottom is in the southeast, beneath Şanlıurfa and Diyarbakır.
Today, the republican layer is what we walk on: the Republic Monument in Taksim Square, İstiklal Avenue with its late nineteenth-century apartment buildings and tram, and Sirkeci station, which the Orient Express once served. The centenary was celebrated in 2023, and that year Atatürk’s portrait hung in every Turkish home.
Rewind. The republic was proclaimed on 29 October 1923, with the capital already in Ankara rather than Istanbul: farther from the palaces, straits, and everything that recalled the sultans. That summer, the Treaty of Lausanne fixed the borders and formalised a population exchange: around 1.2 million Orthodox Greeks left Anatolia, around 400,000 Muslims arrived from Greece, and Greek Smyrna, burned in September 1922, became Turkish İzmir. Before that, a three-year war of independence had been fought against the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which planned to carve up Anatolia.
The Ottoman Empire ended on 1 November 1922, when the Grand National Assembly abolished the sultanate. By then it had been losing provinces for seventy years and had lost the First World War, along with Arabia, Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. During that same war, in 1915, Armenians in Anatolia were deported to the Syrian deserts, and most died. The Armenian homes of Mardin and churches in Van that we will encounter in the lower layers have stood without Armenians ever since.
But what we see in Istanbul is the peak: the Blue Mosque of 1609–1617, built opposite Hagia Sophia to rival it; Sinan’s Süleymaniye from the 1550s; Koza Han in Bursa, built in 1491, where silk cocoons were traded; Topkapı Palace, begun six years after the conquest; and the Grand Bazaar, trading since the fifteenth century.
Mehmed II captured Trebizond in 1461, the last remnant of Byzantium in Anatolia, where the Grand Komnenoi had ruled for 250 years after the Fourth Crusade. The fortress on the rock above Trabzon is their work; the Ottomans only repaired it. Constantinople had been conquered eight years earlier, on 29 May 1453, after a 53-day siege. According to tradition, the last emperor died in the final fighting, and his body was never identified.
Half a century earlier, the Ottomans nearly disappeared: in 1402, Timur defeated Bayezid I near Ankara and captured him. Bayezid died eight months later, and the state broke apart into principalities for ten years. Bayezid completed Bursa’s Ulu Cami, with its twenty domes, in 1399, three years before the disaster. The Genoese, who held Galata as a colony, had already built a tower above it in 1348; after 1453 they simply changed overlords. Before all that came Bursa, the first real capital, captured by Orhan in 1326: a city with a lively bazaar. At the very beginning, in 1299, was Söğüt, Osman’s small beylik, one of dozens like it, with one difference: it sat right on the Byzantine frontier and grew at the expense of Byzantine Bithynia. It absorbed its Turkish neighbours only later.
Süleymaniye Mosque
The Süleymaniye Mosque stands on Istanbul’s Third Hill and is considered Mimar Sinan’s principal work in the capital.
Topkapı Palace
Topkapı Palace was begun in the 1460s under Mehmed II on the headland between the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus, and the Golden Horn, and for almost four centuries it…
Galata Tower
Galata Tower rises above the Karaköy district, on the hill across the Golden Horn from the old city.
Trabzon Fortress
The walls of Byzantine Trebizond follow a rocky ridge between two ravines, dividing the old city into three parts—the upper citadel…
Ulu Cami Mosque in Bursa
Bursa’s Grand Mosque, Ulu Cami, was built in 1396–1399 under Sultan Bayezid I with spoils from the Battle of Nicopolis.
Koza Han
Koza Han was built in 1490–1491 on the orders of Sultan Bayezid II; its caravanserai income funded the upkeep of his mosque in Istanbul.
By 1308, nothing remained of the Sultanate of Rum but its name; formally, it outlasted the birth of the Ottoman beylik by nine years. Jalal al-Din Rumi, the Persian poet, died in Konya in 1273, when the sultanate was already a vassal state. His tomb beneath a green dome is now one of the country’s main pilgrimage sites. The Çifte Minareli Madrasa in Erzurum, dated to the 1260s–1270s (the exact date is disputed), with its two fluted minarets decorated in turquoise tile, was also built under the Mongols. In 1243, they defeated the Seljuks at Köse Dağ, and from then on the Mongols appointed and deposed the sultans.
The golden age was brief, in the 1220s and 1230s: the Alaeddin Mosque on a hill in Konya was completed then, and in those same decades caravanserais were built along the roads every thirty to forty kilometres, a day’s journey for a caravan, where travellers could stay free for three days. These roads are the main Seljuk legacy. Near Aspendos, the Seljuks built a bridge with steep ramps on the piers of a fourth-century Roman bridge. Since some piers had slipped downstream, the spans had to zigzag. One layer literally lies on another, and you can walk across it.
The peninsula under the Seljuks was not only Turkish: from 1098 to 1144, Crusaders held Edessa, today’s Şanlıurfa; their first state in the East appeared before the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Konya, ancient Iconium, became the sultanate’s capital in 1097, after the Byzantines retook Nicaea with the Crusaders’ help. The first capital, from 1077, was Nicaea itself, a hundred kilometres from Constantinople: the Turks reached it just six years after a single battle.
Çifte Minareli Madrasa
A religious school from the late thirteenth century, Erzurum’s best-known building and one of the largest monuments of Seljuk architecture in…
Alaeddin Mosque in Konya
Konya’s oldest congregational mosque occupies the summit of Alaeddin Tepe, an artificial mound in the city centre beneath which archaeologists…
Eurymedon Bridge
A humpback bridge over the Köprüçay River, known in antiquity as the Eurymedon, a couple of kilometres from Aspendos.
Mevlana Museum
The mausoleum of the poet and mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi, known as Mevlana, is Konya’s main shrine and one of Turkey’s most visited places.
This layer begins above the previous one: Byzantium outlasted the Seljuks and ended only in 1453, by which time it was just a city and its suburbs. In the twelfth century, the Komnenoi still held the coast, but the plateau had been Turkish since Manzikert. Ani, the city of a thousand churches near today’s Armenian border, was stormed by Alp Arslan in 1064 after a 25-day siege; Byzantium had annexed it only twenty years earlier, in 1045. The East was already fragmented and not entirely Byzantine: Armenian Bagratids ruled in Ani and Kars; the kingdom of Vaspurakan had the Church of Akdamar, built in 915 on an island in Lake Van, with David and Goliath carved on its outer walls; and Syriac Christians in Tur Abdin still worship in Aramaic today.
Cappadocia is Byzantine too: tenth- to twelfth-century frescoes in Göreme and fourteen kilometres of cave churches in the Ihlara Valley. A more frightening layer lies beneath them. In the seventh to tenth centuries, when Arab raids reached the centre of the peninsula, entire villages went underground. The Byzantines expanded Derinkuyu and Kaymaklı: at Derinkuyu, eight levels have been opened down to 85 metres, with stables, a winery, and millstone doors that could be shut only from inside.
The peak of this layer is Justinian. In 562, the present dome, 31 metres in diameter, was placed over Hagia Sophia after the first one collapsed twenty years after the church’s consecration. Since then, the dome collapsed twice, in 989 and 1346, and was rebuilt both times. Hagia Sophia itself was built in 532–537, in five years and ten months; at the same time, the Basilica Cistern was dug beneath the square, supported by 336 columns taken from ancient ruins. In 505, a generation before Justinian, Emperor Anastasius built the fortress of Dara against the Persians; its walls stick out of a field ten kilometres from the Syrian border, near Mardin. Old Mardin consists of Syriac and Armenian houses now inhabited by Kurds and Arabs. Above it is the fifth-century Deyrulzafaran Monastery; farther east, in Tur Abdin, Mor Gabriel dates to 397 and is one of the oldest active monasteries in the world. In 395, the empire split in two; in 330, Constantine founded his capital on the site of Greek Byzantium.
Church of the Holy Cross on Akdamar Island
The Church of the Holy Cross on Akdamar Island is a masterpiece of medieval Armenian architecture, built in 915–921 by the architect Manuel for…
Göreme National Park
Göreme National Park is a valley in the heart of Cappadocia, where volcanic tuff has weathered into cones, ridges, and “fairy chimneys.”
Derinkuyu Underground City
Derinkuyu is the deepest excavated underground city in Cappadocia: its galleries descend about 85 metres below ground…
Ihlara Valley
Ihlara is a fourteen-kilometre canyon in southwest Cappadocia, cut into volcanic tuff by the Melendiz River to a depth of nearly a hundred…
Ancient city of Dara
Dara, also known as Anastasiopolis, was Byzantium’s eastern outpost, built by Emperor Anastasius around 505 as a counterweight to the Persian…
Old Town of Mardin
Old Mardin is a stone amphitheatre on a mountainside above the Mesopotamian Plain: its streets rise in tiers and houses of golden limestone stand…
Deyrulzafaran Monastery
Deyrulzafaran, the “saffron monastery,” is the spiritual centre of the Syriac Orthodox Church, founded in the fifth century on the site of an even older…
Mor Gabriel Monastery
Mor Gabriel, or Deyrulumur, is the world’s oldest active Syriac Orthodox monastery: founded in 397, it has never ceased…
Hagia Sophia
Hagia Sophia was built in 532–537 on the orders of Emperor Justinian: in five years, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus raised the dome…
Basilica Cistern
The Basilica Cistern is the largest underground reservoir in Byzantine Constantinople.
Roman Anatolia did not end; it moved with the capital, and for the three centuries before that it had been the empire’s richest region. Most of what people call “ancient Turkey” was built under the Romans, not the Greeks.
There are more than a dozen ancient cities along the coast from Perge to Olympos, and brown road signs bearing their names appear more often than signs for living settlements. The best-preserved theatre is at Aspendos: it dates to the second century and retains its stage wall, unusual for an ancient theatre, and concerts are held there. It has undergone extensive restoration, which is no problem: Aspendos is one of the few coastal theatres that reads as a building rather than a ruin. Myra also has a Roman theatre beneath its Lycian tombs, with stone masks of tragedy and comedy at the entrance, while a Roman agora has been excavated at Smyrna, beneath today’s İzmir. The Library of Celsus at Ephesus was built around 117 by a son in memory of his father; the theatre, which seats 25,000 is in the same city. Hierapolis stands on Pamukkale’s travertines, and its ancient pool with fallen columns is still fed by the same hot spring. Laodicea, ten kilometres away, the city from Revelation described as “neither cold nor hot,” has only been excavated in the past twenty years and is almost empty.
Rome assembled the peninsula piece by piece: Vespasian annexed Commagene in 72, Claudius Lycia in 43, Augustus Galatia in 25 BCE, and Pompey Pontus after three wars with Mithridates. The province of Asia was established in 129 BCE, with Pergamum as its centre; Ephesus became its capital under Augustus. It all began in 133, when Pergamum’s last king, Attalus III, bequeathed his kingdom to Rome: Rome took Anatolia less through war than through inheritance and treaties.
Upper City of Aspendos
While tour buses stop at the famous theatre, the hill above is usually empty, even though that is where the city itself stood.
Library of Celsus
The Library of Celsus at Ephesus was built around 117 by the consul Gaius Julius Aquila in memory of his father, Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus…
Ephesus Great Theatre
The Great Theatre of Ephesus is carved into the western slope of Mount Panayır and remains the largest ancient theatre in Asia Minor.
Hierapolis
Hierapolis was founded in the early second century BCE by the kings of Pergamum beside hot springs emerging at the edge of the plateau above the Lycos valley.
Ancient City of Laodicea
Laodicea on the Lycus was founded in the mid-third century BCE by Antiochus II and named after his wife Laodice.
Ancient City of Perge
One of the largest and best-preserved ancient cities of Pamphylia, eighteen kilometres east of Antalya.
Ancient City of Myra
Myra was one of Lycia’s main cities, near modern Demre, two kilometres from the sea.
Agora of Smyrna
The Agora of Smyrna lies in central İzmir, in the Namazgah district, and remains one of the few surviving public squares of the ancient city…
Hellenism in Anatolia did not end in a battle but through an administrative act: in 25 BCE, Augustus made Galatia a province, while client kingdoms lasted as long as they could: Cappadocia until 17 CE, Commagene until 72. The strangest monument in this layer stands on Mount Nemrut. In the 60s–50s BCE, Antiochus I of Commagene raised a 50-metre mound of rubble there and placed statues of the gods, eight to nine metres tall, around it, putting himself on a level with Zeus and Heracles. Their heads fell long ago and now stand separately on the ground. No one knows what lies inside the mound: the rubble cannot be moved without the structure collapsing. I want to put Nemrut on the right shelf. Guidebooks describe it as an “ancient sanctuary,” which captures its atmosphere: 2,134 metres, wind, and heads gazing at the sunrise. But in age it is a contemporary of Caesar, with seven more layers between it and bedrock.
In the same years, in 63 BCE, Mithridates VI of Pontus died. Persian by blood and Greek in culture, he fought Rome three times and lost the last war; his ancestors carved their tombs into the cliff above Amasya. Lycia followed a different path: from 168 BCE, twenty-three cities maintained a league with proportional representation, which Montesquieu called a model federation. You can grasp Lycia’s scale at Andriake, the port of Myra: a museum of Lycian civilisations is housed in a Roman granary there, and its map shows that the ancient cities along this coast numbered in the hundreds, not dozens. The Aegean coast saw grand building projects: in Pergamum, the Attalids raised an acropolis on a rock with a theatre on a sheer slope and an altar of Zeus, taken to Berlin in the nineteenth century. At Didyma, construction of the Temple of Apollo began in the late fourth century BCE and continued for six hundred years without ever being completed.
In 278 BCE, the Celts, known as Galatians, arrived in the centre of the peninsula and settled around Ancyra; the apostle Paul later wrote to them. Alexander died in 323, and his generals divided his empire. Over the next century and a half, kingdoms arose among the ruins in Asia Minor: Pergamum, with the second-largest library after Alexandria; Pontus; Cappadocia; and Commagene. In the spring of 334 BCE, Alexander had just crossed the Hellespont, defeated the Persians at the Granicus, and cut the Gordian Knot at Gordion that winter, the knot no one else could undo.
Mount Nemrut
A 2,134-metre summit where Antiochus I of Commagene built himself a tomb and sanctuary in the first century BCE.
Amasya Fortress and Rock Tombs
Above the Yeşilırmak River, in the sheer cliff just behind the old quarters, the tombs of Pontic kings—the burial places of the Mithridatic dynasty—are carved…
Persian rule in Anatolia began to end at the Battle of the Granicus and ended in the same year Miletus and Halicarnassus fell. For two hundred years before that, the Persians held the peninsula through satrapies and the Royal Road from Sardis to Susa: 2,700 kilometres that messengers crossed in a week. The Persians themselves left infrastructure rather than architecture, but their subjects built: the Lycian rock tombs above Myra, modelled on timber houses with beams, and the temple-front tombs at Kaunos were carved in the fourth century BCE under Persian rule. Around 350 BCE, Priene was also rebuilt on a rectangular grid devised a century earlier by Hippodamus of Miletus.
The Ionian Revolt of 499–493 BCE, which ended with the destruction of Miletus, began the Greco-Persian Wars. In the first years of this layer, around 540 BCE, something happened in Lycia. Harpagus, Cyrus’s general, besieged Xanthos. Herodotus writes that the Lycians, realising they could not hold the city, gathered their wives, children, enslaved people, and belongings in the acropolis, set it on fire, then the Lycians went out to fight and were all killed. The city was repopulated, and five hundred years later it repeated the same act when Brutus arrived. Today, Xanthos is a hill with a theatre above a valley; nearby is Letoon, the sanctuary of Leto and shared holy site of the Lycian League. Both are on the same UNESCO list.
Ancient City of Xanthos
Xanthos was Lycia’s largest city and its capital, as an inscription found there calls it the metropolis of the Lycian people.
Letoon Sanctuary
Letoon was the Lycian League’s shared sanctuary and federal centre, four kilometres from Xanthos, right by the river’s floodplain.
Ancient City of Myra
Myra was one of Lycia’s main cities, near modern Demre, two kilometres from the sea.
Ancient City of Kaunos
Kaunos stood on a rocky hill where the Dalyan River met the sea and was a port until the gulf became a reed-filled delta with a sandbar.
Between the Persians and the collapse of the Bronze Age, four worlds coexisted on the peninsula, not counting the Hittite fragments in the southeast discussed in the next chapter. I put them in one chapter because they were contemporaries and begin with the one that ended last.
Lydia fell last and left the most enduring legacy. Croesus, who ruled until 546 BCE, introduced coins made of pure gold and silver, giving us the phrase “rich as Croesus.” He also paid for columns at the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus; his name is carved on the base of one, a fragment of which is now in the British Museum. The first coins ever made, from electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver, were minted in Sardis in the seventh century BCE. The Ionian cities paid tribute to Lydia, which absorbed Phrygia.
Urartu fell around 590 BCE. Its capital stood on a rock above Lake Van: a ridge more than a kilometre long, a fortress, and cuneiform inscriptions. The sources do not say who finished Urartu off, the Medes or the Scythians.
Phrygia ended around 700 BCE, according to Eusebius’s chronicle: the Cimmerians swept in, and Midas, according to Strabo, killed himself by drinking bull’s blood. Midas was a real king, known to the Assyrians as Mita of Mushki, and his mound at Gordion is intact: 53 metres high, with a wooden burial chamber inside, the oldest surviving wooden structure in the world. It was built around 740 BCE, before Midas came to the throne, so his father is probably buried there. Archaeologists date Gordion’s great fire to 800, before Midas, so who burned the capital remains disputed. The earliest levels of Cappadocia’s underground cities are also usually attributed to the Phrygians, though this is tradition rather than a find; archaeology does not support the Hittite theory at all.
Ionia did not fall; it simply was not a kingdom. The Greeks arrived on the coast around 1000 BCE. This is the Greece people usually seek in Athens: philosophy was born in Miletus in the sixth century, Herodotus was born in Halicarnassus, and Homer, according to the most common theory, in Smyrna. The Greeks did not move inland; Phrygia and Lydia were there.
Van Fortress
Van Fortress is a rocky ridge more than a kilometre long on the city’s western edge; Tushpa, the capital of… stood here in the ninth century BCE.
Van Museum
The Van Museum, opened in a new building at the foot of Van Fortress, holds the world’s foremost collection on the Kingdom of Urartu, the state…
Assyria absorbed the last Hittite kingdoms one by one: Kummuh in 708 BCE, Melid at Arslantepe in 712, and Carchemish in 717. These were fragments in the southeast, with Luwian writing and lions at their gates, and they outlasted the metropolis by almost five centuries.
The metropolis ended around 1200 BCE: Hattusa was first abandoned, then burned, and the empire collapsed along with half the Bronze Age world. People still assign blame according to preference: drought, the “Sea Peoples,” or the Kaskans. Half a century before the collapse, at the Yazılıkaya sanctuary two kilometres from the capital, a procession of more than sixty gods walking towards one another was carved into the ravine walls. Earlier still, after the Battle of Kadesh in 1274 BCE, the Hittites and Egypt signed a peace treaty, the only ancient treaty for which versions from both sides survive: the tablet is in Istanbul, and a copy hangs at the United Nations. A smooth green block of jade or serpentine lies in Hattusa’s Great Temple. It is said to have been a gift from Ramesses II to celebrate the peace; that is folklore, but the treaty was real.
Hattusa lies in the steppe near Çorum, and the steppe itself is an excavation site: isolated, regularly shaped mounds rise among the fields—those very tells—and only a small number have been excavated. Hattusa covers 180 hectares of walls and foundations: the Lion Gate, the King’s Gate, and the Yerkapı rampart with its tunnel underneath. Population estimates range from 10,000 to 50,000; even the lower figure makes it a huge city for the thirteenth century BCE. Everything valuable found there has been taken to museums, so only stones and a sense of scale remain on site—and that scale is why people come.
The Hittites lived in Anatolia from the twentieth century BCE; their names already appear on Kültepe tablets. But the empire began around 1650, when Hattusili I made Hattusa his capital and took his name from the city: “the man of Hattusa.” The country had been called Hatti before him.
Hattusa
The capital of the Hittite Kingdom on the Anatolian plateau near today’s village of Boğazkale, a city that in the fourteenth century BCE…
Museum of Anatolian Civilisations
A collection worth a stop in Ankara even if the capital was not part of your plans: it presents the entire prehistoric and ancient…
The Hattians did not quietly dissolve into the Hittites: around 1700 BCE, Anitta, king of Kussara, captured Hattian Hattusa, razed it, and cursed anyone who settled the mound. Half a century later, Hattusili I settled in exactly the same place. The last traces of the era visible on the surface are letters. The Assyrian trading colony at Kültepe near Kayseri, founded around 1950 BCE, burned twice, around 1720 and, earlier, around 1835. In both fires, clay tablets survived: 23,000 in all, containing contracts and complaints about business partners. These are the earliest texts in Anatolia. Writing was brought here by merchants, not the Hattians or Hittites, and the tablets contain the first recorded Hittite names.
At Alaca Höyük, 40 kilometres from Hattusa, archaeologists found thirteen royal tombs in the 1930s beneath the Hittite layers beside the Sphinx Gate; other counts put the number at fourteen. The tombs date to the twenty-fifth to twenty-third centuries BCE, roughly a thousand years before the archaeological layer containing the Sphinx Gate. They belong to the Hattians, a people whose language resembles no other known tongue. The tombs held bronze sun discs and deer standards, now in Ankara. The sun disc was Ankara’s emblem from 1973 to 1995 and remains its unofficial symbol. The excavations began on Atatürk’s personal orders: the young republic needed a history older than the Greeks.
Troy, at the other end of the peninsula, runs through every Bronze Age layer. The Hisarlık mound near the Dardanelles contains nine cities, one atop another: Homer’s Troy, in the sixth and seventh layers, contemporary with the Hittite Empire, which knew it as Wilusa; the second layer, where Schliemann found “Priam’s treasure,” is a thousand years older than any Trojan War; and the first Troy, founded around 3000 BCE. The mound is hard to read because Schliemann mixed up the layers with a trench, but the 2018 Troy Museum is the best on the Aegean coast.
Around 3000 BCE, the palace on Arslantepe Hill near Malatya burned. A different society arose there, with a royal tomb containing weapons. The palace had stood since 3300 BCE: corridors, paintings, seals, an administrative building unlike any other in the world at the time, and within it the earliest known swords, made from arsenical copper. This is where inequality first becomes so clear in the soil: some people had swords and others did not. The hill was named “lion” after the late Hittite lions at its gates; the upper layer gave its name to everything beneath it. Arslantepe has been on the UNESCO list since 2021.
Beneath the palace lie two thousand years of villages learning to smelt copper. This is the Chalcolithic, the Copper-Stone Age, between the hoe and the state.
Çatal Höyük, near Konya, was abandoned around 5600 BCE after lasting 1,500 years. Older estimates put its population at 5,000 to 10,000; a 2024 recalculation puts it below 1,000 at any one time. There were no streets: houses stood wall to wall, people walked on the roofs and entered through smoke holes. The dead were buried beneath floors, and bulls were painted on the walls. James Mellaart excavated it from 1961 to 1965; Ian Hodder continued digging for another twenty-five years.
The main find is in Ankara: a clay woman on a throne with leopards at her sides, dating to around 6000 BCE. It is worth a separate trip to the museum. This image of a woman between two beasts is often seen as an ancestor of Hittite, Greek, and Roman goddesses; continuity cannot be proved, but the figure is eight thousand years old and recognisable at a glance.
The first farmers left Anatolia for Europe even earlier: ancient DNA analysis showed that Europe’s first farmers descended from farmers of the same Anatolian horizon, from the peninsula’s northwest. Around 6500 BCE, they crossed the Aegean Sea.
Çatal Höyük was founded around 7100 BCE, but not from scratch: it had predecessors, and they belong to the next layer.
Çatal Höyük
Çatal Höyük is one of the oldest cities on the planet and a UNESCO World Heritage Site an hour’s drive southeast of Konya.
Museum of Anatolian Civilisations
A collection worth a stop in Ankara even if the capital was not part of your plans: it presents the entire prehistoric and ancient…
The top of this layer consists of the first villages, still without pottery. Aşıklı Höyük in Cappadocia was inhabited from 8200 to 7400 BCE; Boncuklu Höyük, ten kilometres from the future Çatal Höyük, around 8300, where houses were still oval and people were already trying to sow seeds without giving up hunting; Çayönü near Diyarbakır, from 8600, where people kept pigs by the eighth millennium BCE and made copper beads—its finds are in Diyarbakır Museum; and Nevalı Çori near Şanlıurfa, where T-shaped pillars like those at Göbekli stood inside the village until it was flooded by a reservoir in 1992. The ritual building was then reconstructed in the Şanlıurfa Museum.
By 8000 BCE, Göbekli Tepe had been abandoned and was buried under earth for ten thousand years, deliberately or by landslides, until Klaus Schmidt began excavating it in 1995. Schmidt died in 2014, only a small part of the mound has been excavated, and his conclusion changed textbooks: first came the temple, then the city. Göbekli Tepe was long considered a pure sanctuary where people from surrounding villages came to pray, but since the 2020s, dwellings and water cisterns have also been found there. The sanctuary and village may not have been separate.
Without context, Göbekli Tepe is a pile of stones. With context, every slab becomes legible: a fox on a pillar, snakes flowing down its sides, hands folded over the belly on the central pair in Enclosure D. Schmidt’s book is available in Russian and is worth reading before your trip. Start at the Şanlıurfa Museum: it has a full-size replica of an enclosure and the “Urfa Man,” the oldest known life-size human statue.
Karahan Tepe, 46 kilometres to the southeast, has only been excavated since 2019: more than 260 pillars, a chamber cut into the rock with eleven phallic columns, and a head looking out from the wall. There are no barriers; the pillars are within arm’s reach, and the stones poking out of the ground all over the mound are unexcavated pillars whose number no one has yet counted. The author considers Karahan Tepe more important than Göbekli Tepe: entire residential quarters have been excavated here, and this is where the appealing theory collapsed that nomads built temples, came to pray, and left. No one yet knows what they considered a temple and what they considered a home.
All of this was built around 9500 BCE. People who knew neither agriculture, pottery, nor the wheel arranged T-shaped limestone pillars in a circle, up to five and a half metres tall and weighing up to ten tonnes, with reliefs of foxes, snakes, boars, and scorpions. Stonehenge is six thousand years younger.
Boncuklu Höyük
Boncuklu Höyük is a small mound near Hayıroğlu village, nine kilometres from famous Çatal Höyük, where archaeologists are excavating a settlement…
Göbekli Tepe
Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known monumental complex on the planet: its T-shaped limestone pillars were set into the mound around 9600…
Karahan Tepe
Karahan Tepe is Göbekli Tepe’s younger sibling. Excavations began only in 2019 and immediately produced a sensation: the rooms here are not…
İçkale Citadel in Diyarbakır
İçkale, the “inner fortress” of Diyarbakır, is a fortified mound in the northeast corner of the city walls, where the city began: this is where…
Conclusion
Thirteen layers, none of them starting from nothing. The Alaeddin Mosque in Konya stands on columns taken from Roman and Byzantine buildings; over a millennium and a half, Hagia Sophia has been a cathedral, mosque, museum, and mosque again without changing its walls; the Hittites took the name of the country and its gods from the Hattians; and the sanctuaries of Göbekli Tepe survived only because they were buried. In Anatolia, one layer does not erase the previous one; it rests on it and takes its stones. No era survives here in a pure form; wherever you stand, other layers lie beneath it.
It changes the way we see Turkey. Istanbul, Cappadocia, and the coast seem like different countries not because there are different Turkeys, but because a different layer comes to the surface in each place: the upper layers in Istanbul, the middle one in Konya, and the lower ones in Çorum and Şanlıurfa. What matters is not the separate mounds and walls, but the layers they leave visible.
Meanwhile, a new layer is being laid at the top: Istanbul’s new districts, the airport, the third bridge across the Bosphorus. In a few centuries it will lie over the republic just as the republic lies over the Ottomans, and someone descending the same hill will begin not with Taksim but with it. What will they find there, and what will they call our layer?
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