Brown Signs

(Click on the map to enlarge it)

Position: 36°54’08.0″N 36°44’44.3″E

Brakes screeching, smoke and dust billowing from under her rear tyres, Clio, our trusty Renault, juddered to a halt. Coaxing her into reverse we pulled back for another view of the brown sign indicating a tourist attraction. Next we thumbed the words into Google for more information – there’s usually just enough to swing us off track. Turning down the side road, our next 20 minutes is a game of pothole whack-a-mole. My experience driving in Mongolia helps and Clio’s subframe lives to fight another day. Here’s a few of our favourite serendipitous stops:

Yesemek

Five hundred metres from Syria’s border, halfway between Gaziantep and Hatay, a brown sign pointed up a dirt road and said, ‘Yesemek’. After an hour’s drive through the green pastures and rolling foothills west of Kilis it was time for a break. We’d gone down to the Syrian border earlier that morning for a look-see. Only 50km from Aleppo, the crossing looked both calm and quiet. A dozen trucks sat alongside the road, probably waiting for clearance.

Meanwhile, the rows of tire repair and mechanic’s workshops looked like they could do with some business. Before the civil war, local Turks regularly drove into Aleppo to stock up on cheap booze and cigarettes. Now traffic seems limited to commercial trucking. I suspect the courage of the truckers making runs into Syria today wasn’t too different from traders traveling the same route 1,000 years ago.

Yesemek is a 3,350-year-old quarry and sculpture workshop on the banks of a wide river plain. The artifacts are mainly examples of Hittite statuary and carvings. Spread out over several good-sized fields on a hillside, there must be hundreds of pieces, each maintained by sheep mowers. Most are about a metre or so high. There is something about the clean lines and friendly faces of the sphinxes, winged lions, and man-bears that makes the stones seem almost cuddly. Artisans at the workshop roughed out the carvings which were then transported to their destination for final touches and polishing. Personally, I like the more unfinished look. Given how many there are, I wondered if the place was abandoned in a hurry.

Kanlidivane

A ticket booth peeked out from a shady copse of pines. We parked. Clio’s handbrake made a reassuring clicking sound, but I left her in first as an additional precaution. As we walked up an attendant groggily stepped forward. As if he had just woken up. There’s not much foot traffic this time of year, but in Turkey even the most obscure museums are prepared for visitors, or at least their admission fees.

Founded back in 300 BCE around a large sinkhole, the city of Kanlı Divane Ören Yeri has a name that stumbles gracelessly off the English tongue. Derived from Greek, Kanytellis, meaning “bloody crazy”, the Turks kept the blood part and dropped the crazy. It’s not clear if the name refers to the red soil in the area, or the legends of criminals cast to their death in the sinkhole by the Romans. Most of the ruins date from the Byzantine period. They left three churches and an impressive basilica behind. For decades the land was privately owned, and graveyards have headstones dated in the 1990s.

My favourite building was the monumental tomb of Arios, built for Queen Aba’s inevitable internment. The late queen had very specific, and slightly creepy, instructions for her burial carved above the door. Briefly, she ordered no one else be buried in the tomb. She deemed the penalty for failing to honour her order a sin against ‘Underground Gods’. And that the perpetrator and his [sic] people would vanish. But in case they didn’t, they would also owe 10,000 denarius to Caesar, 8,000 to the regional administration, and 2,500 to the town. Her order lasts until infinity, while erasure of the relevant inscription results in <unspecified> punishment. So there. Kanlidivane is certainly one of the oddest and most picturesque sites we ran across.

Adamkayalar

The road went straight uphill. The brown sign pointed to a side road where the tarmac promptly gave way to rocks and dirt. A couple of kilometres later, we pulled up next to a Yamaha 650 thumper minus its rider. Casting about for a clue as to where to go next, someone had fortunately drawn a big black arrow on the information sign. Next to it on a large rock was another arrow, this time painted in red. It pointed directly towards a cliff and, we hoped, The Men of Rock at Adamkayalar.

These wonderful stelae celebrate the lives of important community members who died around 1,800 years ago. The community was a death cult. Death cults, also called mortuary and funerary cults, aren’t as scary as they sound. The term refers to the practice of maintaining the memory of the dead for generations after their passing. The Egyptians were masters at it, building private tombs and pyramids to honour their mummies (and daddies – duh-oh!). The Romans were pretty good, too. At the end of every year they celebrated the festival of Parentalia by visiting their late loved ones at the necropoli. All the better to keep their memories alive.

Carved directly into the cliff 220m above the floor of the canyon, to see them you have to boulder down 50m of sheer rock, one fraught step at a time. The climb is worth it as you can see in the photos. On our way back up we met Ken, an Australian mining engineer on a motorcycle trip around Turkey. When he’s not traveling, he works in Siberia as a mining engineer by day, and as a guide for his China-based motorcycle tour company in his spare time. Garrulous in the way that Aussies, and mining engineers on holiday are, he gave us his card and encouraged us to join one of his expeditions. It is very tempting…

Gilindire Caves

The path to the caves of Gilindire takes you down the face of a cliff via a metal staircase, rusty after years of exposure to sea air. Once inside the narrow entrance, the warm, moist atmosphere envelops you and you quickly shed your outer layers. The faint odour of sulphur permeates the dank air. Strips of LED lights brighten things. Stalactites drip quietly. Water draws in minerals and shapes them into intricate, flowing stone shapes; the kind of natural forms that designers like Antoni Gaudi went bonkers for. Meanwhile the sound of your clanking footsteps falls dead, absorbed by innumerable folds in the rocks. At the far end of the walk a deep lapis blue pool waits quiescently for your selfie. No flash photos, please.

Carlsbad Caverns is bigger and more impressive, Carol assured me. It’s also in America. Finding these splendid scenes 2kms off our route was worth the turnout.

Fees

Entrance prices for museums and historic sites range from 5TL up to 110TL for the most popular spots. But thanks to our residency permits, we could buy a Museum Card for 60TL (~$5.00). That gives us unfettered access to all the nationally run museums and historical sites in the country. There are so many excellent places to see, the card paid for itself with one visit.

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