Mardin, midyat, and coming back to GT

A couple weeks ago, I took a trip to Mardin, then Midyat, then outside of Dargeçit… a winding path to visit Boncuklu Tarla, Field of Beads. I left for Mardin with some new dear friends— being in Türkiye is a lot of reuniting with long lost new friends— and spent a couple days orienting and getting to this Tigris-neighboring city on a hill, established more than 3000 years ago. Not a big deal. Mardin has nice windy airflow, up a bit in altitude (that’s a strong word but you what I mean), with long-reaching views stretching well across the border into Syria. Over and over, you hear people say “Mesopotamia” while looking out across the horizon because, contrary to Wikipedia (and, weirdly, plenty of scholarly journals), Mesopotamia reached across, yes, Iraq, but also across Anatolia, right where Mardin now sits. As great as books are, there’s so much knowledge passed through the technology of talking, and in songs and dance and in the art and a whole host of other modes and means.

My friends had rented a car so I got to travel with such ease with them to Dara, the ancient eastern Roman city, walking through its stunning Necropolis, then singing in its cisterns (these were built probably a bit later into early Christian times), and then sweltering (but with fascination) in its vast city ruins. We saw remarkably intact mills, enormous hypo-style stone walls, public and private dwelling spaces… it’s impossible to not sound redundant, but the fortress wall, even as it crumbles on the sides, is very impressive. I’ve run out of words for giant-enormous-megalithic feats of construction and how mind-boggling they are, what they say about the beliefs, values, and consciousness of a given society. I’m not necessarily laying a value judgment on these consciousness just… dang, these buildings are giant.

I went on to Midyat with a hope and a dream to make it to Boncuklu Tarla, staying at a haven of a little inn who helped find me someone intrepid enough to drive the 40 minutes outside of town. I say intrepid because the structural engineering student, S, who kindly drove me texted with a picture of a SUV and said he was ready for “off-roading.” It was around that moment that I wondered what sort of chaos I was bringing into both our lives by asking to be driven to this 13,000-year-old archaeological site, but I told myself to get it together, give it a go… we can always turn back if it was too, I don’t know, off road? Cut to the actual drive— all paved, all very scenic, rolling beautiful hills and plateaus, feeling very Montana in its vistas. We talked about his name, which means descended from kings, and about the names of the area. We listened to Kurdish jams. I took funny long videos of the vistas, like a recently-landed alien visitor. We arrived to the site, following the google maps location, and found ourselves in front of a locked gate. I gulped, knowing I had, of course, screwed the pooch. I’d asked the tourism office and the police station in town and also the archaeo team at GT and all had been fairly causal about the whole thing— “don’t see why you can’t visit?” was the general vibe. But now, there was a big locked gate and chainlink fence between us and the apparent site location… and I felt like a dingdong. We walked along the side of the gate, me in my jelly shoes (special excavation issue/100L at the drugstore in Urfa) and I tried willing the gate open a few different ways in my mind. The driver noticed the big hole in the fence at the same time as me and just shook his head with a very clear “don’t even think about it.” We shared a moment or two of WTF and then S hopped to action, calling his friend who lived in the area. I tried to listen in for any phrases that resembled “American fool,” because that would be justified, but the Kurdish flew over my head. He got off the phone and said that his friend would call right back. Then we waited, more music, and me making silent prayers to the site gods. Not 8 minutes later, a car pulled up behind us and a couple men got out and they were unlocking the fence. Turns out, the friend had called his buddy, the site direction, Dr. Ergül Kodaş, and we were getting a very special, very unplanned, very privileged tour. We spoke in Turkish, English, and I listened in French, all languages he spoke. It was amazing, exhilarating, beautiful to see the long-stretching site with pillars, not t-pillars, and circular enclosures similar to GT…PPNA, PPNB, long stretches of time and building styles, the swooping mountains framing this valley-set site. Much wetter, more lower-alpine feeling than GT. (Image courtesy of Mardin Archaeology Museum.)

They kindly invited us to tea at their house and we met some of the other archaeologists and Dr. Kodaş wife, Charlotte, a soon-to-be doctor of archaeology herself, and I got to ask all kinds of questions, and generally take in this very similar but very different environment and excavation. Hopped a ride with the family back to town, my cells happy-happy from S’s ingenious call, from the gifts of this welcome and the kismet coming together of it all.

That night, I had gone out to see some of Midyat and meet a master silversmith who introduced me to a doctor of archaeology from Midyat who does fascinating ethnographic-historical work in town. These two buddies took me on a tour around town, visiting an Assyrian church service with incense and singing, finished with tea on the veranda with her family overlooking where the old town and new town meet. Overflowing hospitality here and so many connections and insights sparking from visiting this further-away site and these new friendships. Letting all of this cook in the stew for a bit… more soon!

And, PS… would you like to go on a little side quest with me? Okay, back to Mardin… officially (?), Mardin draws its name from Marida a term found in Kurdish and Syriac for “fortress.” Makes sense. Word on the street/so I’ve heard from multiple sources (a highly scientific survey) is that Mardin’s previous names have been Merlin and Merylin and variations on Mary Mother of God. Interesting to note that Mardin is within the Artuklu District and is known for its Artuqid architecture and please just let me enjoy the similarity of Artuqid to Arthur as in Arthurian legend, which one Joseph Campbell (Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth) had suggested drew substantially from Persian, Arab, Islamic and potentially other distinct yet simultaneous traditions…. and then we have Merlin, a very specific archetype and character in Arthurian legend. While Arthurian legend has been coded as Western European READ white, Anglo-Saxon, there’s compelling reception studies of this tradition pointing it to what was known in the 10th and 11th centuries as Persian love poetry and other syncretically-connected traditions (Modarres’s “A Comparative Study of Two Romances: The English Morte d'Arthur and the Persian Samak-e-Ayyar” for example). And, as well, the strong Gral/Grail significance in Arthurian legend and this city’s ties to Mary, the Divine Mother. I don’t anything to be a fact or unshakable reality but I do sense that this area is a nexus of cultures and traditions and a place where we might listen in for complexity instead of simplicity. It’s a possible connection and it’s interesting, at the least. A vast universe of contemplation to be sure to ponder histories that hinge upon Europe’s “whiteness,” as both the category of whiteness and its intrinsic connection with Europe may well be a constructed, a later-on revisionist history, when compared with myriad examples of European plurality of culture, ethnicity and race. Interesting meeting places of possibilities and re-listening into histories, connections. Yeah, so that’s been bangin’ around my head for a while, since hearing these little wisps, little phonemes of potential connections. The Assyrian tradition in Mardin and Midyat is fascinating and an area of history on which I am trying to catch up… as well as basically all of the intertwined yet distinct traditions, plus the vastness of time and the constant tug between specific individuals, communities and wider patterns of history.