INTRODUCTION
The British archaeologist Sir Charles Fellows (1799–1860) did something quite rare for a travelogue author of the long nineteenth century: he returned to visit ancient remnants a second time, in a different season.Footnote 1 The site in question held the antiquities of what was once the city of Laodikeia (Turkey). Fellows’ first visit to that place, which had since come to be known by locals as Eskihisar (old fortress), took place on 8 May 1838. It appeared to him to be a ‘deserted city’.Footnote 2 His second visit was on 23 May 1840, just a few weeks later in the calendar, but at the very start of the summery half of the year. He observed an entirely different sight:
How changed is the scene now! Hundreds of peasants, and thousands of cattle, sheep, goats, oxen and camels, cover the ancient city, and continue to arrive in long trains: the people are actively employed in pitching their tents, while the cattle are grazing over their new pastures. These pastoral people migrate from the valley; when the herbage becomes scanty there, the whole village moves into the hills, keeping together, the better to protect their flocks from the wolves and other animals.Footnote 3
With the changing of the seasons in May, the site completely shifted from one of a ‘deserted city’ with ‘no trace of vegetation’ to a place with ‘new pastures’ and ‘hundreds’ of inhabitants setting up camp. The nearby town of Denizli in the valley below, by contrast, was now ‘almost all deserted’.Footnote 4 Eskihisar/Laodikeia evidently served as a space for summer inhabitation linked to Denizli in the valley below, which inversely served as a winter inhabitation. Both places were inhabited, and by the same people, during different halves of the year. Any ‘desertion’ of either place was only temporary. Yet, we would never know this if Fellows had not returned a second time, and at the right time of year.
The radically differing experiences of Fellows on his two visits, even just a few May weeks apart, are cause for caution whenever travelogues describe the remains of an ancient city as ‘deserted’ of inhabitation. The picture of Eskihisar/Laodikeia in other travelogues is overwhelmingly an impression of supposed abandonment. To begin chronologically, just such an assessment appears in the travelogue of British clergyman and writer Richard Pococke (1704–65). Pococke visited almost exactly a century before Fellows, but on 9 March, so in the off-season. He described Eskihisar/Laodikeia as ‘entirely uninhabited’.Footnote 5 British antiquary Richard Chandler (1737–1810) also visited during the off-season, on 12 and 13 April 1765. He, too, missed the seasonally inhabited nature of the site and assumed total abandonment: ‘We saw no traces either of houses, churches, or mosques. All was silence and solitude. […] A fox […] was the only inhabitant of Laodicea.’Footnote 6 Eskihisar/Laodikeia likewise appeared ‘abandoned nowadays’ in the account of French archaeologist Léon de Laborde (1807–69), who visited on 25 October 1826. At that time of year, he recorded that there was no ‘vegetation’ up on the hills, but instead in the valley down below, which indicates that he visited after the end of the summer season. With the vegetation growth shifting into the valley, the seasonal inhabitants of Eskihisar/Laodikeia would have moved back down before de Laborde could have observed them.Footnote 7 On 28 April 1872, the British consular chaplain in Alexandria, Edwin John Davis, was inspired by Fellows’ account and visited the site. As we have now come to expect of visits before the summer season, it was ‘utterly desolate’.Footnote 8
All these descriptions of desolation contrast sharply with the lively, inhabited scene from Fellows’ second visit. There was an inhabitation in Eskihisar/Laodikeia; it was simply semi-nomadic, and one had to be there at the right season of the year to see it. One wonders how many of the descriptions of ‘abandoned’ sites that frequent the pages of travelogues akin to these are, in actuality, misattributions of non-inhabitation upon landscapes host to regular, seasonal inhabitation. For example, an undated visit to Eskihisar/Laodikeia, in which it is described as completely abandoned, appears in the account of British architect and artist Thomas Allom (1804–72) and Irish clergyman and writer Robert Walsh (1772–1852), contemporaries of Fellows. Walsh wrote that ‘there is now no modern town built in or near the ancient site’, which are left as ‘ruins, slumbering’.Footnote 9 Instead of taking their portrayal of ‘ruin’ and desolation at face value, given the above wall of misattributions of non-inhabitation, perhaps we can instead postulate that Allom and Walsh visited sometime in the off-season of the site.
This paper will present further evidence that ancient remnants in Anatolia were not, in fact, as abandoned as literal readings of long nineteenth-century travelogues created by European visitors to the Ottoman Empire would suggest. These were hardly minor phases in the afterlives of these ancient sites, either. Eskihisar/Laodikeia hosted a substantial population. One can calculate from Ottoman state documentation that dates just a few years after Fellows’ visits that the population in Denizli was an estimated 9,690 people.Footnote 10 Fellows described Denizli as almost completely empty in the summer. Even if just a fraction of that 9,690 came up to Eskihisar/Laodikeia for the summer, with some going to hills elsewhere, that is at least hundreds and probably thousands of summer inhabitants, which explains Fellows’ exclamation point upon writing about witnessing them. It is striking that such a major seasonal inhabitation has gone entirely unnoticed in the historiography about the site.
In general, the over-assumption of antiquities’ abandonment in the travelogues reverberates in today’s scholarship and represents a significant source issue. Such travelogues by European visitors to the Ottoman Empire are invaluable sources for understanding antiquities and their afterlives.Footnote 11 While they are certainly flawed, like any source, travelogues provide windows into daily life that are particularly generative for experiential histories.Footnote 12 In acknowledging their limitations and fallibility, I am not questioning their usefulness, quite the opposite. Instead, I propose methodologies to glean more information from them and to avoid false conclusions based more on the nature of the source rather than the historical moment they describe.
The focus of the present study is on Ottoman Anatolia in the long nineteenth century. Yet, the methodologies in question are intended to aid in the ever-growing discourse surrounding the reuse and inhabitation of antiquities in post-antique eras.Footnote 13 This body of scholarship aims to shed light on a practice of dwelling in ancient remnants, a practice that has seen marginalisation in recent centuries, one that has been subject to physical displacement by archaeological excavations and heritage legislation and, as this paper argues, subject to marginalisation in the written source base. Research that investigates these ‘inhabited reuse’ practices, however, often focuses almost exclusively on sedentary communities and experiences.Footnote 14 Sedentary dwellings were not the only manner in which one could inhabit antiquities, however, and to adopt a largely sedentary focus is to miss the rich and multitudinous histories of nomadic and semi-nomadic inhabitation of reused ancient remnants.
Though nomadic and semi-nomadic communities are often harder to see in written sources made by sedentary people and in the archaeological record, these sorts of communities were quite common in the Ottoman Empire and are vital to understanding its history.Footnote 15 What it means for a land to be ‘settled’ or ‘inhabited’ is filled with epistemological disconnects and misunderstandings.Footnote 16 This paper adopts the stance that nomads and semi-nomads were as much inhabitants of the landscape as were sedentary people, and to implicitly marginalise them from histories of antiquities reuse is to adopt a sedentary bias that relegates them as secondary users of spaces. This paper aims to avoid such hierarchisation. In so doing, it aims to more fully illuminate a whole world of inhabiting the physical remnants of the ancient world that has thus far received exceedingly little attention. I join in and answer to a broader call to include these marginalised histories.Footnote 17 The present contribution to that effort is a proposal of different strategies for how to identify nomadic and semi-nomadic presences in travelogue sources and how to, thereafter, reinterpret histories of ancient remnants and their reuse. There is not space in this brief paper to fully explore the diverse implications of nomadic and semi-nomadic inhabitation of antiquities, and that larger project remains the subject for later forthcoming work.
A few notes on terminology are in order. I will now use the phrase ‘(semi-)nomadic’ as a catch-all term to refer to both semi-nomadic and fully nomadic communities simultaneously, when this is necessary. These two modes of inhabitation are markedly different, however, and reference to both at once does not mean to elide the two. Semi-nomadism involved movement between a winter and a summer residence, usually quite close to each other, whereas nomadism involved many stopping points and more continuous periods of travel during the year. In the case study on Eskihisar/Laodikeia below, I make note of modern scholars’ difficulty to see that both kinds of nomadism were present at the site and distinct from one another. I also resist using the word ‘ruin’ to describe sites such as Eskihisar/Laodikeia that had inhabitation and therefore were not the abandoned ‘ruins’ they often appeared to be in travelogues. The word is not conducive to recognising when ancient structures were, in fact, inhabited, and to reflexively use ‘ruin’ to refer to ‘ancient remnants’ is to, at worst, rhetorically deny the validity and existence of inhabitations that reused the antiquities.
As a final caveat: many of the travelogues included in this paper feature uncommon instances in which historical authors and/or archaeological excavations have identified at least some (though usually not all) of the (semi-)nomadic presence at a site. That is because I aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodologies through cases where we can be completely confident that there was nomadic inhabitation, before then applying them to cases without explicit reference to (semi-)nomads. There is therefore an overrepresentation of travelogues in which we have an explicit lead, and it should not be taken as a representative sample of all travelogues. Overall, the cases here raise questions for all claims in today’s scholarship that a site was abandoned, especially those that base their claim upon travelogues. A large amount of re-evaluation is necessary if the myth of abandonment is to be dispelled.
IMPLICATIONS OF ABANDONMENT (OR LACK THEREOF)
IN ESKIHISAR/LAODIKEIA
Eskihisar/Laodikeia is a good example of how over-assumptions of abandonment can emerge in modern scholarship that relies on travelogues. Some scholarship cites the travelogues as evidence that the site was fully abandoned.Footnote 18 Others recognise some, but only a fraction, of the (semi-)nomadic presence. Excavation publications from Eskihisar/Laodikeia detail the site’s use as a stopping point for fully nomadic peoples passing through, but do not recognise the extent of the diversity of those nomadic peoples nor the semi-nomadic inhabitation for the entire summer season by communities from the valleys below.Footnote 19 The full extent of Eskihisar/Laodikeia’s non-abandonment has thus yet to see scholarly attention, in no small part due to the absence of (semi-)nomadic inhabitation in all but a brief appearance in one volume of one travelogue.
Firstly, it is useful to outline the different kinds of fully nomadic communities who regularly inhabited the site, including one that has already seen historical and archaeological analysis. After the twelfth century, Eskihisar/Laodikeia became a stopping place for Yörüks on their migration route between the Western Taurus mountains and the Aydın-Söke region’s plains.Footnote 20 ‘Yörük’ was not an ethnic identity, but rather more of an ‘administrative status’ that categorised them based on their manner of nomadically inhabiting the landscape. They were generally a subgroup of Türkmen.Footnote 21 Yörüks were not a monolith in their way of relating to the landscape. They could engage in both pastoralism and agriculture, depending on circumstances, as Ottoman tax records show.Footnote 22 They could be semi-nomadic, with a winter residence (kışlak) and a summer residence (yaylak) close by to each other. This was especially true in the Taurus mountains on the southern Anatolian coast.Footnote 23 The semi-nomadic inhabitants of Eskihisar/Laodikeia from the neighbouring valleys were not, themselves, Yörüks. This was a mixed community that featured Turks, Greeks and Armenians.Footnote 24 In addition to semi-nomadism, Yörüks could also be fully nomadic, with long migration routes. It was this latter kind that made Eskihisar/Laodikeia their inhabitation along their way north-west from the Taurus mountains and back again.
Some of these nomadic Yörüks appeared in travelogues. The excavation publications cite Allom and Walsh, who identified ‘a few wandering Turcomans’ who ‘make a temporary abode’ there.Footnote 25 These are presumably the same Türkmen whom Allom illustrated erecting their tents up against the ancient architecture (fig 1). Türkmen also saw documentation in two other travel accounts, those by the British Consular chaplain at Smyrna, Francis Vyvyan Jago Arundell (1780–1846), and by his fellow traveller, the British reverend and missionary John Hartley. When they visited during the off-season, on 5 April 1826, Arundell recorded that the amphitheatre remnants were ‘occupied by Turcoman huts and tents’ and that they also tented by the ‘aqueduct’ with ‘thousands of goats and sheep’.Footnote 26 Hartley also noted that ‘the Turcoman had pitched his migratory tent’ in the amphitheatre.Footnote 27 Early April fell during a time of the year that accords with the migratory route that took nomads towards the Taurus mountains for the summer; the date leaves a month to make the remaining several-hundred-kilometre trek towards the south-east.
‘The ruins of Laodicea, Asia Minor’, Allom and Walsh Reference Allom and Walsh1839, 86.
To demonstrate Yörük presence, the excavation publication cited, in addition to Allom and Walsh, a 1781 engraving by the British artist John Thomas Serres (1759–1825).Footnote 28 This image was in fact based on William Pars’ earlier illustration from his travels with Richard Chandler in the retinue funded by the Society of Dilettanti (fig 2). Pars visited the site at the same time as Chandler, on 12–13 April.Footnote 29 It is less than certain whether any of the figures in Pars’ illustration were actually Yörüks, as the excavation publication claims. Chandler’s text can help to identify some of them, as he wrote that, while they visited the site, ‘some shepherds came with their flocks to the ruins, and in the evening to the water by our tent’ down below.Footnote 30 These are probably the shepherds depicted on the left side of Pars’ composition (fig 2a). They were seemingly not tenting in the antiquities atop the hill, as they came down off it ‘in the evening’; this does not point towards spending the night there. Here we probably have local pastoralists, rather than Yörüks, stopping in Eskihisar/Laodikeia along their route. As for the camel caravan walking along the left ridge of the stadium in the image, they only travel with camels (fig 2b). They do not have any kind of goats, sheep, cattle or other signifiers of pastoralism, which indicates that the transport of goods was their central economic activity.Footnote 31 Yörüks could hypothetically play a role in overland transport of goods like this, but it is more probable that this is a camel caravan of merchants.Footnote 32 This would represent a completely different kind of nomadic presence at the site. As for the figures in the centre, these may have been hired members of the travellers’ retinue rather than nomads on a migration route. At least one of them carries a gun, which may indicate a role as contracted security. Travelogues often featured such hired members of the retinue in their illustrations.Footnote 33 It is therefore possible that none of the figures in this image are Yörüks. They are, however, evidence that there were more kinds of mobile inhabitation of the antiquities than migrating Yörüks and that the afterlife of the ancient architecture is more multifaceted than previously thought.
‘The stadium at Laodicea’, William Pars, 1865. a: detail of the shepherds; b: detail of the caravan. Images: The Trustees of the British Museum, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence.
A final travelogue that the excavation publication references to demonstrate Yörük presence was that of de Laborde, but here the nomads depicted were, again, not actually Yörüks.Footnote 34 They were Zeybeks; de Laborde’s text explicitly uses that name to describe them and their reuse of the ancient remnants as a place for encampment.Footnote 35 His identification was correct, as his illustrations of them showcase the headgear, tight trousers and boots, and overall garb characteristic of the Zeybeks, who travelled around as hired guns (fig 3).Footnote 36 de Laborde was aware of their nomadism, describing them as living a ‘quasi-nomadic’ life in which they had ‘different villages that they successively inhabit, following the seasons and the needs of their culture’.Footnote 37 They represent yet another kind of nomadic inhabitation of Eskihisar/Laodikeia.
‘Denislou. Vue de la plaine du méander, prise du haut du théâtre de laodicée’ (Denisli. View of the plain of the Meander River, taken from the top of the theatre of Laodikeia), de Laborde Reference Laborde1838, pl 34, fig 83.
It is notable that Fellows’ travelogue, cited elsewhere in the publication, is absent from the discussion here of the afterlife of the ancient city.Footnote 38 The valley-dwellers’ use of the site as a yaylak in the summer is, as a result, completely absent in this travelogue-centric analysis, just as it was absent in all the travelogues but one volume of Fellows. The nomadic inhabitations by the Zeybeks and a potential trade caravan are also absent. There were all kinds of (semi-)nomadism in Eskihisar/Laodikeia that, by nature of the travelogues as sources, are difficult to parse. Ultimately only one kind, the fully nomadic Yörüks, appears in the excavation publication, leaving the antiquities to seem far less inhabited in their post-antique history than they actually were.
This diversity of nomadic and semi-nomadic inhabitation of the site can help to re-evaluate archaeological evidence at the site that the excavators attributed solely to nomadic Yörüks. One of the most telling finds is the excavators’ skilful reading of rearranged ancient stone blocks as foundation stones for tents within the stadium.Footnote 39 This was a way of reusing antiquities particular to a tent-based, (semi-)nomadic manner of inhabiting space. The stone blocks in Eskihisar/Laodikeia resemble similar ones for tents from Selçuk/Ephesos.Footnote 40 The area yielded green glazed pottery and other small finds, which excavators initially thought indicated ‘the existence of an early Turkish village’, but they have since reevaluated them as associated with nomadic inhabitation.Footnote 41 The excavations have also yielded evidence of fires in remnants of ancient buildings. The excavation publication assumes that the fire makers were Yörüks who reused the site as an inhabitation.Footnote 42 It is possible, however, that these stone formations for tents, fires and small finds could be attributed to trade caravans, Zeybeks and/or the people from the valleys below who summered in the site. All of these communities needed to pitch tents to form their inhabitations, and all of them would have built fires and brought possessions with them. It is possible that members of all these communities used the tent foundations, at different times of the year respectively, whenever they were staying at the site. As regular tenters, they could all presumably recognise a good set-up upon which to tent, so it would be strange if these multiple different types of inhabitants were not using the tent stones.
It is more difficult to understand the longue durée of the site under the assumption that Eskihisar/Laodikeia was supposedly abandoned to all but the brief rests of migrating Yörüks, an assumption with roots in the overstated abandon from travelogue sources. With knowledge of more of the nomadic and semi-nomadic activity that took place, one can reevaluate the long nineteenth-century history in which the travelogues were written, but also history before that. The question at stake is: when did Eskihisar/Laodikeia become a yaylak and the neighbouring valleys, especially Denizli, a kışlak? There was a bad earthquake that damaged the city in the seventh century ad, and the excavation publication notes that archaeologists have not uncovered building remains dating after this point. The director of the excavation, Celal Şimşek, and Paul Arthur conclude from this that the site was abandoned in the seventh century, and that historic sources that continued to use the name Laodikeia until the thirteenth century referred to settlements in the surrounding area to which the former residents spread, such as Denizli and Hisarköy.Footnote 43 With no new sedentary constructions, Arthur argues, Laodikeia ‘was clearly no longer on the present site’.Footnote 44
We may, indeed, have a case of an old name lingering in documents that did not align with the contemporary reality, especially as the name Laodikeia was tied up with ecclesiastic geography and held particular importance for Christianity as the site of one of the Seven Churches of the Apocalypse. Yet, if the practice of semi-nomadism had already started in the early Middle Ages, sometime after the seventh-century earthquake, then perhaps the use of the name Laodikeia was not completely dissonant after all and referred to people of the region by their summer inhabitation rather than their winter one. In response to the argument that there are no remains after the seventh century, one can employ the old maxim that ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’. Semi-nomadic inhabitation with tents would not leave the same large-scale, easily identifiable traces as sedentary inhabitation. Şimşek and Arthur both cite the act of quarrying the remnants of Laodikeia for reuse in nearby settlements such as Denizli as evidence of ‘later activity’ in the site after the seventh century.Footnote 45 Quarrying of material does not, however, inherently mean that it was not in use as an inhabitation. Material continued to be quarried from the extensive antiquities for use in Denizli into the nineteenth century, when we can be certain from Fellows’ travelogue that the site was simultaneously in use as a yaylak.Footnote 46 Simultaneous quarrying and summer inhabitation could theoretically have been the case as far back as the seventh century, although it is difficult to say for certain.
To explain a supposed abandonment of Laodikeia in the seventh century, Şimşek invokes a historical narrative that Sassanid raids caused Anatolian populations to relocate to the mountains for protection.Footnote 47 This flee-to-the-mountains narrative parallels that found in Greek nationalist historiography.Footnote 48 Yet, it does not fit well onto the case of Eskihisar/Laodikeia.Footnote 49 While Hisarköy certainly is in the mountains to the west of Eskihisar/Laodikeia and would represent an escape into the mountains, the settlement with far greater population was Denizli in the valley below. Some people seem to have established inhabitations in the mountains while others did so in the plains. There was not an exclusive movement to mountains. Another example that runs counter to the mountain flight thesis is Güllük Dağı/Termessos, a site that will be discussed in greater detail later in this paper. This was a mountain city, whose sedentary inhabitants, in late antiquity, supposedly moved down from this mountain inhabitation into nearby valleys.Footnote 50 All of this movement of inhabitations up and down mountains seems strange and contradictory if one only conceives of the populations in question as fully sedentary, as people with just one inhabitation. If one instead allows for the possibility that populations could become semi-nomadic in response to pressure, and therefore experience a need to establish inhabitations both in the plains and in the mountains, these seemingly contradictory movements make more sense.
Why would a population such as that of Eskihisar/Laodikeia become semi-nomadic? One explanation could be that, in the face of economic struggles, earthquakes and invasions, they turned more towards pastoralism. To do so in response to changing conditions would be a norm rather than an aberration in the history of human settlement.Footnote 51 Such a pastoral turn would necessitate a new kind of interaction with the landscape. As the travelogues cited above recorded, vegetation was available in the valley and not in the hills during the winter season, and the reverse was true for the summer. The seasonal realities of the landscape for a more pastoral population would motivate a shift towards a (semi-)nomadic mode of inhabiting that landscape. This reappraisal of the trajectory of inhabitation at Eskihisar/Laodikeia, while still at this stage far more speculative than conclusive, demonstrates the potential of recognising the overstatement of abandon in travelogues and engagement with non-sedentary histories of antiquities inhabitation.
ORIGINS OF OVERSTATED ABANDON IN TRAVELOGUES
Several, overlapping reasons dictate why these travelogues feature overstated abandon of ancient remnants. There was a clear difference in perceptual context between travel authors with largely sedentary backgrounds and (semi-)nomadic inhabitants of antiquities, and the authors often held overt anti-nomadic biases that riddle their travelogues. The audiences for which the authors aimed their works, largely the European elite, would have themselves held a sedentary bias, providing another motivation towards the work itself adopting that viewpoint. In one unsubtle instance, Davis wrote that he considered ‘pastoral life’ to be ‘but a lower form of civilisation’.Footnote 52 This general sedentary bias could entangle with a specific preference for a glorified ‘Classical’ architecture, a preference that manifested in denigrative descriptions of local inhabitations in Ottoman lands in contrast to the ancient architecture, whether (semi-)nomadic or sedentary.Footnote 53 When Allom and Walsh saw Yörüks in Eskihisar/Laodikeia, they wrote that the nomads’ ‘feldt-tents [sic] strongly contrast with what remains of the splendid edifices of its former possessors’ from a ‘magnificen[t]’ ancient past.Footnote 54 Here, not only did Walsh’s text establish a sedentary bias in favour of fixed ‘edifices’ over ‘tents’, there was also a temporal preference for the ‘magnificence’ of antiquity. This perspective saturated the travelogue genre and cast nomadic peoples as lesser and less worthy inhabitants of the landscape. It was not a vantage point that encouraged the travel authors to fully recognise (semi-)nomads’ inhabited reuse of antiquities as a well-established, if different, form of inhabitation.
A further layer that could enmesh with sedentary versus nomadic tension was orientalism and anti-Islamic sentiment. In the French archaeologist Charles Texier’s (1802–71) telling of northern Anatolia’s ancient history from his travel account, for example, he contrasted the nomadic Mariandyni, whom he says left the country almost a ‘desert’, against his positive appraisal of the Bithynians, ‘originally from Europe, and habituated to stationary residences’.Footnote 55 Here, Texier drew a thinly veiled equivalence between the two ancient populations and a supposed modern European ‘West’ versus a ‘non-West’, wrapping his view of nomadism with orientalist garb. In British writer and traveller John Carne’s (1789–1844) denigration of mobile populations, religion, rather than orientalising geography, took centre stage. He observed a group of people returning to Istanbul from the Hadj, who tented in ‘ruins of Antioch’ on the outskirts of that city while on their way home. He wrote that viewing their tent encampment ‘presented a mournful comment on the decline of the power and glory of this world, as well as on that of the pure and earliest church of God’.Footnote 56 To consider another dimension of the quote from Allom and Walsh above, theirs was a travelogue whose title and subject featured the ‘Seven Churches’ of the Apocalypse. They had a specifically ancient Christian past in mind, within a general, glorified ‘Classical past’. Moralisation and preference for Christian rather than Islamic eras could serve as other reasons to discount and therefore not fully engage with and document mobile inhabitations of antiquities.
Minimisation of present inhabitation may have also served to justify the travel authors’ extraction of artefacts for imperial museums or private collections back home. Fellows and Texier both acquired Anatolian antiquities for the British Museum and the Louvre respectively.Footnote 57 de Laborde, a decade after he published his travelogue, even ended up directly involved with the Louvre in charge of the Greco-Roman antiquities collection.Footnote 58 For travellers so connected to obtaining antiquities, the implication that those artefacts were part of an existing inhabitation, and that to extract them would therefore be to rob that inhabitation, would have potentially cast doubt upon their enterprise. An intentional blindness to (semi-)nomadic inhabitations would help to avoid the issue. If a place is abandoned, and there is no obvious ‘owner’, it makes the accusation of looting harder to make. Travelogues did not only levy this justificatory rhetoric of abandonment to justify extracting artefacts from exclusively (semi-)nomadic inhabitations. In illustrations of antiquities that saw sedentary reuse, travelogues often visually undercut or even removed signs of Ottoman reuse altogether. This, too, served to justify artefact extraction.Footnote 59
In addition to justificatory rhetoric and overt biases, there was also a genuine epistemological disconnect that did not necessarily always come from a place of malice or denigration. The authors were often confused by what they saw and did not fully understand (semi-)nomadic lifeways. They were, of course, like (semi-)nomads, travellers of the landscape themselves. Yet, they were traversers of that landscape, rather than established inhabitants of it. It was not a world they directly knew. de Laborde struggled to describe what kind of inhabitation he was seeing when he witnessed Yörüks who reused an ancient necropolis as winter quarters (fig 4). The community had converted for residence the necropolis of Ayaş, in what was once ancient Elaiousa Sebaste, on the Anatolian coast south-west from Mersin. de Laborde knew about Yörüks of the region such as them and was aware of their semi-nomadism.Footnote 60 Yet, upon seeing an actual kışlak established in reused antiquities, he was still puzzled by this sight, and questioned:
What name to give to modern Ayaş? Is it a city, a town, a village? Is it none of these, as there are neither houses nor huts, and the inhabitants are lodged with their livestock in the tombs? They accommodate themselves to these tombs and transform them into houses, the funerary chambers into apartments, the places hollowed for the coffin into beds and alcoves, and lastly, the sarcophagi into troughs and sideboards.Footnote 61
‘Ayach. Vue des habitations modernes au milieu des tombeaux anciens’ (Ayaş. View of the modern inhabitations among the ancient tombs), de Laborde Reference Laborde1838, pl 73, fig 153.
De Laborde’s inability to label this inhabitation is an excellent demonstration of the epistemological disconnect between travellers such as he and (semi-)nomadic inhabitants. He did not understand the semi-nomadic existence of the Yörüks there, wondering how such an inhabitation could exist without ‘houses’ or ‘huts’, without structures that served as dwellings year-round. Shuffling through different sedentary types of residence, ‘city,’ ‘town’ and ‘village’ did not produce satisfactory categorisation. De Laborde was additionally thrown by the way the Yörüks reused each section of the antiquities, documenting in a detailed list what saw reuse for what purpose as a naturalist would the properties of a newly encountered plant species. His rhetorical questions and detailed list indicate that he expected his sedentary intended audience to share his epistemological disconnect.
De Laborde certainly displayed sedentary and chronological biases that went beyond a simple lack of understanding. He wrote of the remnants of what was ancient Sardis that the ‘tents of nomads have thus replaced the grandeurs and the riches of antiquity’.Footnote 62 His hostile biases fell alongside a genuine inexperience and lack of context to completely understand what he was seeing. Together, these factors combined to create a contradictory text in which de Laborde at once seemingly acknowledged the inhabitations of tenting nomads in Sardis while simultaneously describing it as ‘a ruined city with no habitation’ in an adjacent sentence.Footnote 63 As if to cement this assertion of non-presence in the face of presence, the accompanying illustration of Sardis does not feature the tents that de Laborde mentioned or any other sign of the active human inhabitations there.
The above issues of bias and epistemological disconnect are, however, still not full explanations. There are completely practical reasons behind overstatement of absence that were intrinsic to the nature of travel. The authors almost always engaged in single visit or visits in quick succession, which meant that they missed comparisons of the site between different seasons. Travelling was expensive, and transit times between locations were long. The travel authors often spent less than a day at the ancient sites that they toured, even those as substantial as Eskihisar/Laodikeia.Footnote 64 By Davis’ detailed records, he only spent three hours and twenty minutes there.Footnote 65 This is not the kind of travel that easily enables one to notice seasonal inhabitation of a site. There was already a difficulty among authors such as de Laborde to understand seasonal inhabitations of antiquities when they saw them in front of their eyes. They were not well equipped to, in the off-season without directly seeing those inhabitations, recognise the subtle signs of nomadic presence from other times of the year (although they did inadvertently record some of them, as the following section of this paper will explore). To them, the sites in the off-season would have appeared to be abandoned, and authors with sedentary backgrounds would not have any ready reason to assume that these places were not abandoned like that year-round unless a local person happened to have told them otherwise.Footnote 66
Finally, many of the travellers seem to have avoided travel in the summer, with its heat and disease risks. Fellows, for example, ended both of his voyages in May just as the summer season began.Footnote 67 He wrote that, by mid-May, ‘the season is getting too hot to travel for pleasure’.Footnote 68 Not one of the many travel authors cited in this paper visited Eskihisar/Laodikeia during the period of June to September. This preference for travel outside of summer meant that the authors witnessed more reuse of antiquities as kışlaks than they did yaylaks.Footnote 69 This pattern of travel parallels the general trend of the Mediterranean as an elite tourism destination primarily during winter in the nineteenth century. The switch to high volumes of tourism in the summer instead is a later, twentieth-century phenomenon.Footnote 70 The seasonality of travelogues creates an inverse concern to over-assumptions of abandonment. Travelogue authors who witnessed winter inhabitations of antiquities may have assumed that these were year-round dwellings, rather than seasonal, thus over-ascribing chronological presence at a site and interpreting sedentarism instead of (semi-)nomadism.
With many reasons set against the inclusion of (semi-)nomadic inhabitation of ancient remnants, it is worth enumerating why instances of it appear in travelogues at all. On an experiential level, this kind of travel required knowledge of and engagement with local people in interactions that were similar to those conducted by practitioners of the increasingly developing discipline of ethnography across the nineteenth century.Footnote 71 It is perhaps no surprise, then, that similar descriptions of local peoples such as (semi-)nomads appear in their texts. Authors also included (semi-)nomadic peoples in illustrations and texts as an appeal to their audiences’ orientalising and romanticising fascinations. They cast them as othered, picturesque, anti-modern figures, sometimes with similarities to biblical nomads, an impulse that spoke to the anxieties of industrialisation and modernity back home.Footnote 72
The manifestations of orientalising and romanticising impulses were not always monodirectional. An orientalising gaze could, as established above, also lead to a denigrative and minimising view of (semi-)nomads who inhabited antiquities at the same time as it might motivate their inclusion. The same tension exists for romanticism; a dominant image of the romantic movement was the solitary, uninhabited ‘ruin’.Footnote 73 The image clashed with the widespread inhabitation of antiquities in the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere, but it was something that romantically-inclined audiences and authors came to expect, propagate and desire despite that reality. Such conflicting drives towards both inclusion and exclusion of (semi-)nomads as inhabitants of antiquities can, in addition to justification of artefact seizure, practical matters of travel and epistemological disconnect, combine to explain why we have a source base that recognises those inhabitations some of the time but not most of the time.
METHODOLOGIES FOR CIRCUMNAVIGATING OVERSTATED ABANDON
Considering these warps in the sources, how can one attain a clearer picture of (semi-)nomadic inhabitation of reused antiquities, without a fortunate, but rare, overt description such as in Fellows’ text? One technique is to look for some of the few permanent constructions on the landscape that (semi-)nomads left behind in places where they tented: burial sites. In addition to sometimes reinhabiting ancient tombs, nomadic communities created their own graveyards on the landscape. (Semi-)nomadic burial sites, unlike tents and other transportables particular to nomadic life, could not travel with their creators. The community would tend to place a graveyard in a location in the landscape to which they expected to return. Graveyards, therefore, are one way through which to more easily track how (semi-)nomadic people, who could otherwise leave little evidence of presence, seasonally inhabited the landscape.
The (semi-)nomadic community’s graveyard, as a place to be returned to for commemoration and addition of new interments, represents a spatial claim to presence on the landscape unlike that of a sedentary community. In the implication of the community’s regular return to a graveyard, also implied are the presence of the community’s herds and tents – their means of inhabitation – and the use of the lands around the graveyard to graze those herds. Nomads could reuse antiquities to construct the spatial claim to landscape presence that was their graveyard, involving the antiquities in this signification of their inhabitation.
Yörük graveyards were often but not always constructed from reused antiquities. Davis noted burials in ‘strange, solitary little spots, each grave marked by a lichen-covered stone, but with no further record or memorial of the dead’.Footnote 74 If antiquities could not be easily supplied, it seems that any ‘stone’ could do as well. The following examples, however, are indicative of the general tendency of Yörüks to fashion their grave markers out of reused antiquities. Reuse of antiquities for graves was not particular to nomadism but was something that sedentary communities of all confessions engaged in as well.Footnote 75
One can find context for nomadic funerial practices in the writing of Yaşar Kemal, whose novels were based on his own personal experiences and interviews as a journalist in nomadic communities.Footnote 76 In his 1971 book, Binboğalar Efsanesi, he wrote about Yörüks in mid-twentieth-century Çukurova who were among the last nomadic communities left, and their struggles with displacement due to sedentarisation in the region. On burials, he wrote that:
Yörüks have graves, but not graveyards. Whoever dies along the way, wherever they are, they are buried in the place that they died. However, Deliboğa mound, from top to bottom, is a Yörük graveyard. It is an ancient kışlak.Footnote 77
In places of longer-term seasonal inhabitation, such as a kışlak or a yaylak, there was more ability for Yörük communities to make a graveyard that they could continually return to and that would amass a large quantity of graves, such as the fictional Deliboğa mound in Kemal’s novel. If a substantial graveyard was more likely to be in a yaylak or kışlak, one can invert this logic to identify a Yörük yaylak or kışlak by means of its graveyard. If a substantial Yörük graveyard existed at a site, that probably indicates its function as a seasonal inhabitation for them. Yörük graveyards made from and/or placed within ancient remnants would therefore indicate the Yörüks’ seasonal reuse and inhabitation of those ancient remnants.
I will first apply this method of identification to a place that Fellows explicitly mentioned as a yaylak to show that the method works. I will then apply it to places supposedly ‘abandoned’ to evince instead semi-nomadic presence and reuse of antiquities.
Fellows encountered yaylaks in high-elevation plains that lie to the east of Uyluk Tepesi, a mountain in south-western Anatolia. He noted that the names of inhabitations there all ‘terminate in -yeeilassy’ (meaning a yaylak) and that they are summer dwellings that ‘have their corresponding village in the valleys’.Footnote 78 Between his first visit there on 9 May and his second on 18 May, as the summer season began, he witnessed the arrival of ‘a large population’ of ‘peasants living during their short season’ (meaning the summer season) ‘here in tents’.Footnote 79 These were semi-nomads, rather than nomads. On this plain, Fellows observed numerous ancient remnants, including ‘considerable remains of old materials lying about the rocks’, ‘several columns and ornamented stones, of the Corinthian order’ and a ‘pile of squared stones – some carved into cornices and dentiled’. He also saw antiquities reused in burial sites. There were ‘several ornamented sarcophagi in the burial-grounds of the [Yörüks]’ and ‘many remains of sculptured white marble’.Footnote 80 The semi-nomads could have sourced these remnants from what was left of nearby ancient Lycian cities such as Komba, Nisa or Choma. These ‘Turkish burial-grounds […] were scattered over the valley’ rather than connected to sedentary settlements.Footnote 81 Even if we only had the details about burial grounds unconnected to sedentary settlements that reused antiquities, we would be able to infer semi-nomadic presence and inhabitation of antiquities on the plain. It is useful as a confirmation that Fellows actually observed the yaylak populations and heard these spaces referred to as yaylaks. This confirmation helps to demonstrate that it is possible to infer (semi-)nomadic inhabitation of antiquities by means of their graveyards.
We can use this technique elsewhere in Fellows’ account to infer the presence of nomadic communities that he did not hear reference to nor see. For example, Fellows portrays as abandoned the site of what was once ancient Lurnessos, in the mountains to the south-east of Edremit on the western Anatolian coast. He visited on the first of March, which would have been the off-season for a summer mountain inhabitation. He described the area as ‘extremely wild’, in which ‘scarcely a trace of a cottage is to be seen the whole distance’. This was evidently not a primarily sedentary space. There, Fellows ‘saw in a burial-ground several columns’, and these burial grounds were adjacent to ‘squared stones of considerable size’ and ‘old walls of good masonry’. Ultimately, he interpreted the place as ‘deserted’.Footnote 82 Yet, the presence of the burial-ground with reuse of ancient columns and no signs of active sedentary inhabitation suggests the opposite. This is a space reminiscent of how Kemal’s Deliboğa mound covered in Yörük burials would look in the summer, during its off-season. It suggests (semi-)nomadic presence. This was most probably a semi-nomadic community, who used the space as a yaylak; its mountain geography and proximity to nearby settlements in the plains below would render it particularly effective for this purpose. Despite Fellows never seeing them, the (semi-)nomadic inhabitants and reusers of what was once ancient Lurnessos are discoverable in his travelogue. Seasonal inhabitation of the site is an important but hitherto unknown part of its history.
To apply this approach to a similar case from Thomas Abel Brimage Spratt (1811–88) and Edward Forbes’ (1815–54) travel account, they recorded a graveyard in a place whose name they wrote as ‘Akheer Tash’. It is difficult to tell precisely where they mean, but it is in the mountains south-west of Antalya, nearby what was once ancient Rhodiapolis. There, Spratt and Forbes encountered what they identified as a medieval building and ‘a dozen sarcophagi’. There were ‘no remains of habitations visible, excepting in an old Turkish burying ground adjoining, where there were scattered a few blocks and fragments’.Footnote 83 Like so many others, this graveyard featured reused antiquities. Spratt and Forbes took the graveyard to be a ‘remain’ of habitation rather than an active site. The travellers’ visit was on 7 April, when semi-nomads would generally be below the mountains for the winter season, so its vacancy at that time of year is not a surprise,Footnote 84 but that does not mean that it had no habitations year-round. The setting of the site was a ‘small plateau or natural terrace on the mountain side […] capable of great fertility’.Footnote 85 A plateau up in the mountains would be the perfect place for a yaylak. The presence of the ‘burying ground’ suggests that, like Kemal’s Deliboğa mound, this was a place where a nomadic community would stay for long stretches of time during the year. Though Spratt and Forbes did not witness the antiquities’ inhabitation directly, that does not foreclose our possibility to understand the space that they visited. The excellent setting for summer pasturing combines with the graveyard evidence of continued return and inhabitation of the location to indicate that the antiquities there saw reuse as part of a yaylak in the summer season. As a final detail, the name ‘Akheer Tash’ may be an attempt to render the Ottoman Turkish âḵir taş, meaning ‘last stone’ or ‘“at last” stone.’ Such a name may suggest the site’s role as a yaylak that one reaches ‘at last’ on one’s journey up into the mountains for the summer.
Graveyards were not the only indications of (semi-)nomadic inhabitation of a site with antiquities; the herd’s consumption of vegetation growing in ancient remnants could suggest their presence as well. As I will demonstrate, Yörük herds did precisely that during summer pasturing in Güllük Dağı, where there are remnants of what was once ancient Termessos, in the mountains north of Antalya. Güllük Dağı/Termessos was a yaylak like Eskihisar/Laodikeia, but appears misleadingly in some travelogues as ‘deserted’ despite its seasonal inhabitation.Footnote 86 Güllük Dağı/Termessos is similar to Eskihisar/Laodikeia, in that contemporary scholarship relies on travelogues and often concludes that the site was, as those travelogues’ authors usually wrote, ‘abandoned’, seemingly since ‘late antiquity’.Footnote 87 The Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism has produced research that reports the site was not ‘resettled since its abandonment’, and this is why it is so ‘well-preserved’.Footnote 88 I will shortly argue, instead, that some of the site’s good condition can be attributed not to abandonment but to the Yörüks’ presence and their herds’ curtailment of vegetation growth.
During the latter half of the nineteenth century, it appears that the Yörük summer inhabitation there dwindled into near-complete disappearance. Their disappearance is legible in how the site suddenly became more and more overgrown over time, with fewer and fewer Yörük flocks to keep down the vegetation growth. This chronology corresponds to that of neighbouring Çukurova in Gratien’s study, when the Ottoman state’s ‘Tanzimat for the countryside’ enacted widespread forced sedentarisation of (semi-)nomads in the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 89
One can best trace vegetation growth over time at certain major landmarks of the site that always received careful description in travelogues, such as the theatre. Spratt and Forbes visited in 1842, before the sedentarisation of the second half of the nineteenth century. They did not encounter inhabitants there, which is unsurprising as they visited in the off-season from 27–30 April, which fell before the summer inhabitation season would begin in May.Footnote 90 They did encounter signs of those inhabitants, however, only they did not seem to know it. When they saw the theatre in Termessos, it was ‘well-preserved, free of bushes’.Footnote 91 They did not theorise why this may have been but simply accepted it.
Davis, by contrast, who visited three decades later in 1872, well into the forced-sedentarisation of the ‘Tanzimat for the countryside’, found a different circumstance in the theatre.Footnote 92 The theatre was now only in ‘tolerably good preservation’.Footnote 93 In the rest of the site besides the theatre, Davis and his retinue ‘found it almost impossible to trace out the buildings, so thickly [wa]s the site of the city overgrown with brush-wood and rank vegetation’. Such a struggle with overgrowth was not present in Spratt and Forbes’ text. Unlike Spratt and Forbes, Davis was aware of the connection between the vegetation and the Yörüks. He wrote that the only accessible ‘paths’ through the overgrowth were ‘the tracks made by the [Yörük] cattle, and even through these it was difficult to force a way, for the place had been abandoned to nature since the preceding autumn, and the tenants of this yaila’ (yaylak) ‘had not yet ascended to it’.Footnote 94 They had not yet arrived because Davis visited on 12 May, just before the start of the summer season.Footnote 95 Despite Davis’ evident knowledge that the Yörük herds could reduce growth, he did not, in writing at least, recognise that the site had become more overgrown since Spratt and Forbes visited nor understand how it implied displaced and forcibly sedentarised Yörük populations unable to return in as large numbers.
Thirteen years later, the Polish writer, traveller and art historian Karol Lanckoroński visited the site with his retinue in September of 1884, and in late July of 1885.Footnote 96 Unlike the earlier two travelogues, these visits should have been during the on-season. Yet, during both 1884 and 1885, they only encountered one family left inhabiting the antiquities, the ‘Yörük Mahmud with his Family in two tents’. They were tenting in ‘a small plain, surrounded by a ring of ancient building remains’.Footnote 97 Now the theatre featured a large amount of overgrowth, readily visible in an illustration of the theatre from the travelogue (fig 5). A number of small trees burst through the seats and from just in front of the skene. Throughout, especially concentrated in the orchestra, many shrubs and weeds grew. Had the Yörüks not been displaced, this much growth would have been eaten by July, after two months of keeping herds there. The state of the theatre was very different from that well-preserved theatre of forty-three years prior in Spratt and Forbes’ description, a deterioration that represents not the ravages of time over thousands of years of human abandonment, but specifically the forced sedentarisation of the Yörük community whose herds until then curtailed that growth.
‘Termessos. Ruine des Theaters’ (Termessos. Ruin of the Theatre), Lanckoroński et al Reference Lanckoroński, Niemann and Petersen1892, pl 12.
One can thus trace an arc of increasing overgrowth, and inversely decreasing Yörük presence, at Güllük Dağı/Termessos in the late nineteenth century. Spratt and Forbes visited before large-scale sedentarisation began, Davis visited amidst the decline but while the site was still inhabited enough to be known as an active yaylak, and Lanckoroński visited deep into the displacement of the community, when there was just one family left. It is difficult to ascertain just how large the community was before its displacement. It is notable, however, that Spratt and Forbes described the theatre as ‘well-preserved, free of bushes’, even in late April, right before the summer inhabitation season began. This would have been at the end of the off-season, the time of year when the overgrowth would have reached its greatest extent, and, even then, it was not substantial. It seems as though the Yörük community, with its flocks, was large enough to keep the theatre free of growth to such an extent that, even at the end of a long winter period of absence, there was still little visible growth.
Another Termessian landmark that shows the floral consequences of Yörük displacement is an ancient building with a fresh water source that still flowed from it in the nineteenth century. When Davis visited, a hancı (inn keeper) from a han (inn) nearby served as his ‘guide’ in Termessos. According to the hancı, this ancient building featured a ‘spring of excellent water, which […] never failed’.Footnote 98 The travelogue’s illustration of the building demonstrates that, as with the theatre, by Davis’ time in 1872 there was already some overgrowth (fig 6). A few weeds grew on the top ridge of stones, to the right of the structure, and in each of the three triangular-roofed niches. There was an open space in front of the building with a few stones and a column partially buried, and bare earth that appears to be worn flat, possibly from footfall. When Lanckoroński witnessed the same building thirteen years later, it looked very different (fig 7). His publication’s illustration was clearly the same structure, with its three, characteristic triangular-roofed niches and the label of ‘spring house’ relating to the fresh water source.Footnote 99 Now, however, the weeds grew in a dense cluster along the top ridge, spilling over the side. The space in front of the building was completely filled with tall growth, obscuring the stones, columns and earth. The vegetation was so thick that it covered the whole lower portion of the building, leaving only the triangular portions of the niches visible above it.
‘Spring, with pointed recesses – Termessus’, Davis Reference Davis1874, 228.
‘Quellhaus’ (water spring house), Lanckoroński et al Reference Lanckoroński, Niemann and Petersen1892, 59, fig 12.
The absence of the Yörük community seems to have had swift, material consequences on the site. The overgrowth affected antiquities across the whole site, not just these two landmarks.Footnote 100 The consequences of the semi-nomadic community inhabiting the site would have been especially evident in places conducive to their inhabitation, such as the source of fresh water that would bring continual foot traffic to fill water, or a large open space convenient for hosting flocks such as the theatre. It was places central to the rhythm of daily life that would see the largest difference before and after the community’s displacement.
Güllük Dağı/Termessos is an example of presence demonstrated through absence. Absence of vegetation growth shows presence of a seasonally inhabiting semi-nomadic community, and vice versa. To infer the community’s absence through the presence of vegetation is to engage hauntologically with the history of the site, a technique increasingly in use in the study of the afterlives of antiquity.Footnote 101 This history includes much more than the displacement of a yaylak, more than the displacement of an inhabiting community. It also centres the displacement of their effects on the landscape. Specifically, it is the displacement of the effects of their habit of housing their hungry herds with them, a habit that was a central part of their way of life by which they inhabited the antiquities. Through the method of tracing vegetation consumption, this history of presence and then displacement from antiquities as an indirect consequence of forced sedentarisation is possible to trace, even though none of the travelogue authors recorded that displacement nor directly witnessed inhabitants in Termessos until there was only one family left.
CONCLUSION
The cases in this paper are far from the only ones like them. With so much (semi-)nomadic inhabitation of antiquities in Anatolia that has gone unrecognised, one is almost tempted to place the burden of proof on a claim that a space was abandoned rather than the opposite. To do so would be an extension of Martin Devecka’s provocative argument that ruination is a choice enforced by elites. When there are many decentralised authorities, he argues, top-down enforcement to keep ruins as ruins, by preventing reinhabitation, is unable to occur and places do not stay abandoned for long.Footnote 102 In the Ottoman case, it is only when there was central-state-directed forced sedentarisation that sites such as Güllük Dağı/Termessos actually became more abandoned. That being said, Devecka’s argument is not airtight. I agree with Paul Cooper that the definition of ruin that his argument requires – operating on the level of a city rather than structure-by-structure – is too narrow.Footnote 103 This paper certainly does not argue that abandonment was impossible, only that it was rarer than scholarship often takes it to be. Whatever the mechanics of abandonment and reinhabitation of Anatolian antiquities may be, it is necessary to recognise as much inhabitation as one can from the source bases to most accurately test theories such as Devecka’s about them.
When tracking histories of (semi-)nomadic inhabitations of antiquities, the history of Güllük Dağı/Termessos demonstrates well that one is often tracking histories of a lifeway that eventually saw displacement. In Eskihisar/Laodikeia, Yörüks no longer arrived to use the site as a stopping place after 1990.Footnote 104 (Semi-)nomadic peoples in Anatolia today continue to face marginalisation in the face of forced sedentarisation, restrictive land regimes, global capitalism and many other factors.Footnote 105 The displacement of (semi-)nomadic peoples has had further consequences that extend beyond those suffered immediately by these communities. Without the Yörüks’ herds, there is a need to establish a plant control strategy in Termessos as it faces deterioration due to vegetation growth.Footnote 106 The ancient spring house became further obscured since the late nineteenth century without inhabitants to regularly caretake it. In the following century it filled up with sediment and further growth, all but completely obscuring the triangular tops of its niches (fig 8). For the development of excavations and conservation plans in Termessos and sites akin to it, the nomadic inhabitants’ effects on the site, both through their presence and absence, are vital to understand its condition over time.
The condition of the ancient spring house in Güllük Dağı/Termessos in 2011. Photograph: Used with permission of Dick Osseman. https://pbase.com/dosseman/image/142748237.
The first archaeological excavations at the site, which kicked off in 2025, cleared away a few of these consequences of non-inhabitation and revealed the triangular niched building again.Footnote 107 However, by the time of my visit on 9 March 2026, growth had already begun (fig 9). Vines, grasses and brush – all of which a goat might like to eat – have quickly established themselves again upon the structure. The theatre nowadays only has slightly less overgrowth than it did in the late nineteenth-century illustration of fig 5, when there was only one Yörük family left and no site management plan, as there is now under the Turkish national park system (figs 10–11). Neither structure is as clear of vegetation as it was in the early nineteenth century, when the semi-nomadic inhabitation there was in its full capacity. The hauntological signs of the community’s absence are not limited to the long nineteenth century, but still grow, uneaten, between the stones of the ancient remnants. Güllük Dağı/Termessos is not unique in this respect; Anatolia is filled with hauntological growth. The fenced-off site of Belkıs/Aspendos, formerly a kışla according to surrounding residents, was meadow-like when I saw it on 8 March 2026 (fig 12).
The condition of the ancient spring house in Güllük Dağı/Termessos in 2026, with growth after the 2025 excavation season. Photograph: author.
The condition of the theatre in Güllük Dağı/Termessos in 2026, view of the orchestra. Photograph: author.
The condition of the theatre in Güllük Dağı/Termessos in 2026, view between the seats. Photograph: author.
Meadow-like Belkıs/Aspendos in 2026. Photograph: author.
In placing more emphasis on these marginalised and displaced histories, an important future line of inquiry is the pursuit of deeper understanding of (semi-)nomads’ experiences of antiquities reuse, part of a broader trend of experiential history especially important for regions such as south-western Asia.Footnote 108 Such a phenomenological approach can help to shed more light on the afterlives of antiquities as part of (semi-)nomadic reuse practices, especially given the highly embodied nature of inhabitation and the knowledges enmeshed within it of antiquities not just as artefacts of the past but as places convertible to dwellings. There is not space to delve into this further in the present study, and it must remain the subject of later work. The goal of this paper is to help equip and spur such efforts with methodologies that aid in recognising a larger amount of antiquities inhabitation than previously understood.
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