(Salkimbagi , Turkey)…Someone explained to me in Diyarbakir that there was a road all the way from the Kurdish capital to the mysterious statues of Nemrut Dagi. “Yes. Straight road,” he said. “From here to there.” The road was soon beautiful, rising high into the thinner air to the northwest of Siverek. Teenagers wearing knitted caps, which I had not seen in all the other, warmer areas of Turkey I had travelled to, tended large flocks of sheep and goats. Round knots of bare rock peaked out of the stony soil, and I saw a small group of soldiers: This area often has seen activity from the outlawed Kurdish Partyiya Karkeren Kurdistan organisation.
Thus, it came as a surprise when the D360 road ended at Mezra, at the thinner north end of the lake known as Ataturk Baraji, named after the founder of modern Turkey. I wondered if I would have to do a 180-degree turn, but I decided against that when I saw the distance involved. I parked behind the one other vehicle already awaiting the ferry.
The ferry port consisted of a small building that was divided into a small room for sitting and making chai and a prayer area. Two women – perhaps a mother and daughter – sat outside wearing the traditional lilac-coloured headscarves that I had started seeing in Sanliurfa, Ceylanpinar and Mardin. As I waited, additional cars came and parked, although in no order. Pretty soon my car looked as though it would be the fifth car to get on the ferry, then the tenth, a worry that grew when I saw the size of the ferry. A ramp was thrown down onto a concrete slab emerging from the water, and after the cars on it departed the jigsaw puzzle began that resulted in every waiting car getting a space. It was a very impressive display of juggling, and I have to say I was impressed, too, by my ability to follow instructions, drive up the ramp and fit in. It took some effort to get out of the car once the ferry was off, such was the squeeze, but here was a wonderful, 20-minute journey, rich blue sky kissing bare lakeside hills and the sound of Kurdish being spoken among the passengers.
It was not the first potential delay that had turned into a fond memory. Almost 200 miles before in the River Tigris-side town of Hasankeyf – continually threatened by a planned hydroelectric dam, which will sink this amazing place of cave dwellings, towers and tombs if it goes ahead (help plan that it does not, although the last news is that the plan has been discarded) – some local children, after successfully relieving me of all my strawberries after finding out I had no pens, were responsible for laying down thumb tacks on the floor that luckily resulted in only two wheels being punctured. One of these was so slow to lose air I did not realize until hours before I returned the vehicle to the car agency. At the time I had parked the car to visit the startling blue tomb of Zeynel Bey, who was the eldest son of Uzun Hasan, who, in turn, was a 15th-century sultan of the Aq Qoyunlu dynasty of everyone’s favourite Orghuz people of the White Sheep Turkmen, who as all students know hardly ever got on with the rival Black Sheep Turkmen. I do not think Hasan ever came to Hasankeyf, despite the names, and Zeynel was killed in action in 1473, five years before his father died – amazingly peacefully, which is a word that cannot possibly describe the bloodshed that then took place between his remaining sons for his vacant throne.
Also amazingly was that opposite the tomb, which was being repaired, was a small mechanic's hut. After prayers, he fixed up the wheel, but on the next day as I drove some 10 miles away, I realised the wheel was unaligned and the steering therefore was faulty. Back I went. The mechanic, who was the nicest person, was frightfully apologetic.
After Lake Ataturk, the D360 continues. I was on the lookout for a turn to Karadut, which in turn led up increasingly smaller roads to one of the great archaeological finds of the late 19th Century – Nemrut Dagi. But before I reached it, I made a wrong turn, which is the reason I started to take some travel notes while in the minute village of Salkimbagi, snot-faced children (no thumb tacks … I was checking) tapping on the window.
Nemrut Dagi’s statues are on the top of a bare, somewhat forlorn, windswept, 7,000-foot-high mountain. The hillside also contains one of the loneliest WCs on the planet, although it cannot compare with the one I came across in the Gobi Desert a few miles west of the Great Wall of China’s final fort (from thereon in, medieval Silk Road travellers, you are on your own!) at Yangguan. A few people trickled up the steep, rocky hillside to Nemrut Dagi, the final and only marker of the long-forgotten Commagene people, this 1st Century BC tomb site honouring King Antiochus I. In fact it gives him far more honour than his life deeds merit, with statues of gods, including Hercules and Apollo, accompanying a 30-foot-high statue of himself. Standing around are other huge statues with pointy beards and cool headgear and representing eagles and other animals. His remains have never been located.
Today, Nemrut Dagi makes for an epic adventure, though, so I am not criticising Antiochus I’s ego one little bit – although what I find more amazing is how the German Charles Sester ever found these grey statues camouflaged perfectly amid thousands of square acres of identical rock and not – to my knowledge – even on the highest point hereabouts. “I’ll just have a wander, see what I see,” he might have muttered one afternoon before disappearing for a fortnight. That said, one thing I have learnt about travelling over all the years of good fortune I have had the opportunity to do so is that everywhere you think you have been, and only you have been, someone else has always got there before you – and usually a German!