A LITTLE SIDE TRIP IN TURKEY

One of the places in Turkey that we found exceptionally interesting was a little town named Iznik, which is located south and a little east of Istanbul, across the Sea of Marmara and about 18 miles south of the Marmara shoreline. It's a tiny town of about 16,000 people and off the beaten path for tourists. But Jerry and I found it to be one of our favorite places, and we kept returning to it, even though it was a long drive away. Our driver, Ahmet, was always with us to drive and care for us as we explored his country. He always said he was really getting an education by working for us, as he had hardly seen any other part of his own country than Istanbul.

Iznik is thought to have been founded about 1000 BC. Originally called Nicaea after the wife of one of Alexander the Great's generals, it later became Nicomedia and eventually Iznik. There is a really interesting museum in town, and it was at that museum that we learned of the tomb pictured above and below.

In 1960, while bulldozing the hillside for fill dirt, this old Byzantine tomb was discovered. Luckily its historical worth was recognized quickly and the cement work was placed around it for its preservation and protection. The tomb dates from the late 300's A.D. Ahmet arranged for a museum guide to take us to the tomb, which was kept under lock and key. The guide allowed us to go inside and had no objection to my using a flash camera, which surprised me.

Really lovely Byzantine murals covered the inside walls. It was undoubtedly the tomb of a wealthy family. Some damage has occured over the years from vandalism but overall it has been decently preserved. At the bottom of the picture you can see where one of the owners had been buried. There is a similar crypt on the other side of the tomb.

With my own personal interest in cemeteries and burial places, I was totally taken with this tomb, as well as with a totally different kind of burial place shown in the photo below, which was taken in Sille just outside of Konya. Konya is in the south central part of Turkey, northeast of Antalya on the coast and southwest of Ankara, the capital of Turkey. We were in Sille in the dead of winter. It was frosty cold and everything was brown and dead. This picture shows a burial ground. What looks like little cactus plants growing over the hillside are really the headstones of tombs.

As I understand it, the Muslim idea of headstones is to have them made of impermanent material, available and in good condition as long as there are people alive who remember and honor the deceased, but just as the deceased's physical body eventually ceases to exist, and the people who remember him disappear, so does the marker that indicates his burial place. Therefore what appears to the Western eye as a very unkept place is simply being what it is supposed to be....representative of the life cycle of all things.

From time to time here I will provide photos of other tombs, crypts, mausoleums, cemeteries and such that I found so very interesting. I have that kind of interest in cemeteries here in the US too, but certainly in Turkey there are just layers and layers of time periods in which the remnants of burial practices can be seen. Photographing them was one of my favorite pastimes!

Ahmet was very uncomfortable with cemeteries but he was a trooper. He mostly stayed near the car rather than to go exploring with us, but he never complained. For that we were grateful.