Kızıldağ National Park

From Eğirdir Gölü we head further east to the Kızıldağ National Park. The weather has become decent and we dare hike up the Kızıldağ Mountain (500 steep meters in altitude, view details here) and are rewarded with a breathtaking view over the Beysehir Gölü and the Taurus Mountains around it). In this case, pictures are worth a thousand words indeed…

We spend another day in the National Park. Weather-wise, this is definitely a low point since we entered Turkey, and packing up our camper the next morning at 7 o’clock in the morning with 4°C and all kinds of rain drizzling out of the clouds engulfing us definitely feels like a chore. But we it’s good to have had another quiet day, as we know that we have a few busy days ahead of us on our way back south through the Taurus Mountains…

Çatalhöyük

We head east one last time and the sky soon clears as we steadily lose altitude. We drive past Konya and after about 2.5 hours we reach the historical site of Çatalhöyük, one of the absolute highlights of our journey so far.

Çatalhöyük is centrally located in the region that will later be known as the Fertile Crescent. At the end of the Pleistocene here here created extremely favorable conditions that enabled Homo sapiens, who had previously lived in larger groups as nomadic or semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, to settle down here. This step, together with accompanying inventions such as agriculture, farming and the more intensive domestication of certain animal and plant species, marked the beginning of a new era, the Neolithic, and the starting point for a revolution in human history, at the end of which, among others, two specimens of the species Homo sapiens can be seen visiting the very region that was once the scene of this global upheaval.

Çatalhöyük was a Neolithic settlement of around 3000 to 8000 people who lived here from 7500 BC to 5600 BC, with its peak around 7000 BC, making it the oldest known proto-city in the world. We first visit the museum next to the excavation site. The lack of finds from Çatalhöyük (all of which are abroad, in Ankara or Konya) is compensated for by a didactically excellent and visually appealing exhibition about the Neolithic period, the settlement of Çatalhöyük (only 5% of which has been archaeologically excavated to date), the houses and the lives of those who lived here around 380 generations ago. Afterwards, we visit the northern hill, which is open to visitors, and are grateful for the context provided by the museum, because without it, you really couldn’t begin to understand the seemingly insignificant remains of walls and holes in the ground.

Çatalhöyük was one of the places I really wanted to visit before the trip and I’m glad we took the detour north, away from the coast. And especially the really good and newly built museum makes the visit an even more impressive experience. Fascinating!

Back to the coast

Deviating from our original plan to stay overnight near Çatalhöyük (the reason being that we really, really didn’t want to wake up in the snow the next morning, as forecast…), we drive another 1.5 hours further south. We cover many kilometers today and the landscape around us changes dramatically. The region around Çatalhöyük is really dreary: the landscape is charaterize by monotonous monocultures with huge irrigation systems, devastated fields and, again and again, incredible amounts of garbage, which is plundered by stray dogs. In the distance the Taurus Mountains tower massively in front of us and we cross them in the early evening. We find a nice camping spot in the hills near the town of Mut and enjoy a wonderful evening with mild temperatures (finally!). We spend another half day here relaxing in the sun and then drive back to the coast to Taşucu, where we are due to take the ferry to Cyprus that night.