Two Museums Today!

Hello!

 

Well, into all well-made travel plans, the occasional grit of sand does fall … which managed to put us a bit behind this morning.  However … to explain.  I woke up about 11:30 pm last night and decided to read my Kindle for a bit.  When I turned on my phone, however, I found that AirBnB was trying desperately to get in touch.  They had emailed me, texted me, and tried to call me – not knowing it was heading into sleeping hours in Turkiye.  Fortunately for me, I had my phone turned WAY down, so it didn’t ring.  Turns out, that the AirBnB we had rented in February in London for a week with Debby, had cancelled our reservation!  The gal had sold the place, so obviously, it wouldn’t be available … and our agent was trying desperately to get hold of me to find us a place to stay.  Literally 2 minutes after I’d read her text, she was back – at which point, I tried as best I could on 2 hours sleep to explain where we were, and when I was awake in the morning (Turkiye time) I would take steps to figure out what to do.  She had very thoughtfully provided me with multiple alternatives, but I honestly didn’t feel like getting up at that hour to pursue any of them!  I just wanted to go back to sleep – which, now, however, wasn’t really very easy to do.  I know I drifted off, though, as I had some very odd dreams, but got up around 5:30 to take a look.

 

R and I went over the choices we had been sent – always knowing that I could again spend multiple hours going over things myself, but we came up with one – with a view of the Shard (a relatively new skyscraper in London that looks like a piece of broken glass), no less! – that seemed to fit the bill. We got poor Debby out of bed (it was 10:30 pm her time, and 8:30 am here in Turkiye) via FaceTime just to warn her what was afoot, but she was amenable to the change, fortunately!  It’s in Southwark, an area of London in which we’ve never stayed, but the place checks all of the boxes – two bedrooms, two bathrooms, light and heat and all on one level and close to bus and tube lines, so we made the reservation.  It’s a new listing, but the landlords sound good, so we’ll see!  At any rate, hopefully, that is one crisis we won’t have to deal with in the next couple of days!

 

At any rate, this got us behind for the entire day!  We didn’t get down to breakfast until after 8:30 (the time we were supposed to be opening up the museum) – and the breakfast room was a mob scene!  (The nice thing about going down early is avoiding crowds!). Finally pulled ourselves together and were ready to head to the museum about 9:30 am.  Decided for convenience sake – not having to look for parking – that we would take a cab, and the hotel called one for us, which arrived promptly.  Only took a couple of minutes and we were whisked down the hill and right to the front door of the Sanliurfa Archaeological Museum!  And WOW!  What a place!  Unfortunately, like I said, we were VERY late for us, and there were quite a few people already there.  We didn’t see any tour groups at all, which I thought was unusual, but there were lots of families – fortunately for us, kids, especially small children, don’t have much patience for or interest in ancient artifacts, and we were able to linger behind until we basically had the various rooms to ourselves!

 

Stunning and huge building!

Note carving on the rock below

My favorite piece - Urfa Man!

Vulture from Karahantepe

As pre-pottery people, all they had was stone!

I love the face on this piece

Fragment on a stone bowl from Nevali Cori

Figurine from Gobeckli Type

Assortment of figures from Gobeckli Tepe

We both thought this was incredible!

Totem from Karahantepe

Man carrying leopard from Karahantepe

Loved the expression on the man's face here

Stone "plates" as they had no pottery

The first two times we had visited (granted, 10 years ago) it was in their old space – old building, bad lighting, small exhibit areas, etc.  This time?  Apparently, this museum is the biggest museum in the country – and it is incredible!  Obviously, it centers around the Sanliurfa area, but it starts with Gobeckli Tepe and Karahantepeareas, and proceeds forward in time from there.  Almost of the items are from the sites, with only of few replicas of the T-shaped monoliths on display.  It is still a jolt to remember, these people did all this sculpting without metal tools!

Ancient doorway (from roof entryway)

Small pillars from Lidar Tepe

Moving into the pottery period

"Eye" idols

 

Mold for pouring bronze

Bronze idol

Deer bowl

Actual toy carts for children!

Turns out that, thanks to the government’s idea of building multiple dams in the area to provide water for agricultural irrigation, many ancient sites such as Lidar Tepe and Nevali Cori have been covered up by water over the years.  Fortunately, rescue excavation has been allowed to proceed, and the remains of many of these excavations are displayed beautifully in the museum.

Stele from King Nabonidas originally from Harran, Türkiye

More of the exterior of the museum

 

Of course, we have many photos, which hopefully I will try to identify whenever possible!  So, not too many words today – but many, many photos, first of the museum, and then – separately - of the beautiful Mosaic Museum, which is located just down the street from the archaeology museum!

 

More with the mosaics!

 

m

xxx