Clark Kent in real trouble now...

I've been into this before - the difficulties in finding decent phone booths in which to turn into Superman... but this just confirms that the times are just against him!

Cool setting for a phone, though...

Doors or Urfa

Traditional carved wooden doors from Urfa. They could also be used as window shutters, creating a lovely screen around a balcony.

The park surrounding the ponds

A peaceful park, as I said, even if it was frequented by a lot of people.

Gold market

Travelling teaches you new things every day - I really didn't ever suspect a family member of mine had a gold shop in Sanliurfa! ;-)

Below is an interior from inside the covered bazaar.

Balikli Göl

The sacred fish-ponds have a very pretty setting surrounded by mosques and medreses and outside those, gardens with the possibility to drink tea or even have a meal. And with the fabulously warm winter weather we had, we took all the opportunities we had to hang out here, watching people, cats and fish! This is the main pond in the area and the one most depicted.

Ichtyolatry - the Abrahamic carps of Urfa

These are the sacred carps in the pond in Sanliurfa, associated with the profet Abraham in popular tradition. According to the legend, Abraham was hurled from the castle on the hill above into a fire below, but God turned the fire to water with the fishes in, thus saving him! Nowadays, the ponds are located in a nice park with teagardens and boats for families. Several mosques surround the area. A popular pastime is to feed the fish and watch them churn and jump to catch food being thrown in - fish-food is readily available from sellers by the ponds.

Holocaust Remembrance day

Today is the international day for remembering victims of the Holocaust.

Please do.

Sorrowful news this week, too

Ryszard Kapuscinski, a travel journalist of many years, books and insights of the world, died the other day. A Nobel Prize to him for a lifetime of writing was one of my favourite thoughts for the future prize awards. We will miss his acute observations. Rest in peace.

And my favourite radio-programme has an interview with him on their webpage (in Swedish).

Sheep!

Travelling in the week before Kurban Bayrami (Id el-Adha, for those of you more versed in Arabic than Turkish) sheep was a recurring theme!

Euphrates

Some images of the mighty river, the Euphrates! The glimpses in Birecik earlier the same day were my first actually, and it really lived up to my wild expectations, especially from Rumkale. The magnificence of the gorge is not lost...




Additionally, you can look at my earlier posts: Father Firat and Civilization

Halfeti mosque

The proximity of the village to the dam gives the whole place a slightly surreal touch. Nowhere was this more apparent than by the mosque, which was knee-deep in water as can be clearly seen in these pictures. (I'm still not friendly enough with the new blogger-version to change the order of them as I would have liked them though, for full visual effect...). It seems as though some kind of wall is being erected round it and we speculated that attempts to drain the water and regain use of the mosque were planned.

Eski Halfeti

Halfeti has almost a seaside look, with the dam having crept up on the village (but many people and functions have moved 9 km up the hill to a "new" Halfeti). Lakeside restaurants and rental boats to Rumkale can be found here.

Punky ibis

Birecik is also famous for hosting a breeding station for the near-extinct baldheaded ibis. We didn't have time to go and see it, but the birds where visible in both modern and ancient images pretty much everywhere. They didn't look too bald to me, though!

10th anniversary!

Re:Orient club, the centre of Stockholms oriental music scene, tonight celebrates it's 10th anniversay. Not being there feels a bit odd, actually. So, those of you who are, dance for me too!

On the road!

A glimpse of us while travelling. Both the pictures were taken in Halfeti, on the Birecik dam (more about it to come). Note the fabulous weather, this was Dec 18! We were sooo lucky on this point the whole week, normally the risk of snow closing the roads would have been great.

Birecik on the Euphrates

Birecik is not a big or important town. In fact, I believe it's main claim to fame is the bridge crossing the Euphrates. For us it was a convenient place to stay and enable a detour up the Euphrates, between Gaziantep and Sanliurfa.

Condolences

I would like to offer my most sincere condolences to the family of Hrant Dink and to the people of Turkey after the tragic murder of Hrant Dink (Turkish-Armenian writer). Hrant Dink was shot dead in Istanbul yesterday and had previously been under threat, as well as charged for "insulting Turkishness" in the course of publication of bilingual Agos. The murder has been widely condemned and commented both nationally and internationally (the links contain some examples of reactions).

Additional comments here: from opendemocracy, Swedish radio, Dagens Nyheter

Do not let the perpetrators of this crime set the agenda!

More Zeugma samples

Not all the photos turned out well unfortunately, but I think you can get some idea of the grandeur of the rescued mosaics through these pictures.

Here, I love the diagonally set centre-piece and the meandering patterns (also here, ancient patterns resembling swastikas could be discerned here and there).


The magnificent animal pictures!

This was one of my personal favourites, with the intertwined lacy frame and the centre-piece actually showing depth! So cool!

And the finely detailed human figures, here.

Award for exhibition production

My congratulations to the exhibition producer and to the museum management for such an exquisite production! The display, the lighting and the setup are fantastic! The only thing I can personally imagine to rival this would be an outdoor in situ display at the excavation site of Zeugma, on the Euphrates. But, as I understand it the site is now at least partially flooded through the dam constructed - so this is as good as it gets.

Below, you can see also another damaged mosaic with pieces missing, where scholars and museum staff are searching for the centre-piece and hoping to replace it with the rest of the collection.

Found and returned

This mosaic had maybe the most amazing history of all on display at the Gaziantep museum (remember I previously showed Euphrates the river god and the girl whose image has become the exhibition signature?). The Zeugma rescue excavations found basically only the frame of this piece and the feet of the figures in it - the rest of the image was blank and presumed to have been stolen by antique-robbers. Later, the remaining piece was identified in a private US museum and returned to the collection in Gaziantep, as you can see below! It had been there since the early 1960's when it had apparently been taken from the site on the Euphrates and sold on an art market which was maybe at the time less conscientious about sources than most would be today. Happy endings are nice!

Details of the house

Very fine details in the work on the traditional house were apparent everywhere. Look at this tap and basin for instance, not to mention the oil barrels in the cellar seen below!

The wars we (almost) all forgot

The Swedish branch of Medecins sans Frontieres, Läkare utan Gränser, has earlier this week launched a report on the wars and crises that don't receive a lot of media-attention and thus risk being forgotten completely, despite the painn inflicted on the populations of whole countries or regions. Read it and help us see and remember, please.

Annual human rights report

This year's report from Human Rights Watch has been released today. Read, ponder and spread the word!

Traditional Antep house

This typical Antep house, built around a courtyard, is now a museum. Very pretty buildings, and nicely displayed, actually, giving a picture of traditional urban life.

Murder at the museum??

This, rather gruesome, guy we met on display in the Gaziantep museum! Not to mention his gaudy headgear...

Just so you don't believe that the mosaics (of which I have showed some but more are to come) were all they had!

Baklavaci

Not only did we eat delicious Antep baklava - we also watched it being made. After making 6 och 7 twisted rolls of thin strands of dough and pistachio-filling crammed in circles into the tray, they were baked with honey. Ooooo.....

Emission right christmas success!

This story in todays Dagens Nyheter about how the emission rights for carbon dioixide that I previously wrote about became a popular Christmas gift in Sweden this year! Now that is holiday spirit I wish to wholly support and I am very happy for this!

Gaziantepspor

Football is religion in Turkey - so what more important than the city team's home arena?

Heroic Antep

Returning to our journey, we visited a museum in Gaziantep which displayed details of life in the historic city. One memento from the independence war against the French in Syria was this early motorcycle.