Amisos

After they learned that I was traveling for pleasure, the woman and the man who served me breakfast at my hotel insisted I should go see the “Amisos Hill.” I have seen cable cars moving up and down a hill on my way to the hotel but didn’t know what it was. They also told me about the caves in the village Tekkekoy. So I decided to stay one more day in Samsun, took my luggage back up to my room after breakfast and set out for Amisos Hill first.
It was a five-minute ride up to the hill and the view was quite nice indeed. When I arrived to the top, the first thing I saw was a big restaurant with kitsch decorations all around it in the open area. The visual “noise” of the restaurant was contrasted with quiet tapered hills on the right. There was no sign showing the way to the supposedly historic site, so I choose to move away from the irritating restaurant. There was a wooden walking path built around these two hills. I walked on it for a while, looking for some old wall or ruins. I choose this way of not researching the hell out of my destination points consciously and I still enjoy it: I had no idea what a tumulus was when I arrived at Amisos. This ignorance brings an element of emptiness in my mind to be able to receive the experience without any mental pollution. If I read about Amisos before and knew all the facts of its known history and saw the images of the sites, the site would not be virgin to me any more when we first met and I would not be virgin to it. My mind would be already filled with information, causing me to inevitably have ideas, expectations and feelings about the place before I experience the place. Now, on the other hand, I was walking around like an idiot, not seeing what I was looking at.
As the wooden path curved around the two tapered hills, there were signs on them that read, “Don’t climb on the ‘tumuli’” and I was asking myself where the hell were these tumuli. I saw a piece of ancient looking walls by the side of one of these hills and immediately jumped on it and started taking pictures, happy that I found something!  Another curve on this path finally took me to the entrance of one of the tumulus graves: it turns out that those tapered hills were the sites I was looking for. To my eye they looked more or less natural, yet now I learned that they were human made hills to bury their dead inside. The first one was carved inside the hill after the hill was “made” by piling up the earth. It had three rooms connected to each other and the last one had a skeleton lying on the furthermost section from the entrance. In a few moments after I got inside, I started feeling something extraordinary. It was a physical feeling in my body, especially on my back and in my arms. I was awestruck feeling the age of this place. It wasn’t that important to know the numbers, it was just too old and I could feel it
physically in my body. The space was communicating to me through some energetic way that it was old. I felt it almost like weight, some sort of pressure squeezing my body and I must say, I was a bit scared because the intensity of it kept increasing. I walked to the innermost part, stared at the bones of the deceased and then sat down on the floor to calm myself down. I was scared and at the same time
Second tumulus was closed curious about what this feeling might be. Was it some sort of a reincarnation story, was “I” buried in a similar place in a previous life, although I don’t believe in reincarnation? Was it that something was trying to communicate to me and I was too scared to open myself to it? As I calmed my mind I immediately dropped into meditation and watched the intensity of the pressure rise in the middle of my back then suddenly end. As the pressure “released” me I got up and stared at the bones a little more. There was no sign to tell me if this skeleton was found here in this grave and although it only feels natural that it should be as it was placed in the grave now, I couldn’t help but wonder if it could be transported here from some other grave. The way the Turkish Museums work can be described most mildly as “careless” and anything can happen.  Although this was not a museum, the case might be worse than a museum as I believe the historical sites suffer more from this lack of care. The lighting inside the grave rooms were mostly located on the ground, but the two free standing lights, together with the old wheelbarrow leaning against one of the ancient walls were distracting enough. The space felt so ancient that these objects definitely did not belong here and created confusion in my experience. The walls were bare except for some relief columns.
I quietly waited until some other visitors leave and sat down on my spot one more time. The curious pressure I felt increased again and decreased in a few minutes and it didn’t disappear until I got outside. The sign outside read that this grave was dated 300-30 BC and was previously robbed so there were no findings inside. I may be becoming oversensitive in this but am wondering if our appreciation for the historic sites is parallel to the monetary value of the findings inside. I wonder if we like a site better if we find golden treasures inside. The second tumulus was closed. Needless to say I was very disappointed not to be able to get inside the second tumulus.
My experience inside the first one felt like a first step and I was hoping to find the second step, a direction or a sign in the second tumulus. There was no explanation whatsoever about why they closed the second one. There was a lock on the door, and even the bench across the entrance was “closed.” This again is quite a familiar theme when visiting historical sites and museums. I remember years ago a large section of the big Istanbul Archeological Museum was closed for months just because the museum did not have money (the government chose not to give money) to hire enough employees to work in those sections. Who knows why this tumulus was closed now. Later I learned that the many precious findings from this second tumulus were exhibited in the Samsun Museum.