Havza

My only picture of Havza:
looking out from the restaurant I had a delicious red lentil soup

With all my experiences of the “tumulus” graves and the clay coffins at Samsun Museum, I was determined to go see the 5 more tumulus graves that were located in Lerduke Village in Havza. Havza is a town of the Samsun Province and located towards the inner land, not by the sea. It is famous with its healing natural hot springs and many people go to their baths all around the year to get healthier. I had no interest in the hot springs whatsoever: after all we have them back in my hometown also (Turkey is actually covered with them in every region: every one has waters healing a different kind of ailment.) All I wanted was to go inside those tumulus graves. I realized it would be hard to get there and considered not attempting at all and continuing East after Samsun on the Black Sea shore, instead of going South/inland. I planned to ask around in Samsun bus station about the Lerduke village, and then decide accordingly.

The first person I found from Havza the town had a communication problem. Either he didn’t understand what I was saying, or if he did, either he didn’t want to help or didn’t know how to put words into a sentence that would make sense. It is very common in Turkey that if you ask something to someone, if they don’t know t they don’t want to accept that they don’t. Instead of accepting their “ignorance” (in their minds), they lie. You ask directions and they send you to the wrong places just because they can’t say that they don’t know. So I don’t know if this was the case with this man from Havza, but it felt to me that it was more than that. I felt so very foreign, so much “the other” who did not belong to this area, this culture. This feeling was reinforced when finally a second man jumped into our torturous “conversation” and told me he knows about the village. I asked him about the tumulus graves and with a sarcastic pride, he said he doesn’t know because he was not interested in those kinds of things. He was openly and actually saying that “I” was the weird one looking for some weird sounding old graves. At least he knew such a village existed and that I could take a mini-bus from Havza to the village. So I decided to go. Slept through the 90 minute ride and arrived in Havza at around 1 pm. After leaving my suitcase in a hotel (way up on a hill) I came down to the city center to go to Lerduke and found out that nobody knows about those graves. With much difficulty I found the vehicle and people from the village and none of them knew about the graves. They said even if I go to Lerduke, there was no returning bus to Havza today.

Apparently I was facing one another bitter piece of the state of affairs in archeology in Turkey: I read about these graves in a Samsun City Book which said that the precious findings at these grave sites are exhibited today in the capital Ankara and that there were also paintings on the walls of the graves. What probably happened is that after the findings were moved to the big city museum, the sites were closed or forgotten, depending on their location: if the grave sites are far from the village and hard to reach they were probably just left and forgotten there and if they are closer to the village, they were probably closed in some way so people won’t go in them. I can think of three reasons for this loss of finding an ancient beauty and then after taking the “precious artifacts” closing/forgetting about it: the first and most important one is ignorance and lack of awareness. The museums are owned and run by government and their policy is to put all the artifacts in a building and call it a museum. Even those museums are just sad creatures (I once saw a female head pasted on top of a male body of a Greek sculpture using an ugly pink mortar, and this was in Istanbul Archeological Museum, supposedly one of the best in Turkey.) And when it comes to the actual sites, there is no awareness of and -I will go further to claim that- no respect for history. We don’t know how to exhibit things and what is done is often random.  In Samsun inside of one of the Amisos Graves I was so very hurt to see those lamps, for example. If there is one thing I learned in art school it is that whatever you put inside of a space it will add/change the entire meaning/look/feeling of it. So most Turks will not notice how ugly, disrespectful and distracting those lamps are in this 2,000 year old grave.

Of course, lack of awareness is followed by ignorance: we also don’t know how to do things when it comes to dealing with precious ancient history. When I talked to someone from Tekkekoy village after seeing those ancient caves, he said they would start building around those caves and make it nice. He said they would make cafes and restaurants around it, put lights everywhere and make paths to reach the caves. I was so sad to hear all of this because I can imagine how they will build all of this. On one side the thousand year old caves from the Neolithic age, which are invisible with the terribly kitsch looking restaurant. It will be almost like they are using the caves as a backdrop so people can come eat at that restaurant. No respect for the quiet magic of those mountain caves and of course, I’m sure along the way to construction they will destroy many caves and ancient steps/pathways. But hey, we have a lot of those caves anyway, what is the big deal if we destroy one or two?

That is, in my opinion, the second reason why things are in such a bad shape: Turkey just has A LOT of history. So ancient, so many, layer by layer, from many ancient cultures and everywhere. Many still not discovered. So when something is just everywhere, we just take it for granted. Since we already have a lot everywhere, we loose our interest in taking care of them and/or displaying them properly. Even I am tired of seeing any more Greek sculptures, however gorgeous they are, and in a museum the Greece section is the one I walk past quickly. I grew up on the Aegean coast of Turkey and as long as I am unable to look at them fresh, I don’t find them exciting any more.

The fact that we have too many historical sites also ties to money. There is just not enough money to take care of all of them properly. Many times I couldn’t see sections in museums because there was no budget for enough the personnel, so they simply closed half of the museum. Or they start renovations but the money runs out so the renovation waits for months, keeps the museums closed. In my case today, to make those Lerduke Village grave sites available to public requires money and since every other village has some ancient grave/house/cave/town/castle etc., it is very difficult to find that much money for each one of them.

I still think though this is an awareness issue. If we Turks were aware of what we are sitting on this land, we would find the money and make it possible. We are simply ignorant. The amazing history of this land is NOT a part of our identity. We don’t OWN it. We don’t get it.

I don’t think I get it either.