Archaeology Some building works threaten Turkish antiquities. Others save them

I T WAS 2009 and Antakya, a city in southern Turkey understood in antiquity as Antioch, was thriving. Travelers were visiting it in record numbers. Trade with neighbouring Syria was booming. Picking up an opportunity, Necmi Asfuroglu, a local entrepreneur, decided to construct an upmarket hotel on land that he had actually owned given that the 1990 s. The plot was just a couple of hundred metres from the Grotto of St Peter, among the world’s earliest churches.

Before construction might start, a group of archaeologists was called in to analyze the site. They excavated a damaged amphora here, a statue there, and practically everywhere colourful mosaic pieces, spread out throughout an area of some 17,000 square metres. By the time they had actually completed, they had discovered parts of what had actually when been the heart of Antioch, among the biggest cities of the Roman empire. The finds consisted of a bathhouse, a big marble-floored forum, thousands of artefacts and the world’s biggest floor mosaic.

With these discoveries, Mr Asfuroglu’s plans failed. “We had to reconsider whatever,” he states. Rather than stroll away from the job, he asked an Istanbul architect, Emre Arolat, to create a structure that would accommodate both a modern hotel and a historical museum. Construction began in 2010, but stopped once again for practically 2 years after workers stumbled upon another amazing mosaic, depicting a winged Pegasus attended by three nymphs. It lastly ended earlier this year.

Archaeology Rooms with a view

For Mr Arolat, the difficulty was to find an architectural language that merged what he calls the “spiritual” of a historical site and the “profane” of a business venture. For motivation, he states, he wanted to a museum showcasing the middle ages ruins of a Norwegian town, created by Sverre Fehn, and the paths around the Castle devised by Dimitris Pikionis. The result is a hybrid that exemplifies how preservation and commerce can beneficially coexist.

From the outside, the “museum hotel” that Mr Arolat created resembles a steel and glass Jenga tower resting on its side and stacked with long rectangular blocks the size of shipping containers, each housing a hotel room. The interior is a vast open space criss-crossed by bridges and sidewalks that neglect the mosaics and ruins below. The entire structure rests on over 60 columns. One entrance serves the hotel, another the publicly available museum.

In Turkey, where the earth bursts with the relics of dozens of ancient civilisations– and where over the past number of decades the economy has been powered by a construction frenzy– development routinely takes priority over heritage. This hierarchy applies to little and mega-projects alike. A few years back, when the discovery of 3 lots Byzantine shipwrecks and a Neolithic settlement from the sixth millennium BC delayed the opening of a tunnel under the Bosporus, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, scolded the researchers who triggered “3 to 5 pots and pans” to hold up progress. More recently, flooding from a hydroelectric dam on the Tigris river has actually started to submerge one of the longest constantly lived in put on Earth, a 12,000- year-old town in Turkey’s south-east.

Yet for all the cultural depredations that they sometimes entail, development jobs can conserve ancient treasures, too. Undoubtedly, reckons Gul Pulhan, an archaeologist at the British Institute at Ankara, a research study centre, such ventures are ending up being the only manner in which archaeology can be done. Administration partly explains that paradox: foreign and regional researchers who make an application for excavation permits in Turkey need to jump through many hoops. (The memory of European archaeologists who ransacked Ottoman lands in the 18 th and 19 th centuries may be to blame for this rigmarole.) Another reason is cash. “Throughout the world, there is less and less cash readily available for historical work,” states Ms Pulhan. Turkey is no exception.

The outlook changes, however, when an industrial or facilities scheme is at stake. “The bureaucracy is lighter and friendlier since they wish to support those jobs,” Ms Pulhan states. Financing is likewise available quicker, considering that designers in Turkey and in other places are required by law to cover the costs of excavation (though regularly they shelve their strategies to prevent the expense). In Antakya, a necropolis uncovered throughout previous building and construction ultimately became a museum. In Istanbul a hotel job just recently discovered a Byzantine roadway. In London, meanwhile, Bloomberg’s brand-new headquarters includes a Roman temple, which is open to the general public.

Bankrolling archaeology in this way is not an ideal option. Excavation threats being rushed, due to the fact that financiers wish to proceed with the task. Archaeologists might be lured or required to cut corners. However improvisations like the museum hotel in Antakya may be the very best available method. “Had it not been for that task, most likely none of those things would have been unearthed,” states Ms Pulhan.

Seeing it through to the end was hard. Quickly after building and construction started, war broke out across the border in Syria, sending countless refugees into Turkey and deterring tourism. The economy took a turn for the worse. Because of the excavations, the delays and the modifications to the style, “we had to invest three times more than we prepared,” recalls Mr Asfuroglu’s daughter, Sabiha Asfuroglu Abbasoglu, who managed the advancement. The final expense came to $120 m.

” We had to sell some of our other residential or commercial properties, but we never provided up,” Ms Abbasoglu states, standing beside the site’s centrepiece, a giant mosaic that appears to drift above ground like a magic carpet, the result of centuries of earthquakes and floods that caused a few of its parts to increase and others to sink. Ms Abbasoglu states she hopes the result will be an example to others. The next designer who stumbles upon a couple of pots and pans may wish to bear in mind. ■