Excavations of an ancient city near İzmir have brought out hidden talents in local residents who now spend their summers as amateur archaeologists instead of whiling their days away in the village coffee shops.
With the dig ongoing for nearly two decades, children who have grown up at the site are making contributions to the ongoing work as well.
The daughter of Vasfiye Usta, the site’s cook, has become an expert at cleaning ceramics, while Fatma Yetim, who is responsible for keeping the site house clean, has also worked for years washing historical artifacts. Gürhan Eygay, the son of İbrahim Ergay, who guided Professor Recep Meriç when he first started the excavations 20 years ago, has innovated his own railroad system at the site to help carry out the debris faster. All say their work at the dig site has deepened their interest in history.
“The professors inform us about our findings and we have slowly learned to identify objects,” said Muammer Balcı, 50. “I can immediately identify the objects I take out and separate them according to their period, be it Hellenistic, Byzantine or Roman. I prefer Hellenistic objects and am happy when I find one.”
Balcı’s sentiments are shared by many locals, who said they prefer Hellenistic artifacts to ones from the Byzantine period. The village of Yeniköy in İzmir’s Torbalı district, where the excavations of the ancient city of Metropolis are being conducted, is home to 1,500 people, many of whom are involved in the excavations, which start in the summer, when academic personnel come to the region, and continue until the beginning of the school year. The four-month summer period thus sees neighborhood chatter shift from the tomatoes in the fields to the artifacts in the ground.
Workers such as the Yeniköy villagers often carry out the first layer of digging at an archaeological site, so their professional and careful actions are important so as not to damage the objects hidden beneath the earth.
Though some of the workers do not even have a primary-school diploma, they have interesting stories and knowledge that the archaeologists have come to value.
“It is as if they can smell [the objects],” Serdar Aybek, the head of the excavations, said of the villagers. “They are as important to us as archaeologists. We prefer them to inexperienced archaeology students.”
Villager Recep Canbaz, 51, proudly described one dig in which he participated. “One time, we descended four meters down, thinking there was a theater there. At one point, the [excavation team] decided to stop, thinking it was not there,” Canbaz said. “I insisted and found the ancient theater. In fact, I sat down on the first seat we found. You know how people cheer when they find oil – that was the way I cheered.”
Excavation chief Aybek described another villager worker as an amateur archaeologist. “He separates all objects according to their periods. He will help the inexperienced archaeology student,” the excavation head said.
“My professors say I have a computer in front of my shovel. I can feel whether it is a sculpture or column from the first appearance of the stone,” said Canbaz, who received an appreciation plaque from the late Sakıp Sabancı, one of Turkey’s most prominent businessmen.
His fellow villager Balcı is appreciated for his eyesight. “They tell me, ‘You have an eye like a projector.’ The sculptures we unearthed in the theater and the hamam [Turkish bath] have excited me tremendously,” he said, adding that he has been helping archaeology students at the site. “They learn from books, we learn from digging,” he said.
Merve Güzel, a third-year archaeology student who is interning at the excavations, agrees that what the students learn is often too theoretical.
“I saw here how practice can [be more important than] theory,” she said, explaining how Balcı helped her. “He helped me learn how to unearth a mosaic, how to deal with it. He showed me the materials. Whenever I backed up, afraid I might damage a mosaic, he motivated me and encouraged me to continue.”
“They help us finding the coins,” said archaeologist Yeşim Ulaş, who worked with Balcı on the protection of mosaics. “I learned how to make gypsum plaster. He obtains a plaster by an interesting method of adapting the plaster of ancient times to contemporary material. We use that material in the protection of mosaics.”
At 68, Recep Karana has been working at the excavations for the last 13 years. “Excavations are fun; I really like it when I find something,” he said, adding: “At one stage we found many graves in the acropolis; that made me a bit uncomfortable.” During the winter season, he digs graves in the village or distributes wedding invitations.
Muzaffer Taşcan works at the excavations during the summer and guards the site in winter. He used to work in the fields until he started to work at the site 13 years ago. “My heart beats each time I start digging. You can’t just dig like that. I make tiny calculations,” he said. “One day, the students said, ‘Stop digging, we are at the bottom.’ But I saw ants coming up. I said, ‘I will continue; if ants come upward, then there is a space below,’ and I continued to dig.”
About the ancient city
The history of the ancient city of Metropolis dates back to the Neolithic Age. Artifacts found there bear the traces of the first settlements, the Classical Age, the Hellenistic Age and the Roman and Byzantine empires, all the way up to the Anatolian Turkish Beyliks and the Ottoman era.
Parts of buildings, epitaphs, statues, coins and glass and ceramic objects unearthed during the excavation works are now exhibited in the İzmir Art and History Museum, the İzmir Archaeology Museum and the Selçuk Ephesus Museum. The 2010 excavation program focuses on the assembly hall (Bouleuterion) that is the official center of the city, the Stoic terrace and the Roman bath and Palaestra, a facility comprising the bath and an area for sporting activities.
At the center of the preservation and restoration efforts are the mosaic galleries of a structure decorated with geometrical patterns.
The father of the dig
The advice of Recep Meriç’s Austrian archaeology professor encouraged him to start research on Metropolis that led to the ancient city being unearthed. Meriç, now 66, first went to the site in 1972, when it was only fields.
“I took pictures of the mosaic found by the locals. I cleaned some of the walls and did research for four years without any digging. After I finished my doctorate, I forgot about it and started teaching in the university,” he said.
Meriç than received a phone call from the local mayor in 1989, asking him to head the team that would start the excavations. He left the mission in 2006 to Serdar Aybek, with whom he had worked for many years.
