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Nemrut Dagi, Turkey
Monday, Aug 29, 2005

The Big Heads

David Murray
2007-02-21 19:45:28

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Irish Sarah gave me three pieces of advice before we left her.

1) Do not catch night buses
2) Do not waste your time seeing Nemrut Dagi
3) Do not visit Harran

We had caught a day bus to Urfa as we needed to be here to do the tour to Nemrut Dagi. I took her first piece of advice, but I had to see if the heads were not worth it.

We wanted to do a day tour from Urfa to Nemrut and back again but there was only a 2 day tour. We pondered and thought fuck it, we want to see it and we would get the added bonus of a sunset and sunrise. Sold !!!

We left with two Italians who came from near Bologna - Home of Ducati - So they were ok. There English was as good as my Italian, so it was going to be fun. We had a driver by the name of Yusef. His English was superb, so we were in for a good time.

Our first stop was to look at the Atta Turk Dam. It is quite big but does it really need to be made. I wondered this because as good as a dam can be by supplying people with water, there were archeology sites here in Turkey that were being lost forever. It was huge and kind of impressive though. We moved on and went to look at the Euprates river. We were offered the chance to swim, but the water was ice cold as it comes down from the mountains. We drove on until we came to Karakus. There were a few statues and that had been there a couple of 1000 years. These belonged to the Commagene Kingdom, which is what the heads of Nemrut belonged to. After the photos were taken, we drove down to a village that had an old Roman bridge. It used to be all original, and all of the local transport used to go over it until a petrol tanker made it collapse. It has been rebuilt and was pretty impressive. We had a quick look at a couple of old castles, but one collapsed on a load of Americans, so now you can only admire them from the outside. Around the corner, we saw our next set of statues. There was also a couple of caves with tunnels down them. Whilst walking around, Lucy broke her sandal. Memories of South East Asia and all of the work I had done to mine were coming back to me. I had had mine repaired many times until I chucked them, and there was nobody around here to fix them, so she was fucked. How was she going to climb a mountain to look at some heads and to watch the sun go down. Once down, Yusef said he had a spare pair, they were mens, such is life !!!!! He asked me what I had and I told him that I had sandals as well. He said I would not make it to the top with them. I laughed.

We had 16 K's before we made it to the top of the hill. It was straight up. It took around 2 hours. There were many cars pulled over and their engines were overheating, but Yusef kept going to the top. Then we arrived. Lucy donned her new shoes, very sexy numbers, and we walked 500 metres up to the Eastern Terrace. Up the top we saw the heads. They were all toppled off of their bodies. They are nearly 2 metres in height. Hard to explain really. We walk around until we came to the Western Terrace. There are more heads here, the bodies are not intact though. We sat down, and a crowd of people grew. We waited and watched the sun go down. It was pretty impressive. Once finished, we went back down, met Yusef and he drove us down to our hotel, where we would get a few hours sleep before going back again to see the sun come up.