Turkey: Çatalhöyük

🏛️ Leaving Konya and Heading for Cappadocia

We left Konya on a fine morning, bags stuffed back into the boot of the car after a brief detour to the Dervish Hotel to collect the bits and pieces we’d left behind the previous day. Nothing dramatic — just the usual shuffle of luggage, the obligatory check that nobody had left a passport on a bedside table, and then we were off.

The plan was to head northeast towards Cappadocia, but not before making a stop that I’d been quietly looking forward to: Çatalhöyük. It sits roughly 40 kilometres southeast of Konya, well off the main drag and buried somewhere in the wide, flat expanse of the Anatolian plain. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site — one of the most important Neolithic settlements ever unearthed — though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the approach, which consists mainly of narrow country roads, the occasional pothole, and a near-total absence of helpful signage.

I’ll be honest: without Google Maps, we would have been going round in circles until teatime. The site doesn’t exactly advertise itself.

🗺️ Arrival at the Visitor Centre

When we did finally find the place, it was immediately obvious we’d arrived somewhere rather special — or at least somewhere that had recently had a great deal of money spent on it. The visitor centre was a smart, modern affair, low-slung and designed with some care for its surroundings. Environmentally conscious, they’d call it. I just thought it looked quite good for the middle of nowhere.

The car park was almost entirely empty, which told you something about how far off the tourist trail this place really is. We weren’t complaining. There’s a particular pleasure in having somewhere historically significant almost entirely to yourself.

Inside, the staff greeted us warmly and gave us the short version of what we were about to see. As it turned out, the centre had only been open for three weeks at the point of our visit — the paint was barely dry, which explained both the smell and the slight air of people still working out where things were meant to go. Admission was free, which is always a good start, and we were offered a guided tour of the five indoor exhibition rooms. We said yes.

Our guide was a young woman named Filiz — pronounced, as she helpfully clarified, like “Phyllis.” I thought that was rather endearing.

🧭 The Tour with Filiz

Filiz was new to the guiding business. Her English was a work in progress, but she was enthusiastic and thoroughly good-natured about the whole thing, which more than compensated. She led us into the first room, which dealt with the archaeological history of the site in some depth.

The original artefacts — pottery, figurines, tools, and the like — are housed at the Anthropological Museum in Ankara. What you get at Çatalhöyük are high-quality replicas, supplemented by multimedia presentations and interactive exhibits. The information was well presented and genuinely useful.

The digging at Çatalhöyük began in 1958, led by a British archaeologist named James Mellaart. He returned for several more seasons through to 1965, and his team uncovered no fewer than 18 separate layers of settlement — one on top of another, like some kind of ancient geological sandwich — stretching back to approximately 7100 BCE at the deepest point, with the topmost layers dating to around 5600 BCE. That’s getting on for nine thousand years of people living, arguing, cooking, and generally getting on with things in roughly the same spot.

Mellaart’s later career hit something of a wall, as it happens. He became entangled in what became known as the Dorak Affair — a murky business involving allegedly looted Bronze Age treasures and a story that rather fell apart under scrutiny — and that was more or less the end of his involvement in Turkish archaeology. The site sat largely untouched for the best part of three decades before excavations resumed in 1993, this time under Professor Ian Hodder of Cambridge, who continued the work until 2018. Oversight has since passed to Professor Ali Umut Türkcan of Anadolu University, who presumably has fewer colourful controversies to his name.

Filiz was particularly keen on the interactive elements of the exhibition — touchscreens, 3D reconstructions, that sort of thing — and demonstrated each one with great enthusiasm. Karen, who is considerably more patient and open-minded than I am, engaged with every single one of them and listened attentively throughout. I, having reached an age at which I am no longer obliged to pretend to enjoy pressing buttons on museum displays, drifted off to look at the other rooms at my own pace. Nobody seemed to mind.

It later emerged, over lunch, that Filiz was 28 years old, the mother of three children, and apparently held considerable views on politics and social policy. She and Karen had got along famously. I was not entirely surprised.

🪨 Life in a Neolithic City

What makes Çatalhöyük genuinely remarkable — beyond simply being very, very old — is its layout. There were no streets. No roads. No lanes or alleyways. The houses were built in tight clusters, wall against wall, with flat rooftops that served as communal outdoor space. You didn’t enter your home through a front door; you climbed down into it through a hole in the roof via a ladder. Daily life, it seems, happened largely up top, in the open air, above the dwellings themselves.

The settlement represents a critical turning point in human history: the shift from a nomadic, hunter-gatherer existence to something more settled and agricultural. The people of Çatalhöyük kept domesticated animals, grew crops, and developed the early structures of organised community life. They appear to have had no formalised religion in the institutional sense, though there’s clear evidence of ancestor veneration — which, when you find out how they went about it, takes on a rather startling dimension.

They buried their dead beneath the floors of the houses. The actual floors, of the actual houses where people lived, cooked meals, and presumably slept. As someone with a longstanding interest in burial practices throughout history, I found this detail extraordinary — equal parts fascinating and deeply unsettling. I’m not sure how I’d feel about doing the washing up knowing Grandad was directly beneath my feet, but apparently it was simply the done thing.