The best things in life are free

Theo’s blog – The best things in life are free.

Today I had two sublime experiences which any traveller in Turkey who ventures beyond Istanbul or the holiday beaches can access, without spending a lira on anything but travel.

Having taken a train through the endless folded hills and plains of “the Asian side”, which I last saw gazing down from a plane when the band flew back from touring India in 2003 (mine and Shannon’s last flights), we arrived in Konya. It’s a large thriving modern city on the southern Anatolian plains, and it’s theoretically less than an hours travel away from the site of the earliest known human settlement in Eurasia – Catalhoyuk.

Although Catalhoyuk is a top UNESCO heritage site, negotiating the rural bus system to find it almost defeated us, and we arrived at the isolated spot in the heat of midday, with no idea how we would ever get back to our hostel, The Hosteleda, 40km away.  At first site it seemed hopelessly abandoned. A huge swanky visitors complex and cafe promised online was still under construction, and the rusted wire entrance to the site, which had fired my imagination since I first read about it in The Chalice and The Blade by Riane Eisler in 1992, was unattended.  So we just walked in.

But we soon discovered a lone Turkish speaking worker sheltering in the shade, and she introduced us to Duncan, a young, passionate Albanian archaeologist who happily told us everything he knew.  This included some recent discoveries (that he told us with some impatience had not yet been published,) relating to the lifespans of the people there, 9000 years ago, and evidence that they had supported the elderly and infirm as a matter of course.

Before we visited the museum display, we walked up to the canvass dome that protects the excavated part of the ancient town, which for 2000 years housed 5000 to 8000 souls, farming, hunting and fishing in the surrounding lands. It’s indescribably awesome to touch that world, and unfinished jigsaw picture being pieced together bit by bit of how our first town dwellers lived, and how they may have seen the world – not based on speculation or projection, but on solid evidence refined and revised with each new discovery.  An on-site museum and reconstructed Neolithic town-houses complete the incomplete picture.

Here were people who lived together, often into their 50s, in densely packed clay houses where the walls were beautifully decorated, there were no weapons or fortifications, and no central authority or social class hierarchy as we would understand it;  Where natural forces were honoured without structured religion and the dead were buried in the clay beneath the homes of the living, so that each new generation stood, literally, on the shoulders of their ancestors.

It was a strange moment when the Moslem call to prayer echoed across the surrounding fields from the speakers of a distant minaret, and me and Rosa imagined how all our bustling world of screens and high speed trains and supermarkets and precision guided missiles had grown out of these egalitarian beginnings, as similar settlements multiplied across the continent.

“Wherever you are, be the soul of that place. Wherever you are, sanctify that place with your heart.” – Rumi

7000 years later, a different human world occupied southern Turkey, part of an Islamic culture that stretched all the way to Tajikistan on the border of China.  That’s when the famous much-quoted poet Rumi came to live in Konya. The rituals of the so-called whirling dervishes came from his mystical insights, becoming one with God through meditation in hypnotic spinning dance.

I’d heard of them, but had no idea about them, and I couldn’t believe it when, after a long hot journey by taxi and bus back to Konya, we dragged ourselves out again to a free weekly “cultural event” at the Mevlana cultural centre next to Rumi’s burial place, and found ourselves present at beautiful, ecstatic and transcendent whirling dervish ceremony, where Sufi singers, musicians and dancing initiates took us out of this world….or deeper into it.

Turns out that Konya was the home of 2 of my favourite inspirations: the fact that primitive Neolithic communism once existed and thrived amount our ancestors, and the profound compassionate wisdom of Rumi and the Sufi saints – and both can be experienced absolutely for free!

“ I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and became animal,
I died as animal and I was human.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying? “  – Rumi