August 22-26, 2004

Daily life became more a routine, but not less hectic, with most of the participants, including the excavation director already returned home. Yet, there still were three more weeks to carry out the necessary yearly protection against the severe winters at Sagalassos, which during the last two years were exceptionally hard with meters of snow covering the exposed walls. Last Tuesday, an examination of the various samples that will be taken to Belgium for further analysis was carried out at the Museum of Burdur by archaeologists, a veterinary, an agricultural engineer, and a geologist. On Wednesday morning the car left for Cesme in order to catch the ferry to Ancona. But this did not go as planned, as the day before the departure, one of the car's drivers, Markku Corremans decided to run down from Sagalassos to Aglasun, twisting his ankle, which is now immobilized in a plaster cast. This means that Markku spends most of the trip on the back seat, directing the only remaining driver, Toon Putzeys. As this report is written, the car had already safely reached Stuttgart (Germany) and is supposed to arrive at Leuven tomorrow. In two days the excavation director will start his Odyssey to Australia, spreading the Sagalassos gospel there. From Australia, he plans to write a conclusion on this year's very successful season.

August 15-19, 2004

This week, as the end of the full-scale campaign approached, our numbers dropped to between 70 and 80 scientific participants and students. We had no doctor, but once more Luc Karremans continued to take care of our safety, this with great success. He also directed the construction of all bridges needed to remove material. It was also a week of important visits. On Tuesday afternoon, we welcomed at the excavation house, the governor of the province of Burdur, Mr. Can Direkci, accompanied by two local members of the national parliament. On Wednesday, Mrs. Godelieve Vansteen-Baert, member of the family, which since 12 years supports the work on the Antonine nymphaeum on the Upper Agora, paid her sixth visit in as many years to the site. The day after another sponsor, Mr. Frans Smeulders, member of the board of directors of Friesland Drinks, which has supported our subsistence studies for seven years, accompanied by his wife and two in-laws, also paid a visit to the site for the second time.

As the excavation director had to leave the site on Thursday evening to catch an early morning plane taking him back to Leuven for ten days of exams and a successive seven-week lecturing tour in Australia, the traditional farewell dinner of the last week was already organized in a local trout restaurant on Wednesday evening. This meal, attended by 76 people, including Mustafa and Kamile Kantekin, our cooks, and their two daughters was as usual dedicated to them. Despite the fact that it ended into a real dancing party with Turkish music, everybody rose up early the next morning for the final day of the full-scale campaign. Some team members led by Luc Karremans, as part of a bet, even went already to the site at half past five in order to steal the flag posted by the excavation team of the Hadrian and Antoninus Pius Sanctuary amidst the ruins of the temple. In the mean time, the latter team had its revenge by stealing the helmet of Luc Karremans now posted as a trophy fixed to a second flag.

Thursday afternoon, after packing his bags, Marc Waelkens went back to the site for a two-hour long, round of emotional individual goodbyes to the more than 70 workmen and the as numerous members of his scientific team. A local tradition involves throwing water on people and their car upon their departure, so that they would come back the year after. When he left, the excavation director was treated the same way by his team, forcing him to switch on the heating system of the vehicle that took him to Antalya in order to arrive there with dry pants. However, upon entering the lobby of his hotel, every step still produced rather annoying squeeking noises from his water-soaked shoes.

Left, Luc Karreman's helmet now figures as a trophy on the Hadrian and Antoninus Pius shrine. Right, Mrs. Vansteen-Baert and the excavation director in front of the Antonine Nymphaeum, of which she supports the restoration.

August 8-12, 2004

Last week, the number of participants dropped for the first time, but we still had 88 people in the scientific team. As was to be expected, there were the usual birthday parties and visits. Among the latter, the director received one of his nephews with his wife and two small children. He also started to share some of his lunches with the individual teams of workmen, who are taking turns to feed their comrades. For the rest, there was a lot of routine, ending on Thursday evening in the usual water fight. This was accompanied by shouts and shrieks resembling a heavy metal version of Händel's Water Music.

August 1-5, 2004

Last week was a full house here with nearly a hundred members of the scientific staff present. Fortunately temperatures came back to normal, making our life more comfortable and working in the field and in the excavation house more bearable. Because of an illness of the doctor, who was supposed to overlook our health during the last weeks, it was also the last week of a Belgian doctor's presence (Rik Cottenie, see July 25-29 below) on the site. However, our safety was well looked after by Johan Van Neck (IDEWE, Leuven), who was already here during one week in July and fulfils this responsible job during his holidays. Since Luc and Bea Vanhaverbeke left us, logistics are now taken care off by Willy Bijnens, also a volunteer passing most of his annual holiday here working for free, together with his wife Muriël, who has joined the illustrators' team. Both had already been here before. We also would like to thank our extremely skilled and meticulous crane operators: Ali Koç from the Antalya Museum working on the Antonine Nymphaeum, as well as Süleyman Ayan and his son Tufan, working respectively on the NW Heroon and on removing blocks from the Hadrianic Nymphaeum and elsewhere on the site. Again, we had some birthday parties and some important visitors as well, among whom we would like to mention retired professor Andre Poisson (Bordeaux University), who has produced in the past a detailed geological map of this area and still gives every year classes or seminars at Isparta University. He has become a regular visitor here and a great source of inspiration and gave us the honor of welcoming most of his family, including some of the grandchildren. We also could welcome the British ambassador Sir Peter Westmacott and his wife, who had visited Sagalassos 15 years ago. Ben Rubin also brought over the Ann Arbor team working at Pisidian Antioch under the direction of Elaine Gazda.

July 25-29, 2004

On the whole this week was rather uneventful and a certain routine settled in, starting in the morning when all trench supervisors or responsible people for other tasks gather shortly before 7 a.m. to buy simit (sesame covered bread rings) to be consumed by their workmen during the morning tea break (10:30-11:30). Roland Vandenborre fulfilled his last week as safety manager, while a new doctor and his wife, Rik and Martine Cottenie, began taking care of our health for the next two weeks. There were some birthday celebrations and we got the usual visitors, especially a fairly large team from the Amorion excavations and its director, Chris Lightfoot, a former Sagalassos collaborator and glass specialist, now curator at the Metropolitan Museum of New York. For the rest the week was mainly dominated by the extremely high temperatures and humidity, which made tempers sometimes rise as much as the temperature, making me feel sometimes rather a firefighting commander than an excavation director. After all, however, serenity and peace prevailed again.

Left, our safety manager Roland Vandenborre. Center, our new doctor Rik Cottenie. Right, our glass specialist Veerle Lauwers and Chris Lightfoot, the Amorion excavation director.

July 18-22, 2004

During our third week of large-scale operations, we have almost reached our "cruising altitude" with 90 people involved as scientific staff or students. This requires lots of logistic activities from all our staff members, each responsible for a specific task such as booking and checking plane tickets, arranging airport transfers, transporting 160 people a day from the excavation house to the site and back, lodging 90 people, distributing nearly 35 people over three different restaurants in town for evening meals (our dining room can only accommodate about 55), organizing a laundry system for everybody, et cetera. It also requires an enormous effort from our cook and housekeeper Mustafa Kantekin and his wife Kamile, to prepare 90 breakfasts, 90 lunches, and 55 dinners every day.

We also had the usual visitors during the week, such as a small team from the Gordion excavations, working on Early Iron Age pottery, and Mr. Honoré Pitteljon, from Group Arco, which sponsors the Heroon restoration. This was the first visit to the site by Mr. Pitteljon, who has been one of our strongest supporters from the very start of the project. With him were his wife Frieda and his son Jonas, who was born on August 1, 1989, the very day on which the excavations at Sagalassos started.

Our weekend was dominated by two events. The first one was not so inspiring, as we had to replace our sewage system completely, which necessitated our digging up part of the excavation house's garden. This meant that during one day none of us staying here could use water for showering, doing laundry, cooking, or using the toilets. Fortunately by 6:40 p.m. the new system was officially opened with a ceremonial flushing of the toilet by the director of the mission. The second event, which was inspiring, was the wedding of Hasan Inci, one of the local pharmacists and son of Mustafa Inci, former mayor of Aglasun, and Derya Sevim, a doctor from the nearby town of Bucak. In the countryside, such a wedding party lasts three days with festivities, musicians, and feeding dozens of people near both the bride's and the groom's houses. Only during the third day does the groom take his bride to his home. Part of the team thus attended the second day of the festivities and got a taste from the food cooked in enormous copper vessels.

July 11-15, 2004

With the arrival of the urban survey team, the number of our scientific staff has suddenly reached 84. For the next two weeks Dr. Juan Willems will watch over our health, while Roland Vandenborre keeps an eye on the safety on site. Luc and Bea Vanhaverbeke took care of all logistics. All these people remove a lot of my daily stress from my aging shoulders.

We also celebrated two birthdays this week: on July 10 that of Yaprak Özkünü and one day later the 36th anniversary of the director's activities in Turkey, which he calls his Turkish birthday and which he will stress even more in future years as it makes him 20 years younger than he really is!

For the rest the work and days have become a routine, with idyllic lunches in the garden of the guardian's house, until one finds a scorpion hidden in an unopened crate of fresh drinks! Another event was the discovery of at least six cavities in one row of Jeroen Poblome's teeth, which have been selected as the "trench of the week." It is quite an achievement on a site with different ongoing excavations and in a region full of natural caves and karstic features!

The hidden passenger in a crate of fresh drinks is being removed.

Dirk and Ilse Menten once more guided--for their eighth year--for free all visitors to the site. While all-inclusive tours keep most tourists today within a perimeter of a few hundred meters from their swimming pools or hotel beaches, beyond which their plastic bracelets have no value, and while most of the cultural tourism is unfortunately gradually disappearing, we get many individual tourists coming to visit us in rented cars or taxis or by public transport. The most important visitors this week were first of all the Belgian ambassador Jan Matthysen, accompanied by his wife and daughter, who before their next post in Bangkok after four years at Ankara, wanted to say goodbye to the site and the team. We will regret their departure very much, as in my 35 years of Anatolian research I never met an ambassadorial couple with such a genuine interest and human warmth. Secondly, we were also visited by one of the new sponsors of the Antonine Nymphaeum, Mr. François Renier, his wife Marleen, and their friends Ger and Joos.

After weeks of very hot weather, they left the site in a heavy thunderstorm with hail and lightning that slowly crept up from the valley to the site, eventually reducing visibility there to almost zero, so that we had to stop the work an hour earlier than normal. But now the sun has returned, although it is rather windy, and the swallow's nest on my balcony brings me face to face with the beauty of natural rural life every morning and evening.

Swallows on the balcony of the director's room

July 4-8, 2004

This week was the first with a full-scale team, now numbering 62 and belonging to seven nationalities (Belgium, Turkey, Italy, Slovenia, The Netherlands, the USA, and New Zealand) and various disciplines. This team also includes our two representatives of the Turkish Ministry of Culture, Ilhan Unlusoy (Antalya Museum) and Ertan Yilmaz (Aydin Museum). Dr. Jan Cardyn took care of our health and Johan Van Neck supervised our safety. Luc and Bea Vanhaverbeke covered all logistics with a wonderful sense of patience and efficiency.

As most of the team members were already veterans of the excavation, we could start at full speed. The only inconvenience was the heat wave which is currently striking Turkey. Temperatures went far beyond 30 degrees Centigrade (86 degrees Farenheit), even in our high mountain site (a mean 1600 m above sea level), reaching up to 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Farenheit) at Antalya.

Another major inconvenience was the plumbing of our excavation house, because the toilets cannot manage the use of toilet paper by such a large number of people. For years we have to deposit everything in waste baskets, but each year during the first weeks many people forget this rule. The result was that on Friday, the first day of our weekend, we had to call the fire station to send high-pressure water through our sewage system. The man directing the hose was completely sprayed with the content of our toilet tanks, part of which also ended up against the white walls of our house. Manuring, as in fertilizing fields, is a hot topic in archaeology, but we prefer not to apply it this way.

Friday is also the usual market day in Aglasun, when (as it must have been the case with Sagalassos in the past) people from the neighboring villages come to the small city to buy and sell and do their banking. I experienced my most emotional moment of the week at the local bank. While I was transferring billions of Turkish liras for insurance, social security, and conservation material, an old woman from a nearby village was depositing as a real treasure some 100,000,000 TL (40 euro or US dollars) from a knotted handkerchief hidden in her clothing. For her, it must have represented a carefully saved amount of cash which she had cherished for weeks. It moved me almost toward tears and at the same time showed me how spoiled we are. Lately I keep complaining about how my life is more and more dominated by a constant struggle to find private sponsors willing to maintain our activities at their current level. This year, we already had to cut down both our excavations and our restoration activities by more than a week. Suddenly, I was confronted with another type of struggle for financial survival. My only consolation was the knowledge that as largest employer in this village, we help stimulate the local economy through our own activities and the resulting tourism, which makes the future of our workmen's children more promising and secure.

The second day of our weekend became the day of Murphy's law: it started with a complete crash of my computer at 6 AM, accompanied by loud noises when the UPS system supporting it went flat. Eventually the computer crash was mended by 11 PM, leaving me three hours of sleep after having finished this report. At Sunday breakfast it became clear that one of our cars also had a dead battery. By lunch time we lost our most loyal labor force of the last 12 years: our washing machine, which throughout these years has done the laundry of hundreds of people for almost 18 hours a day, seven days a week. When the new replacement arrived, the door of the laundry room proved to be too small; part of the wooden doorposts had to be removed by a carpenter. At 3 AM this morning I could finally go to sleep with a PC that is working again, a finished new website report, and a new washing machine for our laundry. The wakeup call was three hours later, when I was faced with the breakdown of one of our three coffee percolators... That, as well, is life of an excavation.

May 5-July 1, 2004

One of the first events each year is the arrival of our minibus, which brings the necessary documents and all the equipment used by the various disciplines at work in and around Sagalassos. "Volunteers" selected from our staff drive it from Belgium to Ancona, where it is put on a ferry arriving two days later in Cesme, near Izmir, still a day's drive from Sagalassos. This year, the "volunteers" were Luc Vanhaverbeke and Toon Putzeys. After some bureaucratic problems at Cesme, that were quickly solved, the car arrived safely on June 30.

May 5, 2004

Sagalassos had the great honor to welcome Belgium's Crown Prince Philip to both the site and to the ground level of the brand new Museum of Burdur, which houses most of Sagalassos' best finds. The Prince was accompanied by the Turkish Minister of Culture Mr. Erkan Mumcu, by Director General of Antiquities Mr. Nadir Avci, by Belgian Federal Minister of Economy and Science Policy Mrs. Fientje Moerman, by Belgian Ambassador at Ankara Mr. Jan Mathysen, and by Turkish Ambassador at Brussels Mr. Erkan Gezer. All experienced a perfect example of Turkish hospitality. The team is extremely grateful to the Governor of Burdur Mr. Can Direkçi, to the Kaymakam of Aglasun Mr. Orhan Burhan, and to the Director of the Museum of Burdur Mr. Haci Ali Ekinci, all who have spared no efforts to make this visit a great success.

The new Museum of Burdur

See daily life 2003