Hattuşa: Ancient Snow Covered Footprints

An Ancient Sphinx.

Turkey is a land of history.  Testaments to empires past tower across the water that I walk along every day and in every footfall, echoes of those people before me.  But I hadn't been confronted by the grand scale of the country's past until I found myself in a taxi speeding through a remote valley in central Anatolia.  

I was on the way to see what remained of an empire that once rivaled the Egyptian Pharaohs in their own time, a regional juggernaut that at its peak stretched across Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.  Hattusa, the capital city of the Hittites - a name and a people I was barely acquainted with a few weeks prior - stretched over the valleys and hills just beyond the horizon.

Snow-swept Anatolia and the old city wall.

It is still cold in Turkey, though much of the snowfall has melted in the waning of the winter.  Yet when we reached ancient Hattuşa, the elevation meant that crisp snow blanketed much of the ruins.  Only the tops of stone foundations and walls were visible.  From a bird's eye view at the top of the city's ancient walls, grids and footpaths poked through the snow like crop circles in a corn field.  Much of what is left at Hattuşa is simply the foundations of different buildings, but their shapely corners paint easy pictures of the city past.

What was visible were the remains of the ancient city, a powerful ancient regional hub.  The Hittites may have left their legacy, but evidence shows that the area was first settled 8000 years ago.  The Hittites moved in and established their fortress-city around 4000 years ago, after Assyrian merchants set up a trading post.

The day's bitter cold was kept at bay by the constant feeling of wonder, the reminder of finite life against the dramatic backdrop of a 4000 year old fortress.  I mean, if I lived to 100 forty times in a row, then I might have got to see what such a stretch of time really meant: it's been around since Alexander, Caesar, Genghis, Charlemagne, Saladin, Columbus, Suleiman, Napoleon, Hitler... 

The towering remains of a gate.

Much of what we saw were simply old foundations and a few ramparts and walls, but there were a few instances of splendor.  An intricate and somehow intact carving of a Sphinx (gem inlaid eyes missing courtesy of marauders) still graced the gate of the ancient city.  A bizarre cubic rock of cloudy green was rumored to be a gift from Ramses II after he agreed a peace treaty with the Hittite king, now left to the elements.    

The eyeless beauty.

After marveling at the remains it was time to head back to Ankara, an arduous journey combining taxis and buses.  But on the way out, another marvel: cows grazing in grass growing between the ruins of Hattuşa's central temple, where once they would have been sacrificed to the gods.  

  

A bit of historical irony.

Hattuşa was no different from the rest of the Turkey in that we were about to come upon a striking reminder of the issues of the present right outside such a striking vestige to the past.  We came upon a small building near the exit.  Our taxi driver, Hassan, claimed the welcoming men out front were tamam (Ok; allright).  Inside an open room with a pot belly stove for heat and carpets lining the walls and ground, a man offered us tea.  

An arched stone tunnel 
underneath the city walls, built 
long before the discovery
 of the pure arch.

He was a Turkish-Kurd and the English spokesperson for a cooperative selling carpets and kilims, painstakingly woven by hand by women in the nearby villages.  They were magnificent and left İstanbul's carpets paling in comparison, but unfortunately, still out of my modest range.  It was the lean winter and he repeatedly lowered the price, even at one point suggested we take a carpet and mail him the money later.  Times were tough for the co-op, but the summer months will be bring tourists and trade to their tiny town, and if Hattuşa is any indication, they'll still be around for a few years to come.