The Guardian of Gobeklitepe: The World's Oldest Temple

By Yonca Eldener

Gobeklitepe, the oldest temple in the world, awakened from its 12,000 years of sleep to tell hacker Kamil a secret. A secret, locked behind the sealed tongue of its guardian, that can only be heard by to the wise and capable…

Kamil is forced to unravel Gobeklitepe’s mysteries when a stranger from the southeastern Turkis

• Language: English
• Publisher: iBoo
• Release date: Jan 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9786058376700

Book preview

The Guardian of

Göbeklitepe

.

The Guardian of

Göbeklitepe

Yonca Eldener

iBOO P.H.

London

.

The Guardıan of Göbeklitepe

Yonca Eldener

An iBoo Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Hard cover and eBook edition published January 2016

Published by iBoo Publishing House

Kemp House, City Road, London, EC1V 2NX, U.K.

www.iboo.com - infoæiboo.com

iBoo is a division of F. ONCU Consulting

Cover design by Emrah Yücel / I Mean It Creative

Translated by Yılmaz Vurucu

Edited by Leah Nodar

Copyright © 2015 iBoo, Yonca Eldener

[e-mail]

This is a novel. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, electronic, graphic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials.

Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

ISBN: 978-605-83767-1-7 (book))

978-605-83767-0-0 (ebook)

Printed on acid-tree paper, partially sourced from recycled waste material.

Printed in the United States of America.

Dedicated to the memory of my mother ....

Special thanks to my husband Emre Eldener and to my family for their life-long support for everything I do. I am also grateful to my editor Leah Nodar who worked with me on every single sentence of this novel with great care.

Foreword

I was astonished by the Gobeklitepe temples when I first saw them. The oldest temples in the world found so far, they are 7,000 years older than the Egyptian pyramids. Their discovery in 1996 in Urfa, Turkey, changed everything we knew about history and challenged the way we understood human civilization. This striking truth, and the way it forced me to rethink human history from another perspective, drove me to write this novel.

My story starts in Milas, on the Aegean, where the ancient Carian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman civilizations once flourished. And it ends in Gobeklitepe, in the Fertile Crescent that nurtured thousands of civilizations. East and west are united at Gobeklitepe, where no human is different from any other.

Gobeklitepe is thought to be the first place where we as humans realized that our power was superior to that of other species, where we started a journey that ended with the loss of our integrity towards nature and towards ourselves. Every human journey in search of truth and existence passes through Gobeklitepe, where the first crops were domesticated and human evolution reached a turning point. The hunters and gatherers of the Gobeklitepe temples whisper the story of humanity, when our faith changed irreversibly as agriculture alienated us from earth even as we depended more and more on it. For those who ask how and where we started, the temples awakened from their millennia-long sleep to remind us that we are not the masters of the universe, only a part of it, and as humans we are all one. The symbols carved on the magnificent stelas tell us a different history… so I followed this call.

The historical happenings in this story are all real, though I had to make some changes to accommodate the story’s structure. Readers can find a detailed explanation of these changes in the author’s note at the end of the book.

My story revolves around people with long distances in space and time between them. I’ve therefore included a historical chronology, a family tree starting from Abraham, and a map showing the locations of the ancient cities in the story. For non-Turkish readers, who may have some difficulty remembering Turkish names, I have also added a character list. For readers interested in beginning their own journey into an understanding of Gobeklitepe and its history, there is a bibliography at the end of the book. And for a photo gallery of the real places where the story takes place, please visit https://yoncaeldener.wordpress.com

PART I

LOGOS

And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language... Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.

– Genesis 11:6-7

1.

Kamil knelt down by his mother’s grave at the Jewish cemetery. Someone handed him a bag containing his mother’s shirt, cut into pieces, and then her death certificate. He waited silently as family and friends processed into the entrance. Children were not supposed to attend Jewish funerals in Milas, but the kids of the small Muslim town tagged along anyway with water containers they’d found, hoping to pour the water over the grave and ask for tips. They pouted when they learned that the fountain, which had once washed the hands of the congregation, was now dry. In this ruinous cemetery, it had been years since someone was last buried.

Nobody knew Kamil. A handful of Jews had come for the sake of his Aunt Beti to make upalongside him the ten adult men necessary for the prayer. They took their places next to the Rabbi. The Muslim congregation watched with their mouths open, listening to prayers they were hearing for the first time, not sure where to place their hands, how to pray or where to stand, fidgeting with anxiety. They tried to copy what the Jews did. Kamil performed his prayers, whispering with his head down, and when he was done he went up to his Aunt Beti and hugged her. The old woman stroked Kamil’s head. Friends who understood that the burial was over came to Kamil and offered their condolences. The children with the water containers grasped at the legs of the people they saw, asking for money, and then left the cemetery one by one like shadows.

Kamil had asked to be left alone in the cemetery. He sat by his mother’s grave.

He didn’t remember his father at all since he lost his father before he was born. The only parental figure he’d had apart from his mother was his grandfather, but he had lost him at an early age as well. He still remembered that after his grandfather’s death, he’d seen images of him everywhere and was confused when he discovered that he was the only person seeing those images. When he stopped seeing the image of his grandfather, he thought it was because his grandfather had abandoned him; but he realized that the true abandonment had come now, with the loss of his mother. He felt her death in his entire body. He had always felt alone, even among crowds, but this was different. His mother, unique and special and as much a part of him as his fingerprint, was gone, and the foundation of his existence had collapsed. He couldn’t grasp it. The person who two days ago was laughing, whose voice had rung in his ears, and who had had feelings, was no longer alive. The only being who loved him with no expectations and all her heart was his mother, and now he had been left behind.

He and his mother had been the only Jews left in Milas, and he had always felt imprisoned in the city. He had dreamt of the day he could leave Milas, but he knew that his mother would never leave the town, and he had felt ashamed of the idea and suppressed his urge to escape. Now he thought of all the previous times he had considered himself alone, and how meaningless they were when his mother was still with him. There was a void in his heart that would never be filled. Hundreds of memories flashed before him, and the tears that had been accumulating released themselves. He screamed, hoping that she would hear him, and it echoed in the depths of the desolate graveyard.

He was sitting by her grave, his hands covering his face, when he was startled by a tiny finger poking him.

A small, bright-eyed boy, one of the children with the water containers, peered at Kamil with great curiosity. The child asked naively:

Are you a tourist?

Kamil, surprised, wiped his tears and tried to pull himself together.

Why do you think that?

It’s just that my friends said so.

Do you think I sound different?

No, you talk like us. But what about the old guy? We didn’t understand what he said.

You mean the Rabbi? He’s like our imam. That man prayed for my mother. My mother lies here.

The child shook his head and said, No, not him. There was a man with white hair at the back of the crowd, with glasses on.

Kamil frowned. I don’t remember anybody like that.

He was standing far away from the crowd, in the back. When I asked him for a tip, he didn’t know what I meant.

Really? Kamil said. He murmured to himself, Maybe he came from Izmir.

Was the imam a tourist?

Kamil looked at the boy and asked, Because the prayers were different?

The child shrugged. I didn’t really understand the prayers, but my brother did, kinda. He goes to Quran school.

Do you go there too?

Well, I did. Now I’m being punished because I ran away from the course. My mom was really mad.

Why’d you run off?

To play ball.

Kamil smiled. He leaned in and said, Between you and me, when I was a kid, I was in trouble for cutting religion class pretty often myself.

Did Allah strike you down for it?

Not yet!

The answer comforted the child. Well then.

What’s your name?

Emre.

Glad to meet you, Emre. I’m Kamil. Children shouldn’t really come to funerals, but I’m glad you came.

2.

Kamil returned to his empty home. The neighbors had left his mother’s slippers in front of the door, following tradition. Inside, the people from Milas were whispering prayers to share their sorrow, unable to contain their tears. The incense burning in the room filled his throat. For one week, no cooking could take place in the home of the deceased, so the neighbors expressed their condolences and then went to Auntie Gulfer’s home, where she hosted them. Auntie Gulfer wasn’t his real aunt. He had no aunts by blood, but he called older women aunt, especially those who took care of him. And Auntie Gulfer had always been there; she had helped bury Kamil’s grandfather and grandmother, and now she was trying follow the Jewish traditions she recalled as best as she could.

When the neighbors left, Kamil too went to Auntie Gulfer’s house. He only realized how hungry he was when she placed a bowl of soup in front of him, her hands shaking. When she came to take his bowl to the kitchen to replenish the soup, she grasped Kamil’s hands with her own wrinkled ones and said, Eat well, son. You’ll fall weak. Oh, my poor child, my orphaned son. I’ll never forget your mother leaving to go abroad. She was too young to die. You are now entrusted to us. Once the visitors leave, I’ll go downtown. And tonight, I’ll stay with you.

Auntie Gulfer refused to let Kamil spend the night alone, despite his objections; when night fell, she had settled herself in the upper floor of his house. He remembered her taking in his mother whenever business took him out of town. Auntie Gulfer never wanted her to feel alone. She lay on the sofa, which extended along the window, and he heard her praying softly.

Kamil quietly began to walk through the rooms in his house. First he sat in the alcove on the upper floor, which extended over the street, and watched random people pass by in the dim street lights. Then he walked towards the back window and stared at the courtyard. He remembered the day that the grapevine had been planted. It spread over a marble stairwell leading to the balcony, which he could barely see in the darkness. He remembered that when he was very little, the kitchen and washroom had been in the corner of the courtyard. Later his mother had moved the washroom to the first floor. There they’d installed a kitchen with new water pipes that had hot water flowing from the tap, and her hands had finally been saved from turning beet red in the cold well water; but from then on, she had suffered backaches from working on a kitchen counter that was too low.

Kamil silently went downstairs and slid his hands down a long counter in the storage room. He stared at the pickle jars his mother had prepared before she died. He couldn’t breathe. He threw himself out the door and into the courtyard, and sat on the stairwell until the cold crept into him. He went back inside and upstairs to his mother’s room.

Kamil went through his mother’s drawers and dresser until sunrise. He found a notebook, laid out open on his mother’s table, and thought of his mother going to sleep next to the Carian letters, which nobody understood.

They had always worked near each other, though not together. While his mother was busy in her room, puzzling over the ancient Anatolian language of Carian for hours on end, Kamil was working in his room next door, deciphering the passwords and security codes of computer systems. He would communicate with more people than he could remember, traveling between databases like a thief, breaking into hundreds of digital vaults. Mother and son would be lost in their work as though they had set out to forgotten lands, all geographical barriers, identities and time limitations disappearing; they could not get enough of their freedom.

What they experienced working at night would accumulate internally, like the layers of three thousand years of settlements stacked atop one another in Milas; and in the morning, their work would be pushed deep down inside, as they woke up from their laborious dreams. The fatigue of facing the unknown would take them over in the early hours, and, too tired to be proud of the work they accomplished, they would fall asleep at their desks, lights left on till sunrise. Kamil didn’t know anymore what was underneath the surface that covered his childhood.

And he accumulated so much since then. Kamil had always been exceptionally bright. When he was a child, he could instantly solve problems no one else seemed to understand, and he was frequently beaten for cornering his teachers with questions they couldn’t answer. Kamil could never sit still, brimming with excessive energy, and he wouldn’t stop moving and thinking even when he stuck in time out in a corner of the classroom. Instead, he would be busy, eyeing his classmates and rummaging through the garbage. He would weave together what he heard and what he saw, forming an information web, coming up with unexpected results. This kept him always a step ahead of his peers; he knew when the exams were cancelled, which questions would be repeated on the test, and when the teacher was ill and wouldn’t make it to class. If Kamil had ever focused on his studies, he would have been the top student, but as it was he could barely get by. His mother became a permanent fixture in the teachers’ room, dealing with the complaints from teachers, classmates, and parents. But she had reacted calmly to her son’s adolescence, when he had thought of nothing but soccer, and she took it well too when, having made his way through puberty, he leapt into the world of computers.

Kamil had learned Hebrew, English, French and Arabic in a heartbeat. Even though certain Milas residents held up Kamil’s ability to learn the prayers so swiftly as an example to other students, they remained suspicious of him because his family was Jewish. But the elders never forgot to invite the people they lived and worked alongside to their Mawlid celebrations. Traditions, origins were long since lost, had become intertwined in this small town. Kamil remembered his grandfather’s childhood friends who learned the Ladino language from him; and how they made fun of his broken Turkish, imitating him. The elders had never forgotten their older Jewish neighbors, those who kissed the land they lived on before abandoning their homes, and tears would swell in their eyes when they heard songs from the past, when they tried, with aching hearts, to remember the words and sing along.

But the memories were lost as the elders passed away, and the stories of Kamil’s family were forgotten. The young people of Milas only cared about Kamil’s soccer skills, and whether he was playing on their team. His friend Sefik was always the captain of the team, but like all his peers, Sefik never realized that his bright friend, the kid who ran everywhere instead of walking, was directing everything around him; Kamil was never the official captain of the soccer team, but in reality, he pulled the strings. As long as their team won, his friends didn’t really care how it happened. Kamil was amicable with his friends, but the thick walls he built around himself – an act he could not help – did not allow anyone passage. Kamil was always by their side, but if some stranger had asked what kind of person Kamil was, no one could have said much beyond his love of computers and soccer. No one except Hamit, his gypsy friend whose perceptiveness was underestimated by his friends and even by Kamil. Hamit had an uncanny knack for looking at Kamil’s eyes and seeming to read his thoughts; perhaps because they were both outsiders, and each was the only person likely to pay attention to the other.

But no passerby who saw Kamil chatting with his friends in a cafe on the city square would know that his mind was elsewhere. His eyes were constantly scanning for loopholes in the systems, and he watched his surroundings vigilantly to gather information. He would etch into his mind the bill that was stuffed into the glass, the gesture a friend made when asking to pay, the bill box carried to the table, the cards inserted into it, the money, the locks for the shutters of the cafe, the laughter emanating from the next table, the swinging feet of couples talking to one another. Every detail that surrounded him piled up in his mind, ordered and packed away to be extracted when needed.

After finishing high school in Milas, Kamil went on to study software engineering in Istanbul. He learned software codes inside out, studying diligently until the early morning hours to decipher programming languages others wouldn’t even attempt to learn. He returned to Milas after graduating, not wanting to leave his mother by herself, and set up a job working from home. And with the mind he had inherited from his ancestors, he did quite well. He stored his money under his mattress, also like his ancestors, setting up more of a camp then a home, ready to take off at any minute. Besides his mother, nothing tied him to Milas. If she hadn’t been there, he would’ve shut the door and walked out.

This was also why he never kept a girlfriend. His dark hair; his flawless nose, like that of a Greek god; his long, thin fingers; and his honey-colored eyes -- the girls of Milas buckled at their knees, but they soon discovered that they were trying in vain to attract his attention and gave up. The pushiest girls, known to persevere despite everything, gave up in the end. Kamil rarely met with women from town; he preferred those he met online, whose names were unknown to him, and whose faces could be forgotten in the morning.

His mother Eren, unlike most of their friends and neighbors, refrained from pointing out all the women her son could marry. She also said that she understood if he wanted to leave. She knew that nothing left in Milas recalled the existence of Jews, save herself and her son. She also knew that her son would not be able to find a wife that would suit him in Milas, and would never tie himself to the town that way. However, this topic was never discussed openly between the two of them. Not talking about the obvious was a contract, and the unshared sentiments were codes on standby, never cracked.

Kamil was in awe of his mother’s mind. She taught him to decode, though not directly. He had watched his mother, deep in her philology, and learned the principals of deciphering. He turned operating systems over in his mind as visuals like her alphabet. His mother had once said that in philology, as in all history, it was important to leave an open door; her thinking was constrained by her knowledge, and human knowledge was a tiny drop in the ocean of what could be known. He had never forgotten it, and kept the language of his programs flexible, almost like unfinished works. This looseness let him work on them all over again, over and over, exerting himself to ensure that his software would not disappear like the Carian language.

Kamil lived in his world through the codes he created for himself. When he entered invisible lands and wandered through open portals, he thought of the goddess Hecate, opening the door to the underworld she protected. Whenever he was able to hack a site, he would finish his work with the signature Hecate, as though he were thanking her. Those who saw his message felt a gnawing distrust and restlessness, a response to what Kamil was feeling deep down inside.

By the time Kamil suppressed the rebelliousness of youth and entered his thirties, he had become enamored of even greater acts. He dreamt of cracking bigger systems, finding a real challenge, instead of popping open the email accounts of Milas citizens to learn about the ordinary secrets of ordinary lives. Kamil used to like snooping through every e-mail address and online record in Milas, and enjoyed the impressive number of secrets he discovered in such a small town. The mayor’s son was constantly on dating sites, the waiter at his favorite cafe was gay, and one of his soccer-team friends had a son secreted away in Adana. But these were satisfactory only as an apprenticeship.

Now he was standing on the edge, with a mastery attained through disobedience and curiosity, and he knew that he had to tread carefully. He had survived without trouble so far thanks to his prudence. Once, when he was a rookie, the police had almost snatched him up, and since then he entered systems using his own software instead of others’ programs that he’d downloaded off the web. After that incident, he decided to use his talents to hack companies’ systems to find the flaws and ultimately improve their security – a beneficent, white hat hacker. But somehow he had never really established an information security company. He always felt that he should leave Milas before he set up a proper business. And now, he tried to tell himself, that time had come.

But for someone who lived in the virtual world, geography was not a barrier. He was afraid that he had used his prolonged stay in Milas as an excuse to keep from beginning; and now, deep inside, Kamil was afraid that if he left, he would betray the memory of his mother. After all, unlike the other Jews who had come from Izmir in the Ottoman era and abandoned Milas in the 1950s, she hadn’t left. She was like the last guard of the emptied-out Jewish neighborhood, like an inscription that told the story of long-lost friends and relatives.

Jews had come to Milas at the beginning of the 19th century, thanks to the many religious and trade freedoms provided to non-Muslims by Ottoman reforms. At one time, there were 300 Jewish families living in Milas. Like Kamil’s grandfather, many owned drapery shops at the Milas bazaar. Trade flourished and wealth spread, and vibrant silks and velvets flowed in the market place.

But in 1942, the year Eren was born, the deeply indebted government established a new Wealth Tax. Rich Muslim families and Jewish traders were hard hit by the exorbitant taxes. Most Jews had to sell their belongings in order to pay. Eren’s mother and father were financially ruined, and decided to try to rebuild their lives in Switzerland. Eren was a newborn; they couldn’t take her.

They left Eren with her uncle Nedim, whose wife was ill. Her illness kept them from running, making them fixtures in Milas. Eren’s parents swore they would be coming back to get her as soon as life in Switzerland settled down. But they never did. They died together in a traffic accident in Switzerland, and Nedim took on the lifelong duty of caring for Eren.

He raised his adopted child no differently than his 8-year-old biological son, Izzet. Despite financial problems and his wife’s health, he placed great importance on the education of girls and he strove to give Eren a good education.

Izmir, a nearby city on the Aegean, prosperous with its trade ports, had many minority enclaves and well-established non-Muslim schools. Izzet settled there to work; Eren began attending a French school there. There, too, she fulfilled her aunt’s most heartfelt wish and married Izzet. When she finished high school, her uncle pushed her to go to a French-speaking country, but she decided to pursue her education in England. English schools had the best education in the field she was interested in: philology.

Eren adored university. The ancient Carian language had been a childhood passion, and here it grew into an everlasting, defining factor in her life. As a child, she always wondered about the ruins she could see from her home overlooking Hisarlik Hill. If she wasn’t on her swing in the courtyard among the big trees, she would surely be found staring at the hill from the kitchen window. She had a great deal of admiration for her uncle and believed that he knew everything. Unlike Izzet, who would run away when fed up with his father’s stories, Eren was always sitting by the side of this imposing man. She asked her uncle unending questions and he patiently answered them.

One of the last things she learned from him while still young enough to be impressed was that the ancient marble column in the courtyard before the house was called Uzunyuva, meaning long nest, because storks tended to make their homes on its flat top. She was around eleven then, and her interest in archaeology was making it more and more challenging for her uncle to answer her questions. After her Bat Mitzvah ceremony, when Eren entered adulthood at the age of twelve, she decided that her uncle and her aunt knew nothing. Her aunt’s illness took a turn for the worse in those years, and Eren often found herself at the Milas library after assisting her with household chores. She read everything she could find about the Carian civilization, which stretched down the whole coastal province of Mugla and into the mountainous Aegean inland. She gave up on Uncle Nedim completely, and settled in to teach herself everything she could about this ancient Anatolian civilization.

Those ancient peoples, whose history dated back to 3000 BC on the Aegean islands and Crete, had taken control of the whole of the Aegean within a thousand years. But when the Minos civilization expanded in 1400 BC, they returned to Anatolia. Caria was a land of famous queens, pirates, and the first female admirals in history, but over time they had been forgotten, relegated to dusty, unloved books of history. One of the few references Eren found was an account of the silent meals the women of Caria had following the battle of Troy around 1300 BC; a grim meal with their new husbands, the occupiers that had killed their old husbands. And, of course, there were descriptions of the tomb of Mausolus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, which held the king that had crowned the golden age of the Carians under the rule of the Persians.

Eren always felt like Milas was a scavenger hunt organized just for her, full of hidden clues about the lives of the Carians. Finding traces of them in her daily life became a passion. She would thrill with excitement when she found the tucked-away traces of these people, the fighters and the sailors, in the gullets, in sandals and in weavings. When she came across inscriptions in the marble blocks in the walls of the house across the street, she couldn’t contain herself. When one day a Carian inscriptions was discovered in the wall of a home being restored in the Haci Ilyas neighborhood, her curiosity centered on the Carian writing. And she paid no attention to the complainers, like the home owner who groused to her uncle about her hovering around while he tried to fix the wall.

So many artifacts belonging to the Carians had been found in Milas. Eren felt sorrow for the ignorance of the people around her, who had no understanding of these silent witnesses of history sleeping in the walls of their homes, and she had decided to become the translator for the people who lived on these lands in the distant past. If it weren’t for the Hebrew inscription on the marble door of Nisim Tarika’s courtyard, nobody would know that Milas was once home to Jews; the Carian inscriptions were similarly imperative in ensuring that their history was not forgotten. It was that day that she was sure that she would become a philologist. And when she went to England, she held a firm belief that Carian was waiting to be deciphered by her.

But the four years had passed so quickly, and when school was finished and she returned to be with Izzet, she regretted the unfinished work she left behind. It was only when Professor Henry, whose staff she had been part of in England,