The initial grant proposal for Chatal.
It’s interesting to look back at where I was some months ago and realize how much I’ve learned since this trip. It’s all out there by now, so why not.

PROPOSAL: 
I’m working on a play set at the archaeological excavations at Çatalhöyük, a 9000 year-old Neolithic settlement in Turkey’s Central Anatolia. My story is inspired by the cutting edge work done by the team of international scientists working at Çatalhöyük, some of whom I’ve met, interviewed and become friends with. One of them - recently retired UC Berkeley professor, Ruth Tringham, has become my mentor and collaborator on this proposal.  She and several other Çatalhöyük archaeologists continue to be a great source of support and information as I continue the adventure of composing this play.

My story centers on Joan, a middle-aged American archaeologist who returns to the field after an absence of ten years. Once a well-respected and accomplished archaeologist, Joan’s had a checkered past. The archaeological community rejected a theory she put forward ten years ago and she lost her academic job after a bitter, drunken scandal.  After her husband also abandoned her, Joan stopped drinking, swore off archaeology, and has lived in relative isolation for the last decade,  “gardening,” as she puts it, at her home in Illinois.

When an invitation arrives to visit Çatalhöyük from Alice, a graduate school friend and excavation director at Çatalhöyük, Joan is somewhat perturbed but intrigued. The excavations at Çatalhöyük are famous for the scientists’ innovative methods and radical feminist interpretive approach. Joan, a human remains specialist in her own right, is intrigued by the burial practices at Çatalhöyük  (they buried their dead inside the houses, under sleeping platforms.) After some hesitation she travels there, and finds herself drawn to the work as soon as she arrives.  When Alice announces that she’d like Joan to join the human remains team, and become its leader, Joan is surprised and apprehensive. She’s out of practice, hasn’t kept up with the new methods, and she finds the youthful energy of the team intimidating. Alice - who has much more trust in Joan’s capabilities than she does herself - is in a bind, however, and Joan reluctantly agrees to participate. 

Soon Joan meets Nikki, a student of hers from some time ago, and Nikki’s boyfriend Miro, a Polish archaeologist, both on the human remains team. Joan doesn’t remember Nikki but Nikki has very strong memories of Joan and her feminist philosophy. These three characters embody the central interpretive conflict of the play. Another character is Masum, the affable Turkish villager who’s been hired as the site’s guard. Like other fellow villagers, Masum has a moral problem with excavated skeletons “being carted away in boxes,” and privately questions the archaeologists’ motivations.  The involvement of the villagers at the excavation site, and how this has altered their lives economically, spiritually and politically, is a parallel and central aspect of my story. Sonya Atalay, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Indiana, has conducted community- based research with the nearby villagers, since 2006. She is helping me with this angle of the play.

As a dual citizen of Turkey and the US, I spent many boyhood summers on the Mediterranean coast, an area rife with ancient ruins. I’m equally at home in the world of the Western archaeologists as that of the Turkish villagers. This play, like much of my earlier work, is about bridging cultural gaps (Islam, Christianity, East and West, the past and the present) and my passion for finding common ground between disparate perspectives. These were the themes in my most frequently produced work PERA PALAS, and another play about religion and culture, THE CRY OF THE REED.

I was first drawn to Çatalhöyük in 2009, when I was researching a play about the excavations at Troy.  The dearth of research material on Troy was frustrating me when I ran into an abundance of material (diaries, research papers, photos, videos) on Çatalhöyük, all accessible online. Çatalhöyük’s open philosophy, of sharing the findings with the public, and even welcoming the interpretation of the data by other groups, intrigued me. The objectivity vs. subjectivity of archaeological interpretation had always been at the core of my interest in writing about archaeology. At Çatalhöyük, I found new and groundbreaking approaches to interpretation, and a new method - coined by the visionary leader Ian Hodder as Post-Processualism or “the reflexive method” - that revolutionized archaeology the world over. I’ve spent a good part of the last two years steeped in research and grappling with a story.  After a trip to California to meet with Ruth Tringham and other archaeologists last spring, I finally began to formulate a plot and recently started to write some dialogue. 

I continue to be challenged by the intellectual and creative aspects of this play. One of my challenges is to write fictional characters set against a well-documented background. My greatest handicap is that I’ve never visited Çatalhöyük. Lori Hager, who’s served as field director of Human Remains at Çatalhöyük since 2000, and who’s been helping me with that aspect of the play, has encouraged me to visit the site during the summer season. Funding from EST Sloan would allow me to take a summer off to observe the archeologists at work and to further authenticate my story.

Anyone who visits the Çatalhöyük Homepage will see how indispensable video documentation is to the process of excavation. Video and photographs are used extensively for recording, analyzing and presenting the data. It only made sense to incorporate video into this play.

One of my sources of inspiration from the start was the video of the uncovering of a Neolithic skeleton. The meticulous process of bringing this individual - presumably a young woman - back to sunlight after so many thousands of years, was provocative and moving. Who was she? How did she live? How did she break her ribs and dislocate an arm? Did she have children? Why did she die? This is the tricky issue of archaeological interpretation. Archaeologists are consumed with these questions yet they must be very careful. They must somehow remove who they are from the process of interpretation, and be objective or “scientific” - disregard or negate their own biases, hopes, perceptions and views. But is that possible? Alternatively, they might accept their own biases and recognize them as their only way into the past. This is the “self-reflexive” question the archaeologists at Çatalhöyük continue to wrestle with. 

The video - named “Dido” - was shot by Çatalhöyük videographer Michael Ashley and is narrated, quite movingly, by Ruth Tringham. Michael has served as the Media Team Leader for the Çatalhöyük Research Project for more than 7 years, and has generously agreed to assist me with the video component of the piece.

Çatalhöyük is one of the earliest known agricultural communities in human history. It marks that evolutionary moment when hunter-gatherers began to settle down, and formed communities sustained by agriculture. One of the main purposes of the excavation at Çatalhöyük is to explore this transition and piece together the puzzle of why this happened. Similarly, my central character is in the process of finding out about her own origins. Joan’s early, failed relationship with Alice, her days of drinking and teaching, her successes and failures, and, most centrally, her choice of archaeology as a career and a way of life, are all under question. My tentative title for the play is DIGGING THE SELF. 

A list of the scholars I’ve mentioned in this piece and who are assisting me in this project:

Ruth Tringham, Ph.D. recently retired Professor of Anthropology UC Berkeley
Lori Hager, Ph.D. field director of human remains at Çatalhöyük
Sonya Atalay, Ph.D. Professor of Anthropology Indiana University
Michael Ashley, Ph.D. Chief Technology Officer, Center for Digital Archaeology @ UC Berkeley

Also:

Slobodan Mitrovich, Çatalhöyük Excavator and Professor of Anthropology, Brooklyn College
Banu Aydınoğlugil, Çatalhöyük Research Project Assistant since 1996
Burcu Tung, Çatalhöyük excavator, archaeology Ph.D. candidate, UC Berkeley
Colleen Morgan, Çatalhöyük excavator, archaeology Ph.D. candidate, UC Berkeley

I intended to write another Çatal update today but experienced something that I felt I should write about. My good man, my driver Salih, while driving me to my hotel from Çatalhöyük, asked me- rather coyly - if I’d like to join him and his family for the daily Ramadan meal. 
Most observant Muslims will fast every day during the month of Ramadan. Salih tells me if a person is not able to fast - for health reasons or otherwise, he/she is obligated to feed three meals to a poor person each day. He expands on this: it should be someone in his own family, and if not that, someone in the neighborhood. And there is no needy person close by, it can be someone in Konya or the rest of the country. And if not that, it can be a Christian or a Jew. I’m paraphrasing but that’s the idea. Salih believes that all relgions are the same. However....
In Konya most people fast during Ramadan. The Turkish workers digging ditches are fasting in the heat. As well as the women who work in the kitchens. The idea is that you don’t eat, drink, have sex, and I don’t know what else - during daylight hours. People rise at 3 am and have a large meal before sunrise. The next meal is at sunset. 
I was tired and wasn’t inclined to go but wanted to meet Salih’s wife and children. The idea was that we would have a picnic in a park where the whole family would break their feast. His three boys, Ahmet 13 (barely looks 10), Furkan (8 think) and little Abdullah who’s five - are not obligated to fast but they all do to one degree or another. Little Abdullah boasts that he only ate two things all day. The other two boys are in full fast.
Anyway Salih showed up with his wife and three cherubs packed in the back seat of this taxi, and offered me the front seat. The boys are truly adorable. Very cute, smart, curious, wonderful kids. They are completely open. His wife Şefriye is covered. Her hair is covered and she wears long sleeves - almost a full coat - in the heat of August. She’s mostly quiet - even though I can sense that she and Salih have great respect and love for each other. I hesitate to address her by name since her name is very close to another word in Turkish - şehriye - which means macaroni. It’s just too easy.
We arrived at a large park - many other families had gathered there. Salih made a  coal fire (there are pits everywhere) and produced large amounts of meat. Turkish meatballs (köfte) and kebabs on skewers. Şefriye laid newspaper down on the picnic table and set down condiments, salads and fruit. She poured coke and fanta for everyone. All the food was laid out, the drinks were poured, but no one touched anything. The kids, especially the little one, were slightly impatient but good humored. They ran to the fountain nearby - where Salih had told them to put the whole watermelon to cool - and they splashed and ran about. The middle child, Furkan, was more subdued. They all sort of regarded me in a kind of awe - this foreign creature that their father really talked up or whatever. Furkan stayed with me. He had his father’s fancy phone - maybe an iphone. He’s fascinated by technology and loves playing with that phone. He showed me photos and set a timer to count down to eating time.  Today sundown was 8:10. Furkan gave us a minute by minute count-down and everything had to be timed exactly right. At 8:10 we heard the call to prayer, Şerife offered a few words of prayer herself, and all the families all around the park began to eat.
Salih says that western people - especially secularists - think his lot are monsters. He says, they think we’re monsters, but look at us. We’re just ordinary people. They’re the ones who are monsters. They’re brainwashed, they can’t seem to be able to think any other way.
It saddened me. I felt sort of like a spy. I felt sad that these beautiful boys were living in this indoctrination - yet it’s peaceful and loving and, in many ways, fulfilling. He has a happy family life. His kids are happy. His wife seems content and confident in her faith. After dinner she went off to pray. Salih and I drank tea. The three boys attend Koran school during the summer holiday. The older boy also takes English class. His father boasts: Ahmet is learning American English. I say really, as opposed to English English? They both say yes and then Ahmet adds: I learn American English in summer school but when I go back to regular school, I learn normal English.
The middle kid now plays music on the iphone; an islamic/pop mix with heavy religious lyrics - he sings with it off-key. I glance down at the newspaper covering the table and there is full page ad about the evils of Darwinism - that Darwinism is a sham. Someone just went and invented it. 
Salih is very glad I came. He tells me several times how happy it made him that I accepted his invitation. 
The thing is, I really like Salih. He and I are friends and I’ve developed true affection for him. And I fell in love with his boys. Furkan who, as the middle child, doesn’t get much attention but is thoughtful and attentive. He was my companion the whole evening. Ahmet, who, now a teenager and is trying to be more independent, is perhaps a bit rebellious (his parents worry about this.) When his father tells him to talk to me in English he smiles and blushes. I help him out: What is the color of my shirt. Hello how are you. He answers and is pleased with himself. He knows the days of the week. And the little one, five year old Abdullah, he’s the one who truly grabbed my heart. He’s afraid of dogs but there is a street dog lying on the grass not far from us. Abdullah wants to throw food at him, which his father allows. He and I approach the animal and toss the bone. It’s a largish but calm dog. He eats it and lies back down. Abdullah is shrieking with delight! Do you see that? Let’s do it again! Eventually we’re able to get near enough to the dog that Abdullah gets to touch him. I’m a bit uneasy because - of course - it’s not a good idea to approach strange dogs, especially street dogs. But Salih reassures me: he says the town gathers up all the street dogs and treats them and vaccinates them before releasing them. I say, when I was child, they used to poison street dogs - which was the fate of one of my family’s favorite pet, Tommy. Salih says that doesn’t happen anymore. 

Salih and I have interesting discussions on our 50 minute drive each way. We come from different perspectives, have very different points of view, and we enjoy sharing them. Well Salih enjoys more than me. He literally doesn’t stop talking the whole way. Sometimes he apologizes - have I worn out your ear? I say of course not. What he says is usually fascinating.

The bekçi of Çatalhöyük, which means the guard, is usually in charge of accompanying visitors to see the excavations. Mustafa is the man. When visitors arrive, he takes them around.  Ian Hodder told me it would be fine for me to accompany Mustafa and the tourists on the next tour to visit the excavations. 

I was sitting, bored, drinking tea when Mustafa came along and said, we have visitors! Come!

One of the stops on the tour is a replica of what archaeologists think would be a neolithic house. The houses are built right next to each other. There are no streets. The entries are from the ceiling. So the Çatalhoöyük people navigated on rooftops and entered there houses from above. There is a staircase that leads down, there is always stove, and a platform. The dead are buried under the platform and we assume that’s where the “family” sat and slept. There are also adornments. Wall paintings and bulls’ horns hanging on the walls. Here are some pics of the Neolithic house. Standing inside in the shadows is Aina (sp?). Ruth Tringham was the instigator in building the house and Aina executed the wall ornaments. The small wall opening is for vistors to get in and out.

The next day - the fourth day, I was given approval to roam about the site as I wish. More on that next time.

My second day was a Friday, the muslim holy day of the week, and Çatal was closed. I hung around my hotel for the most part. Read, wrote and visited the pool. The hotel has two pools and a fairly well equipped exercise room. There is a common word in Turkish, YASAK. It sounds a bit severe, and it is. It means forbidden. This is the word I kept encountering while navigating the hotel. It was YASAK to enter the exercise room without proper attire. And if you place your bag next to the rowing machine, it is YASAK because your should leave it in the locker room. And it’s definitely YASAK to enter the indoor pool without a cap - but it’s fine for the outdoor pool, which is rather a scene of  lounging Turkish ladies.
Across the street from my hotel there is an overwhelming, American-style shopping center. 

I braved the extremely dangerous street twice (pedestrians have no rights in Turkey - you must simply learn to duck traffic) to the mall for meals. 


I was headed over there for lunch when a girl of around 12 and her younger sister (maybe 5) approached me. The little girl was crying - kind of exaggerated sobs and the older girl asked me if I’d please buy them lunch. They both looked dirty and a bit ragged. She said, please I don’t want money, but we’re hungry so will you please buy us something to eat. My initial - quick - reaction was to walk away. It reminded me of an incident at a McDonald’s in St. Petersburg a few years ago. There was a mother with two small children. The children were looking up at the board, crying. but the mother clearly didn’t have enough money. It was truly heartbreaking. I’ve always regretted that moment because I sort of didn’t have the guts to do anything. Like everyone else around, I just walked away.

This time I stopped. I said, where are your parents - she said they’re outside but they have no money. So I said, come with me. The little girl immediately stopped crying. They followed me up the escalators to something like a food court - with many Turkish fast food places and one Burger King. Burger King is what I know so I took them there. I ordered some chicken fingers and a burger and the man asked what would I like to drink. I asked the girls and the older girl said, whatever you choose. I ordered them ayran which is a Turkish yogurt drink instead of a pepsi. I told the man to give the food to the children and said good-bye and walked away. I don’t think they even noticed me anymore at that point.  

Good nights’ sleep. Woke up refreshed and ready to go. Met my man Salih at the door, after a hefty buffet breakfast. Salih is the taxi driver who drove me to the hotel last night. We made a deal: he will drive me every day back and forth for a reasonable price. I was relieved to not to have to drive myself in crazy Konya traffic.. He’s very flexible and sweet and is grateful to have the work.

 He’s always talkative, informative, and articulate about many political and religious issues. His wife is “covered” he says but that’s her choice, and has nothing to do with him. He thinks all religions are equal and people should respect each other. He’s fasting now - which means no drink or food until sundown, which, in August, is 8:30 pm. He says he finds fasting refreshing and renewing. 

The drive to Çatalhöyük takes about 45 minutes. Salih says he avoids the highway and takes the short cut. It’s kind of an adventurous road with lots of farms, chickens and cows crossing roads, and motorcyles whizzing by, driven by mad men with no helmets. This morning there was a small child sitting on the handle of a motorcycle. No helmet.

Çatalhöyük is truly in the middle of nowhere. Höyük means hill - and Çatal means fork. I think what’s meant is that a fork cuts two large hills. It wasn’t until the early sixties that it was discovered that these hills, and many more across Anatolia, cover pre-historic cities. Mellaart, a German archeologist first discovered Çatal in 1963 but then got in trouble with the govermnment for some smuggling issue - he was banned from digging and the site was closed. In 1993, English archeologist, Ian Hodder, finally got permission to dig again. It’s his visionary method and archaeological philosophy that drives the excavation today.

Of course you notice that I’m using the British spelling of the word archaeology - it’s not because I’m pretentious. It’s because my mentor, the eminent Ruth Tringham, took a digital red pen and corrected every instance of the word on a proposal I wrote. It’s the correct way, she said. I’m grateful to her for that and for many other intellectual and inspirational gifts. 

The scientists take a site tour each week to discuss the previous week's work. This was quite informative but also sometimes difficult to grasp. Overall I had a great day.  Here are a few more photos:

The Neolithics of Çatalhöyük  buried their dead inside their houses - often several individuals side by side or on top of each other. One of the many mysteries of Çatalhöyük. More on that later.
Below, two burials.

Noon departure from Boston. Sad to say good-bye to my beautiful John. A three hour layaway at JFK and then a 9.5 hour flight to Istanbul. Religiously (and somewhat skeptically) took my homeopathic remedy for jet lag: No Jet Lag. This flight was uneventful (chatted with my seat-mate, an apparently well known clothing designer who travels all around the world promoting his line) and had a bulkhead seat. Yey. I slept! (with help)

As soon as I landed in Istanbul I was struck by the incongruity of the Turkish character. The country continues to become modernized - everything is clean, new, up to date - the airport is beautiful, well kept and modern. And while most of the people you encounter are westernized and forward thinking, there is a huge segment of the population that’s just not taken the leap. It is interesting to observe and sometimes very surprising. 

On my one hour flight to Konya I was seated next to a young woman. Blond (perhaps naturally, perhaps not), lovely smile and very polite and kind. Extremely approachable. We struck up a conversation. She lives in Konya, she’s married with a young daughter. The conversation inevitably turned to religion - she’s religious, is fasting during the month of ramadan. She asked me about my religious background and was rather shocked that I didn’t have one. I said my mother was raised Christian, my father a Muslim, and that religion had never been an issue in my home. She found this very difficult to grasp. She she asked me what I thought about the Muslim religion - or any religion - I said I respect peoples’ faith. This seemed to abate her a bit. But me being me,  I had to add that I had a slight problem - or questions - with women covering up so much - especially in the last decade or so. Under the current right-leaning regme, this has increasingly become the social norm. I assumed that since she was uncovered, with short sleeves, an open mind, this wouldn’t be such a delicate subject to bring up. She looked at me with almost sad eyes: I thought you respected peoples’ faith she said. 

Now  a whole dissertation could probably be written about this little exchange. About what the head-scarf and the variations of the muslim “covering” of women signifies to me (subservience, oppression, powerlessness, giving up of identity) and what it means to her (freedom of expression.) At any rate this conversation then took a pause. I made lots of small talk about how adorable her daughter must be - and god bless her - and so on. She then asked me: are you married. Now this is a question many of us gay men often must carefully navigate. I could’ve said yes - since John and I, for all intents and purposes are married. And left it at that and see what she asks next, if anything. Or I could’ve said “no” and that could be the end. And even though I didn’t think this through in my head, the right thing seemed to be to tell the truth. So I said, no. My male partner and I have been together for over thirty years but haven’t discussed marriage just yet. 

WELL

First she seemed unfazed - like this was a most ordinary revelation. A moment later she said: I’ve never had a gay friend before. And I replied: well now you do. She looked away. By this time we had exchanged email addresses and  were now in full descent. She looked at me and said I feel sick. What’s the matter I said - she said my ears are popping and my stomach  is queazy. We didn’t talk much after that. Once we landed she grabbed her bag and got in front of me. She rather pushed people out of the way to get ahead. When someone said something like - are you alright, “I miss my daughter” she shrieked, never said another word to me, and disappeared into the crowd. 

Took a cab to the Dedemen Hotel where Çatalhöyük had reserved a room for me. All the expected amenities: air condition, wifi, and a pool. Fell to bed and got a good nights' sleep. No jet lag!!

Konya is a fairly large city about an hour away from Çatalhöyük. The word is pronounced something like Chatalheuyuek; it means forked hill. Or a road forking around a hill - something like that. I’ll stay at the Dedeman hotel in Konya. I’m told it’s air-conditioned and has wi-fi and maybe even a pool. I will drive back and forth each day. My mother thinks I should hire a driver. She’s probably right but I’m hesitant.

The home of the mystic poet Rumi, Konya is one of the most religiously conservative cities in Türkiye. I passed through one afternoon back in 2007, when I was researching my play, CRY OF THE REED, that takes in Konya. I visited the Rumi museum and the mosque. Turks don’t think of Rumi as the romantic mystic most westerners think him to be. For them, he’s a profoundly religious figure.

What I didn’t realize when I made these plans was that I was going in the middle of Ramadan, the holy month of Islam. Now this is going to be interesting. During ramadan, observant muslims fast between sun-rise and sun-down. Here is what wikipedia has to say:

Ramadan is a time of spiritual reflection and worship. Muslims are expected to put more effort into following the teachings of Islam and to avoid obscene and irreligious sights and sounds. Sexual intercourse among spouses is allowed after one has ended the daily fast. During fasting, intercourse is prohibited as well as eating and drinking, and resistance of all temptations is encouraged. Purity of both thoughts and actions is important. The act of fasting is said to redirect the heart away from worldly activities, its purpose being to cleanse the soul and free it from harmful impurities. Ramadan also teaches Muslims to practice self-discipline, self-control,[17] sacrifice, and empathy for those who are less fortunate; thus encouraging actions of generosity and charity. It becomes compulsory for Muslims to start fasting when they reach puberty,

This means I’ll have to store food away so I don’t go hungry. It will be interesting to see how the western archaeologists handle ramadan. How will the Turkish workers at the site handle it in the sweltering heat of August?