The Temple and the Trees

This essay uses the genre of creative nonfiction to reflect on a visit to Göbekli Tepe in South-East Turkey. I tell a story about travelling from Cape Town to Sanliurfa that situates this pivotal site (and its excavation) in relation both to imperial history and to contemporary eco-social priorities in the region. What connection might there be between the T-shaped limestone pillars on Belly Mountain and the Hagia Sophia, or an Ottoman mausoleum, or the question of food security in the Fertile Crescent, or the war in Syria, or the protest in Gezi Park that became a national uprising? I argue that whether or not one is a genetic descendant of the people who made that complex of beautiful structures, every living being on the planet is now an inheritor of the relations of power it appears to manifest and the symbolic culture it embodies. Like any archaeological excavation, the site tells at least as much about the present moment as it does about the past. Travelling to visit it in mid-Winter, I encountered both the impact of powerful elites, and a trace of that liveliness which ineradicably continues to resist and elude it.