Ludingirra’s time is up. And he’s not happy about it.

His friends think it’s funny, though. They laugh at him, snorting over their beers. He shakes his shaggy head regretfully and drags deeply on his cigarette. There’s no way around it: Every Turk is a Soldier.

It’s my last night in Turkey. I’m drinking Efes beer with Dogan and three of his friends on the roof of a club in the Tunel area of Taksim, the hippest part of Istanbul. The first three floors are filled with the young, writhing, and beautiful, who dance and drink and drink and—in the women’s bathroom, at least—puke; the rooftop bar has simple wood tables and a quieter, older crowd. Mind you, it is Friday night, and people are clearly drinking their faces off, but they’re having (perhaps increasingly incoherent) conversations while they’re doing it. Downstairs you can only shout in each other’s ears and then nod as if you actually heard what was said.

Dogan is a computer programmer for a tobacco company who has put me up for a week and seems to know pretty much everybody in Taksim. Ismail is a petroleum engineer and recently diagnosed diabetic. (He pulls out a needle halfway through the night, and as he lifts his shirt, I have to look away.) There’s also old friend of theirs whose name I can’t remember but who has appealingly Mod sideburns and a week ago at the annual Roma music festival kept yelling at me to “be more Turkish”—in other words, to shake my ass; and, of course, Ludingirra, the soon-to-be soldier, who in daily life is a 33-year-old editor of a music magazine. His name isn’t really Ludingirra, but that’s what I’m calling him, for reasons that will become clear later.

This is why Ludingirra’s time is up. If a guy studies for a master’s degree, as this moppet-headed sloucher did, he can delay mandatory service in the Turkish military until he’s 33. (He gets another four years if he’s aiming at a Ph.D.) And then, come hell or highwater, he must serve for up to 15 months. Of the four, Ludingirra is the only one who hasn’t served his required time. (Women can join the army, but they don’t have to.) Many stints aren’t exactly taxing; Ismail, for instance, patrolled Ephesus, a Greek-Roman city that is one of the most popular archaeological sites in Turkey. In Turkey, it’s known as Efes—and thus the inspiration for the beer we’re on round four, or maybe five, of.

There are two places it would suck most to be stationed, and both involve Kurds, the minority population in both Turkey and neighboring Iraq, who have been fighting both governments for decades. The first would be the Turkey-Iraq border, which Turkey wants to cross to follow Kurdish separatists known as the PKK into the historically Kurdish area of Iraq. The other would be Diyarbakir, a mostly Kurdish city in southeast Turkey where separatists and Turkish soldiers have been routinely killing each other—and civilians—and more civilians—since 1984. Tens of thousands have died.

The only pro-Bush person I met anywhere in the world—think about that for a moment—was a Kurd from Diyarbakir. A taxi driver in Istanbul, he was happy Saddam Hussein got his, and everything else be damned.

We had a robust political debate about Bush, language barrier be damned.

Kurdish taxi driver: “George Bush very good! Number one! HA HA HA!”

Me: “No no no! George Bush no good! Hayir [no] George Bush! Hayir!”

Taxi driver: “HA HA HA! Evet [yes] George Bush! Evet! Number one!”

Me: “Hayir George Bush! Very bad!”

Taxi driver: “America best country! HA HA HA!”

Discussing the Kurdish situation brings out, at best, uncomfortable cringing from Istanbul sophisticates, and might get your teeth knocked in (from either pro or anti Kurds) in other parts of the country. Talking about the treatment of Armenians by Ottoman Turkey in the early 20th century is even worse. It’s against the law, in fact.

Turkey is bidding for European Union membership, and two of the major sticking points for some EU member states are Turkey’s record on human rights and freedom of speech. For many writers, these two have neatly—and unfortunately— converged. There are a lot of things you can’t say in Turkey. For instance, it’s illegal to call the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 “genocide”; the controversy about whether it was continues today. Nor can you pen something that is “insulting Turkishness.” What is “insulting Turkishness,” exactly? It seems to be defined much as obscenity famously was in 1964 by US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: hard to define, but “I know it when I see it.”

Turkish prosecutors saw it in a Swiss newspaper article in which 2006 Nobel Prize–winning novelist Orhan Pamuk was quoted as saying, “30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares talk about it.” The charges against Pamuk were dropped in early 2006.

But he’s not the only one to dare to talk about it. The Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, given a six-month suspended sentence in 2005 for openly writing about the Armenian controversy, was gunned down outside of his newspaper’s office in Istanbul a year later. Thousands protested. Then novelist Elif Shafak was charged for writing about the same subject. The judge threw her case out in less than an hour. She didn’t testify, as she was busy giving birth at the time the case was heard.

But you don’t have to write about Armenians to be prosecuted for your words. You could try “insulting Muslim women and inciting religious hatred,” as Sumerian archaeologist Muazzez Ilmiye Cig was accused—and promptly cleared—of doing in 2006 when she wrote in a scholarly work that head scarves predate Islam, and were in fact worn by Mesopotamian priestesses who carried on the sacred sexual rites I mentioned in an earlier post. (Incidentally, the 90-something Cig, like a lot of Turks, considered Pamuk’s accusations of Armenian genocide to be untrue. On her website is this obliquely menacing message: “She is a true daughter of Ataturk. She conforms to reforms without concession.”)

Nor must you have a connection to Turkey at all. The only time I saw Dogan—super mellow, incredibly generous, and widely traveled Dogan—look alarmed was when it came to a book, and it wasn’t about Turkey. I was rereading Shalimar the Clown by the recently knighted Salman Rushdie. Much as Midnight’s Children is about the founding of India, Shame the history of Pakistan, and The Moor’s Last Sigh the colonization of India, Shalimar is Rushdie’s take on the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan. I was revisiting it because I had now actually been to Kashmir.

Dogan and his girlfriend Anna-Marie were heading out of his apartment to have dinner with friends when he stopped short. He pointed at the book, which was sitting, I thought very innocently, on the coffee table in his living room, where I was cross-legged on the couch with a glass of wine.

“Don’t let anyone see you reading Salman Rushdie,” he said with a small smile. “Satanic Verses is illegal in Turkey. You can’t sell it here.”

I was surprised. I would have thought that in Turkey, where secular humanists and nationalist reactionaries can at least bond on their mutual distaste for religion, watching Rushdie thumb his nose at Mohammed might have been at least diverting. But instead it had been frightening. I’ve haven’t been able to verify that the book is banned in Turkey, but certainly there is precedent for Dogan’s anxiety. Consider what happened in July 1993, in Sivas, a city in central Turkey. Pro-sharia radicals protesting Aziz Nesin, the Turkish translator of Satanic Verses, set fire to the hotel hosting the Pir Sultan Abdal Literary Festival Nesin was attending. They blocked firefighters from dousing the flames. Thirty-seven died. Nesin himself made it out alive.

But I didn’t know about Sivas then. “Wow,” I said. “I had no idea. I have a copy back home. I can send it to you if you want.”

Dogan was nearly tasered by this suggestion. “Oh! No! Oh, no!” He furiously waved his hands, warding off the very idea, as if the novel would be a literary bomb exploding his mailbox and his life. “Oh no, don’t do that. Please, really. You can’t. That is a very bad idea.”

Still, for now, these writers’ works are intact. But for the long haul, for real persistence through time, they may want to consider writing on clay tablets like Ludingirra. I’m not talking about the music magazine editor, at least not specifically. Maybe I’m talking about all writers, including myself; considering how intangible a medium the Internet is, clay seems preferably substantial.

Instead, I’m referring to the 18th century b.c. Sumerian I had dismissed as a Momma’s Boy a week back. Turns out that perhaps I had jumped the gun in that appraisal. He did note for a courier who was sent to Nippur to fetch his mother that the courier would be able to recognize her by her singular qualities:

My mother is like a bright light on the horizon/active in the mountains./A morning star (shining even) at noon/A precious carnelian-stone, a topaz from Marhasi/A treasure from the brother of the king, full of charm…

—and I mean, c’mon. We all love our mothers—I particularly like drinking wine with mine while storm watching from a good porch—but really. What a suck up. Trying to secure our place in the will, are we?

I had floated this theory by Dogan earlier in the week. He enthusiastically informed me I had no clue what I was talking about: “Oh no, Ludingirra is very famous!”

It turns out that Ludingirra wrote an autobiography, a highly unusual thing for 18th century b.c., in which he detailed how the Akkadians, the new sheriffs in town—”town” being Nippur, in what is now southern Iraq—were suppressing Sumerian culture. And we know this because the clay tablets on which he had written his autobiography were translated into Turkish by Cig, the Sumerian archaeologist whose long-view take on the hijab landed her in court.

We’ve had enough beers that when I privately, slowly, and not very logically connect Ludingirra’s inevitable military stint with Sumerian Ludingirra’s complaints about Akkadian oppression, I find myself depressed as hell. Many people like to think of the past—any period, anywhere on this planet—as some sort of Golden Age when the Ancestors Got It Right, and if we could only recapture the Wisdom of the Ancients, then we too could create A Better World. These people are bullshitting themselves so completely that it makes me sad for and angry at every last damned one of us. Sumerian Ludingirra and Turkish Ludingrra can tell you about how the majority routinely crack the skulls of the minority. It’s happened everywhere, in all cultures, at all times. Akkadians and Sumerians. Turks and Kurds. Iraqis and Kurds. The whole damned planet. Its utter predictability in the archaeological record, the present day, and the forseeable future is seriously depressing.

Shit. Maybe I’ve had too much to drink. I’m a lightweight now. I keep these thoughts to myself as we talk about the Pixies; Ludingirra does write about music, after all. I wax rhapsodic about seeing the very last show in the Pixies 2005 reunion tour, at Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC, which is much more fun than dwelling on the Dark Side of Man.

First Dogan decides to leave, and then Mod Sideburns does; Ismail agrees to drive me back to Dogan’s later. Later comes sooner rather than, er, later, and soon enough Ludingirra and I are exchanging contact info. Mine’s easy: I hand him a business card. Ludingirra writes down his name, email address, and magazine’s website on a torn slip of paper. I stash it somewhere.

If he had written it on clay tablet, I might be able to say what his real name was instead of coining with the moniker of a man who’s been dead for 4,000 years. Because that slip of paper disappeared. It won’t turn up, either—not as a crumpled-up bit in my purse, nor a fluttering-to-the-ground scrap from my notebook, nor a drunken scrawl that I won’t be able to decipher months later as Steve looks at me questioningly over my shoulder. (“Picking up men in foreign countries, are we?”) It will just do a vanishing act. Whoosh. Gone. The whole damned night might have never have happened, save for writing it here, in this painfully ephemeral medium.

Because I’d like to know: Will Ludingirra wind up serving at some place like Ephesus or somewhere more like Diyarbakir? Will he be able to bore himself to tears watching fat, sunburned Germans on package tours pose before the rising columns of the library at Ephesus, or will he be forced to help crack heads—or get his own cracked—at the border?

On the drive to Dogan’s, Ismail and I have this exchange:

Me: You work for a petroleum company? Really?

Ismail: Yes, really.

Me: And you’re okay with that?

Ismail: They will get the oil whether I am okay with it or not.

Me: That is true.

Before I return to Antalya, where I am to catch a flight back to Istanbul, I explore the ruins of Rhodiapolis, a small Lycian city, insignificant except for its most famous native son: Opramoas. He was sort of the George Soros of his day, a rich, philanthropically—and politically—minded Lycian who donated tons of money to dozens of cities after the earthquake in a.d. 141 flattened them. He had the ear of emperors like Hadrian.

His tomb is a jumble of stones—

—most of them covered with Greek inscriptions.

I ask the archaeologists where he got his money. The answer is that he was rich because he was rich. Meaning: self-made men didn’t really happen so much in the ancient world. Opramoas was no Oprah, no Bill Gates, no Ross Perot.

Looking at pile of water pipes someone casually laid down in a corner of the baths 1,900 years ago, where they have lain ever since, I entertain myself with the idea of a Lycian Ross Perot, a comical little man with big ears and a floppy toga, speechifying his straight-talkin’ bullshit about the high capital gains tax on the sale of slaves.

Archaeologists are beginning to make order out of the chaos that is Opramoas’s tomb. When they actually get to the center, I guess we’ll know whether he was shrimp size too.

Back in Antalya, I visit the museum. There are few Lycian artifacts here; most were removed from the sites by Europeans in the 19th century, including the famous Nereid Monument in the British Museum, which was taken from Xanthos, the capital city of Lycia. (Patara had been Xanthos’ port.) Like a lot of countries plundered by 19th century European adventurers, Turkey has agitated to get some of these artifacts back.

There is, however, the tomb of one Aurelia Botanie Demetria. Unhelpfully, it was found in no place more specific than “Asia Minor,” the classical name for Turkey. It dates to the same time as the stone sarcophagi at Patara, around the 2nd century a.d. Unlike those tombs, however, this one is marble and incredibly ornate, with columns and elaborate reliefs. At ten feet long and six feet high, it’s a roomy place to take one’s eternal repose. Atop the lid are high-relief, life-size statues of Botanie and her husband. They lounge casually on their sides, resting on one elbow, plates of food before them.

Botanie has wide severe eyes that beam a bleak anger; she’s been wronged and has no faith things will ever be put right. Startingly, her husband’s head is unfinished—a mere smear, the features still waiting to emerge. Paradoxically, this rough blob rises above berobed shoulders that are so hyperrealistically rendered I want to rub the folds between my fingers.

The inscription on the tomb reads:

I Aur(elia) Botanie Demetria have had this sarcophagus made for myself; I desire solely my body to be buried in there and immediately after my death the tomb to be enclosed with iron and lead by my successors.

What story must lie behind those bitter eyes, that unfinished face, that iron and lead solitude?

Later, I have dinner on the patio of a restaurant overlooking the harbor: fresh fish and an Efes beer. (Okay, two beers. Well, three.) As it has for the last 1,800 years, the Roman tower to my right aims its round massiveness across the harbor at the Bey mountains I drove through just two hours before. It’s easy to imagine people standing in front of it, perhaps early in the morning, their faces to the harbor, the sun warming their backs, thinking, It’s going to be a fine day.

The Cypriot waiter keeps interrupting me to bat his blond eyelashes. It’s early in the season in this tourist town, and I am that always intriguing thing: a woman alone. Better yet, I’m a woman drinking alone. Writing in my notebook seems to elevate me above mere looking-for-it status, because he is flirty but not disrespectful. (Actually, only the Istanbul carpet sellers have treated me like tits on dollar bills.) He knows he’s cute, and a guitarist, too, lithely soccer-hot and tan. He might as well give it a shot.

He writes my name in 1984-style block letters in the front of my notebook.

I haven’t done anything that girly since perhaps ever.

The music is ear-disabling: air raid sirens over a techno beat. “Do you know this song?” he fairly shouts. I admit that I don’t. He sings along—”al-co-hol, al-co-hol, al-co-hol…”—and gently pumps his fist in the air as if testing a faulty ceiling.

The Arykandans might have liked this tune.

When I pay, he hands me the change and a business card for another cafe where he plays the guitar every Sunday night. He urges me to come. Not traditional music. Modern music. I will enjoy.

“Like this,” he says. “Al-co-hol, al-co-hol.”

But by Sunday I’ll be gone. I’m returning to Istanbul for one last night.

Over the next few days, I drive and drive from site to site, interviewing archaeologists about Tlos and Xanthos and Arykanda and Rhodiapolis, which is so little known that I can’t find a link for it. But it’s so awesome, I’m sure I’ll write about it in the future.

There is no radio in the car. The air conditioner only snorts like an disdainful elephant. I sleep in hotels that are neither good nor bad but substantially lonesome somehow. Maybe it’s the clusters of four and five German businessmen talking in the hotel restaurants as they plaster rounds of pita with yogurt and auburgine mezze. When spoken loudly, German sounds angry; when quietly, morose. The best meal I eat is one I find at a roadside mom-and-son restaurant. A boy takes me to a cement tank and gestures that I should choose my dinner. “Kucuk, kucuk,” I urge: small. The boy scoops up a sleek black pond fish with his net. The poor thing emerges 20 minutes later pan-fried on a paper plate, pinning me with its boiled eye. I sip Efes beer so cold it thrills my teeth.

I take sunsets in at Tlos and Arykanda, which are both set into the sides of mountains. Arykanda in particular is amazing. A small 2,000-year-old city that essentially catered to merchants traveling along a main trade artery from the interior to the coast, Arykanda may be the funnest archaeological site I’ve ever visited. Nearly impossible to see from the ancient road, the city climbs indefatiguably into the hills. Following it up and up and up eventually forces you to look down—where are my feet now? oh, the knees… ack, my lungs are burning—but when you can raise your chin again, the reward is one amazing expanse of ruins after another. Best is that they are only revealed one at a time. You encounter the baths and think, simply, Wow. You climb past the baths and then the gymnasium is suddenly in front of you, ornate columns and those lonesome shafts where statuary used to vogue. Oh, okay. Now this is—Wow. Up again and there is the amphitheater. Oh, Christ. Wow. Holy hell.

You sit on the top step and look out at the entire valley spread out before you.

In ancient texts, the Arykandans were scorned as lazy drunkards. Over the years, archaeologists have found thousands of wine bottles and grape presses. So, ahem, chances are they liked to knock back a few. But at sunset, with the Arykandan vineyards, which still exist today, casting shrubby shadows on the mountains staring back at you from the opposite side of the valley, it’s easy to see things from the Arykandan point of view. They felt safe in their mountain city. They could see everybody who passed by. No one could approach unnoticed. The view rocked. All they had to do was wait for the business to come to them. Why not pour a glass of wine and soak in the ambience? Why not have another? Come my friend, life is good, let’s honor it. What More Could We Want? This is Perfection!

The evening is bruising to night, and I’m alone at Arykanda. It’s thrilling. I’d drink to that—Serefe! as the toast goes in Turkey today—if only I had one of those Efes beers.

In Antalya I make a plan to loop around ancient Lycia, heading west through the mountains on the northern border; south to Patara; east along the coast, where mountains and ocean meet; and then up the eastern border back to Antalya.

The Lycian culture dates back to at least the 13th century b.c., because ancient records say the Lycians fought with the Hittites (from what is now central Turkey) against the Egyptians under Ramesses II. If Homer is to be trusted, they then battled the Greeks alongside the Trojans, whose capital city was in what is now northwest Turkey. The Persians, the Greeks, the Rhodians, and the Romans all controlled the region at various times; nevertheless, most Lycians didn’t take kindly to foreign rule. The people of its capital city, Xanthos, committed mass suicide three times when faced with an approaching foreign army. Brutus—of Et tu fame—and his troops found fewer than 200 people alive when they took the city in the first century b.c. Later Romans were more successful in Lycia, because they heavily invested in the cities and ports during the first few centuries of the first millennium a.d. This period was, incidentally, the last hurrah of Lycia. One earthquake in 141 a.d. leveled most of the cities. They rebuilt, but a hundred years later another enormous earthquake shattered them again. And that was pretty much that.

My first stop is Patara, Xanthos’ port city, and the most important one in the 1st and 2nd centuries a.d. There’s so much to see here that I get stuck here most of the day, which means I don’t get to visit as many sites as I intended. But one amphitheater can keep me occupied for hours—hell, so can a sherd of ancient pottery with a partial fingerprint—so I guess getting to more than one site in a day is far too optimistic.

I check out the adjacent beach first. To get there, I may be doing something illegal when I accidentally (and regretfully) cross through a sea turtle nesting area. I don’t see any turtles, but there are animal tracks of all kinds. These are my vote for turtle toemarks.

Most of the beach bunnies are hoary hares long in the ears—European couples in their 50s. They have to make their own waves; here, the Mediterranean is so still and gentle that babies should be born in it. I head for a relatively uninhabited part of the beach. As I bob in the aquamarine waters, one couple nearby get comfortable. She takes off her bikini top and settles nipples up on the beach towel. She firmly secures a tennis visor over her eyes. He wiggles out of his Euro-style tightie swimmies but—and this is what throws me—leaves his shirt on. He sits with his knees up, and I can see the curve of his naked hip where it disappears under his shirt. All that sand on one’s bare ass seems terribly uncomfortable.

The women who live in the small agricultural villages around Patara are all covered up, but not in some bodies-are-sinful way. It’s more of a tuck-your-shirt-into-those- high-waisted-pants-cause-that’s-our-style way, a cover-your-head-it’s-freaking-hot -in-southern-Turkey-and-we’re-bent-over-the-fields-all-day-it-will-get-in-your-eyes kind of way. (There must be a German word that conveys this entire notion.) I wonder what they think of all this pointedly exposed flesh.

I climb the high hill separating Patara’s ancient port—now a marshland a kilometer inland—from the current shoreline. Atop this hill is a double archway that it takes me 45 minutes to reach. There are endless thorns and finger-slicing basalt rocks and will you stop touching me?! wisps of spider webs to navigate, making it a slow go. Eventually I climb into the arches. The Mediterranean peeks through.

From here I can see what I couldn’t have detected from below—stone Roman sarcophagi cracked open first by ancient looters and then by time. I duck and scramble my way down the cut stones gravity is taking bottomward until I am surrounded by the tombs. Some are open, tress-like moss the solo inhabitant. Others have their lids but are easy to peer into.

But here’s something new: I am creeped out. Jesus, I think. Everybody’s dead. The dead themselves are long gone, either cremated 1,800 years ago or having leeched back into the earth. Still, I’m surprisingly uncomfortable. I’m the only person as far as I can see. Nipple Toaster and Bottoms Up are obscured by the distance and the haze of heat.

I wanted the real people in the archaeology, didn’t I? Not that Inanma chick, with her fierce appetites and fertility rites and noncorporeality, but something realer. And now I have them.

Somehow I had forgotten what’s so appealing about gods: the eternal-life thing. The escape-from-the-rot-of-life thing. Inanma and her calls to “plow my vulva” (which sounds even more painful than having sand in your crack) seems not so disappointing after all.

Other Roman sarcophagi at Patara have inscriptions telling you who, what, where, and when (rarely why), but these hilltop tombs have none. Their identifying texts have disappeared over time. There is no singular life here. Just a culture’s death rituals, anthropologically interesting but hardly personally moving.

You can hear more about the site in this audio clip, in which I am possibly doing something illegal. Again.

I make my way down the other side of the hill towards the main street of Patara. From here you can see the majority of the ruins—Lycian inscribed panels, the Roman amphitheater, Byzantine walls. (This is but a fraction—most of the site is still unexcavated.) Furthest away are a gateway built in honor of a visit from Hadrian and Roman tombs built along the entrance road. People all over the world have been building their eternal digs in high-traffic areas pretty much always.

It must be over 90 degrees. I’m hot and sore, panting and need water. My legs sting from the sweat that has rolled into the jagged slices the thorns have made in my shins. This all makes me oddly happy. It’s verification that at least somebody around here still has a pulse.

A few minutes later, I emerge at an amphitheater, where after 20 minutes of having the site to myself to take photos, such as this one from the perspective of the emperor’s seat—

—I encounter a whole drum kit of heartbeats. A group of college-age kids follows a grey-haired but energetic man into the site. American or Canadian—it’s often hard to tell—they politely pretend to listen to him but are clearly eager to climb through the seating rows.

There’s another older man with the group as well. He wears the requisite Indiana Jones fedora of certain white men in hot climes. But while Indy’s hat is sweaty and dirty and just, um, superhot, this guy’s has the stiffness of retail-bought pseudo-adventure. He’s carrying a small video camera, which he only periodically brings up to his left eye. He seems intent and distracted as he nears me, scanning the site for some unknown quantity. If I knew what he was looking for, I might be able to fill him in. After all, I’ve researched this site. I’ve interviewed one of the archaeologists who dug up the stage he’s awkwardly scaling. But more than that, I just want to talk to somebody for a moment. It’s nice to see real, live people, and I feel a minor bond with them. They like archaeology. I like archaeology. Three cheers for archaeology.

“Are those archaeology students with you?” I ask.

He doesn’t acknowledge in any way that I’ve spoken, though the set of his jaw lets me know he’s heard me. Nor does he bother to make eye contact. I’m about to ask again when he finally answers me in the nastiest tone I’ve heard since the smacktalk event with Viking Girl in Kashmir.

And all it consists of is this: “No.”

You know what sucks about the living? The sucking part.

Christ. I’m going with the dead.

In Antalya I make a plan to loop around ancient Lycia, heading west through the mountains on the northern border; south to Patara; east along the coast, where mountains and ocean meet; and then up the eastern border back to Antalya.

The Lycian culture dates back to at least the 13th century b.c., because ancient records say the Lycians fought with the Hittites (from what is now central Turkey) against the Egyptians under Ramesses II. If Homer is to be trusted, they then battled the Greeks alongside the Trojans, whose capital city was in what is now northwest Turkey. The Persians, the Greeks, the Rhodians, and the Romans all controlled the region at various times; nevertheless, most Lycians didn’t take kindly to foreign rule. The people of its capital city, Xanthos, committed mass suicide three times when faced with an approaching foreign army. Brutus—of Et tu fame—and his troops found fewer than 200 people alive when they took the city in the first century b.c. Later Romans were more successful in Lycia, because they heavily invested in the cities and ports during the first few centuries of the first millennium a.d. This period was, incidentally, the last hurrah of Lycia. One earthquake in 141 a.d. leveled most of the cities. They rebuilt, but a hundred years later another enormous earthquake shattered them again. And that was pretty much that.

My first stop is Patara, Xanthos’ port city, and the most important one in the 1st and 2nd centuries a.d. There’s so much to see here that I get stuck here most of the day, which means I don’t get to visit as many sites as I intended. But one amphitheater can keep me occupied for hours—hell, so can a sherd of ancient pottery with a partial fingerprint—so I guess getting to more than one site in a day is far too optimistic.

I check out the adjacent beach first. To get there, I may be doing something illegal when I accidentally (and regretfully) cross through a sea turtle nesting area. I don’t see any turtles, but there are animal tracks of all kinds. These are my vote for turtle toemarks.

Most of the beach bunnies are hoary hares long in the ears—European couples in their 50s. They have to make their own waves; here, the Mediterranean is so still and gentle that babies should be born in it. I head for a relatively uninhabited part of the beach. As I bob in the aquamarine waters, one couple nearby get comfortable. She takes off her bikini top and settles nipples up on the beach towel. She firmly secures a tennis visor over her eyes. He wiggles out of his Euro-style tightie swimmies but—and this is what throws me—leaves his shirt on. He sits with his knees up, and I can see the curve of his naked hip where it disappears under his shirt. All that sand on one’s bare ass seems terribly uncomfortable.

The women who live in the small agricultural villages around Patara are all covered up, but not in some bodies-are-sinful way. It’s more of a tuck-your-shirt-into-those- high-waisted-pants-cause-that’s-our-style way, a cover-your-head-it’s-freaking-hot -in-southern-Turkey-and-we’re-bent-over-the-fields-all-day-it-will-get-in-your-eyes kind of way. (There must be a German word that conveys this entire notion.) I wonder what they think of all this pointedly exposed flesh.

I climb the high hill separating Patara’s ancient port—now a marshland a kilometer inland—from the current shoreline. Atop this hill is a double archway that it takes me 45 minutes to reach. There are endless thorns and finger-slicing basalt rocks and will you stop touching me?! wisps of spider webs to navigate, making it a slow go. Eventually I climb into the arches. The Mediterranean peeks through.

From here I can see what I couldn’t have detected from below—stone Roman sarcophagi cracked open first by ancient looters and then by time. I duck and scramble my way down the cut stones gravity is taking bottomward until I am surrounded by the tombs. Some are open, tress-like moss the solo inhabitant. Others have their lids but are easy to peer into.

But here’s something new: I am creeped out. Jesus, I think. Everybody’s dead. The dead themselves are long gone, either cremated 1,800 years ago or having leeched back into the earth. Still, I’m surprisingly uncomfortable. I’m the only person as far as I can see. Nipple Toaster and Bottoms Up are obscured by the distance and the haze of heat.

I wanted the real people in the archaeology, didn’t I? Not that Inanma chick, with her fierce appetites and fertility rites and noncorporeality, but something realer. And now I have them.

Somehow I had forgotten what’s so appealing about gods: the eternal-life thing. The escape-from-the-rot-of-life thing. Inanma and her calls to “plow my vulva” (which sounds even more painful than having sand in your crack) seems not so disappointing after all.

Other Roman sarcophagi at Patara have inscriptions telling you who, what, where, and when (rarely why), but these hilltop tombs have none. Their identifying texts have disappeared over time. There is no singular life here. Just a culture’s death rituals, anthropologically interesting but hardly personally moving.

You can hear more about the site in this audio clip, in which I am possibly doing something illegal. Again.

I make my way down the other side of the hill towards the main street of Patara. From here you can see the majority of the ruins—Lycian inscribed panels, the Roman amphitheater, Byzantine walls. (This is but a fraction—most of the site is still unexcavated.) Furthest away are a gateway built in honor of a visit from Hadrian and Roman tombs built along the entrance road. People all over the world have been building their eternal digs in high-traffic areas pretty much always.

It must be over 90 degrees. I’m hot and sore, panting and need water. My legs sting from the sweat that has rolled into the jagged slices the thorns have made in my shins. This all makes me oddly happy. It’s verification that at least somebody around here still has a pulse.

A few minutes later, I emerge at an amphitheater, where after 20 minutes of having the site to myself to take photos, such as this one from the perspective of the emperor’s seat—

I’m hoping to find real people in the archaeology. In the week since I was at the museum, I’ve done some research into Inanma. It turns out that she was a Sumerian goddess, something I would have figured out sooner had the museum used the more common spelling of her name, Inanna, or gotten immediately had she been called by her famous Akkadian name: Ishtar. She is the goddess of love, fertility, and war. She loves hot sex and bloody battles. She will bone you senseless, but if you try to leave her she will hunt you down like the dog you are.

You find that sort of hot, don’t you?

Both the “Oldest Love Poem” and “Inanma Prefers the Farmer”—more familiar as “The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi”—are mythology texts describing boisterous shaggings that were the template for keep-the-crops-growing fertility rites between priestesses standing in for Inanma/Inanna/Ishtar and kings or said priestesses and select young men. (If someone trots out something ostensibly feminist about the ancient tradition of “sacred whores,” there’s a good chance they’re talking about these rites.)

I find myself disappointed. I wanted Inanma to be a real person. Sure, you can glean a remarkable amount about a culture through its mythology, but I wanted Inanma to be just a little more mundane. I wanted her to prefer the farmer to the shepherd because of the quality of his flax or the chubbiness of his lambs, not because of the human need for metaphor to explain the changing of the seasons. I wanted her to have been someone who was born and then died, someone who was not the representation of something but the real thing herself. A single life unimaginably different in its details yet essentially the same as mine.

What’s strange about this urge is that I’ve been spending most of my time in Istanbul lingering over mezze and raki with flesh-and-blood people whose lives essentially fit the bill. Dogan, with his 43-hour work days and dream to become a historian specializing in early-20th-century Istanbul. Sercin, with her ongoing decryption of the bureaucratese on the U.S. Diversity Visa application form. Bahar, with her rowdy batch of photographer friends knocking back wine in a gallery where modern-day gypsies stare out from exquisitely beautiful photos. Fulya, with her memories of the 1999 earthquake that destroyed Izmit, her hometown, and killed so many people she knew. Mine, with her daily deadlines for Aksam and the longer piece about the occurrence of the year 2012 in apocalyptic literature.

We have different perspectives and histories and cultural backgrounds. Yet there is never a shortage of ways to understand each other. So why leave Istanbul for Antalya? Why leave now with the living for then with the dead?

Maybe it’s because I know the living don’t have any more answers than I do. Or maybe I’m full of shit and just want to drive a car for a week. Actually, all of these things can be true at once.

So I take a 12-hour bus from Istanbul to Antalya, where I rent a car and hit the road.a Amphitheater” />

—I encounter a whole drum kit of heartbeats. A group of college-age kids follows a grey-haired but energetic man into the site. American or Canadian—it’s often hard to tell—they politely pretend to listen to him but are clearly eager to climb through the seating rows.

There’s another older man with the group as well. He wears the requisite Indiana Jones fedora of certain white men in hot climes. But while Indy’s hat is sweaty and dirty and just, um, superhot, this guy’s has the stiffness of retail-bought pseudo-adventure. He’s carrying a small video camera, which he only periodically brings up to his left eye. He seems intent and distracted as he nears me, scanning the site for some unknown quantity. If I knew what he was looking for, I might be able to fill him in. After all, I’ve researched this site. I’ve interviewed one of the archaeologists who dug up the stage he’s awkwardly scaling. But more than that, I just want to talk to somebody for a moment. It’s nice to see real, live people, and I feel a minor bond with them. They like archaeology. I like archaeology. Three cheers for archaeology.

“Are those archaeology students with you?” I ask.

He doesn’t acknowledge in any way that I’ve spoken, though the set of his jaw lets me know he’s heard me. Nor does he bother to make eye contact. I’m about to ask again when he finally answers me in the nastiest tone I’ve heard since the smacktalk event with Viking Girl in Kashmir.

And all it consists of is this: “No.”

You know what sucks about the living? The sucking part.

Christ. I’m going with the dead.