The stone heads of Nemrut Dagi
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The stone heads of Nemrut Dagi |
| The night before ! |
| The night before had been
quite something. We left the town of Malatya and headed South to Nemrut
Dagi looking for a quiet spot to set up camp. It took us longer than usual
that evening before we stopped and winched up our tent. It was cold and
windy on the ridge of the mountain where we decided to stop but this was
the only spot we could find after searching for 45 minutes. A few hours
later the wind really picked up ! Troopie without its tent up is already
2.4 meters high. With the tent up, Troopie has the aerodynamics of a
garage door ! We tried to sleep in our tent that went back and forth as a
metronome (or as a 80 storey Hong Kong building in a typhoon number 10 !).
The wind battered the vertical sides of our tent. At one in the morning we
decided to leave and find a quieter place !
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A cold shower after a stormy night (left), our second camping spot for the night (centre), on the way up to the peak (right)
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| Nemrut Dagi |
| Mount Nemrut Dagi in the
Anti-Taurus range rises to 2150 meters but this was not always so.
"The summit was formed when a megalomaniac pre-Roman local king cut
two ledges in the rock, filled them with colossal statues of himself and
the Gods (his "relatives"), then ordered an artificial mountain
peak of crushed rock 50m high to be piled between them." (LP
guidebook). His tomb is said to lie under the pile of rocks. We were told
excavations might start in 2002 to check whether this is true !
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| All of the heads have
fallen from their bodies over time perhaps making them an even more
impressive sight, somehow resembling the Easter Islands.
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Just to give you an idea of the size of the heads (left), Troopie crossing a Roman bridge (194-211 AD) of which the columns are still original (right)
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We are doing well !
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| KM 145,417 | Back to Trip page | Heading to Mediterranean Turkey |
