Hasankeyf, Turkey

Talk about old, this place is was around to watch old get its first gray hair!

The first thing that we noticed about Hasankeyf, was that people still live in caves in the hills just around town.

This guy gave my dad and I a little tour of his cave dwelling. It was pretty cool, considering that I thought he was going to throw rocks at us for pissing his dogs off instead. It was apparent that people had been living in these caves for a long time. Probably thousands of years. He took us through the few different levels, and even showed us a room where they used to worship the sun. For that matter, maybe they still worship the sun there, I don't know. It was interesting because this guy had a way of climbing around on the rock with a natural ease, while my dad and I had to really watch out that we didn't slip and fall to our deaths. I think that we were very lucky to have met him.


Storks


Above the city there was a large castle a city and a graveyard. Now you can go up there and hike around the ruins. There is enough to see that if you wanted to see everything it would take most of a day. This cat decided to follow us and persistently meow for pretty much the entire time I was there. If no one else would have been watching, I might have chucked it over the cliff to get it to shut up.

This was inside some of the ruins.

This guy was great. Dad and I would stop by his shop and we would drink coffee with him. His hands always smelled like fish, so he made me prepare the coffee. His English wasn't bad so we learned the town gossip from him, like how many wives certain men had. You know, the usual. Turns out that if you have 3 wives your probably about average. Some of the men have so many children that they can't keep their names straight. One man I heard about had 25!

Just a truck passing through town. It was good for a laugh.

These are the pylons of the old bridge that crossed the Tigris river here. Too bad it and the castle were not preserved very well. This place would be one of the most amazing historical sights in the world. As they are they are pretty darn amazing. I just read that this place has been inhabited by 9 civilizations.

This is half of an arch that still survives.

As I was taking pictures of the old bridge I made some friends.



In the morning people water their animals at the river.

There was a dust storm coming through the area. One person told us that it was only like this one or two days a year. The dust in the air put a kind of pastel cloak over everything as if we were experiencing a constant sunset.

This tomb was built in the 1400s for the son of a local governor.