Ahlat Reimagined—Birthplace of Turkish Rule in Anatolia

The Turkish government has reinstated Ahlat and its architectural treasures in the national narrative, but its history may be more complex than is acknowledged.

 

William Gourlay

 

In late August, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan convened his cabinet in Ahlat, near the shores of Lake Van in remote eastern Anatolia. Dusty, underdeveloped Ahlat, some 800 miles by road from Turkey’s capital, may seem a strange location to bring ministers and policymakers. But this town looms large in the Turkish imagination due to its proximity to Manzikert (Malazgirt in Turkish), the site of the Turk’s first major military victory in Anatolia. Here in 1071, Sultan Alparslan of the Seljuk dynasty bested a Byzantine army, capturing the hapless Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes, opening the way for Turkish nomads and the establishment of the first Turkish state in Anatolia, the Sultanate of Rum. 

Medieval battles aside, Ahlat is home to a collection of long-ignored architectural treasures that are noteworthy in their own right but also enmeshed in the symbolism that spurred Erdogan to drag his cabinet so far from Ankara. Southwest of the town, arrayed across an undulating meadow, are around 6000 stone stelae, some dating back to the 13th century. At almost 200,000 square meters, the Seljuk mezarlık (cemetery) is the largest in the Islamic world, with tombstones revealing Quranic verses, poems and proverbs, and intricate geometrical motifs carved by local craftsmen. Also dotted around the outskirts of town and the nearby shore of Lake Van are an assortment of kümbets, grand, free-standing mausoleums topped with conical towers that loom over the surrounding rooftops. En route to Babylon in the 1850s, Archaeologist Austen Henry Layard waxed lyrical about the site: “The artist and the lover of nature may equally find at Ahlat objects of study and delight.” 

Ahlat’s tombstones and kümbets were hued from the local, rust-colored stone. Known as ignimbrite, this rock is produced during volcanic eruptions, resulting in a building material that is soft and workable, but which hardens over time when exposed to wind and weather. So distinctive is Ahlat stonework that it has been inscribed by UNESCO as an intangible cultural heritage in need of safeguarding. Historically, the stone was mined in the foothills of nearby Mount Nemrut. Local craftsmen have long used it for building projects, including houses, mosques, bridges and kümbets, while also endowing tombstones with delicate relief work based on organic, geometric and calligraphic designs. For centuries these skills were passed on, but currently, due to demographic shifts and the increasing availability of modern building materials, the techniques of Ahlat stoneworking are in sharp decline.

When Layard arrived in Ahlat, with sunset providing an ambience to illuminate the setting, he recorded “leaning minarets and pointed Mausoleums peeping above the trees” on his advance towards Lake Van. These days the approach is more prosaic. The E99 highway skirts the northern shore of the lake, heading towards the border with Iran, and modern Ahlat appears — at first sight — to be of little interest. 

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Yet, Ahlat’s architectural treasures emerge unexpectedly in otherwise workaday locations. Southwest of the town, standing casually between a mechanic’s yard and a wedding venue are the Çifte Kümbetler, a pair of stately mausoleums dating to the 13th century. These almost identical constructions, dedicated to two long-forgotten noblemen and their respective wives, assume a form typical of Ahlat kümbets. At the base of each kümbet lies an octagonal tomb, in the form of a cube that has had its corners cut off on the diagonal. Above this stands a cylindrical tower with twelve ornamented panels, which, in turn, are topped with a pointed conical roof.

T.A. Sinclair is his oft-cited survey of Turkey’s architectural and archaeological treasures noted that these kümbets , distinct from other Turkish tombs (türbe) because they are free-standing, are most common in Eastern Anatolia. The largest surviving examples are in Ahlat. Of those the Ulu Kümbet is the most sizeable. Somewhat neglected, standing a short distance from the shore of Lake Van, it reaches over 20 meters high on a base nine meters square and is thought to date from the late 13th century. 

Although undeniably Turkish, the kümbets dotted around Ahlat reveal artistic sensibilities that are related to yet distinct from the grand Ottoman architecture of Istanbul that many art lovers are familiar with. Here there are no white marble flagstones or voluptuous leaden domes as in the imperial mosques of Sultanahmet. To my mind, as a magpie flutters between the conical, pointed roofs of the Çifte Kümbetler, I catch a glimpse of Persian and Central Asian aesthetics. This southeastern corner of Anatolia has long been an overlapping zone of Mesopotamian, Caucasian, Mediterranean and Iranian political and artistic currents. Indeed, the Seljuk Turks first conceived the form of the kümbet in Iran, apparently based on the conical tents that were central to their nomadic way of life. There they absorbed Persian artistic influences, which they then carried into Anatolia.

On a summer’s day, it is a pleasant walk beneath shady walnut trees from the Çifte Kümbetler to the Seljuk cemetery. Layard, arriving here in the 1850s, wrote, “We rode through vast burying-grounds, a perfect forest of upright stones seven or eight feet high of the richest red colour, most delicately and tastefully carved with arabesque ornaments and inscriptions in the massive character of the early Mussulman age.” 

The tombstones, arrayed in serried ranks across the undulating ground, still exert a stern, brooding presence. The 19th-century English traveller Henry Lynch drew parallels between the cemetery and that of Père Lachaise in Paris, but for me the overriding impression was that of the ancestors of the Turks maintaining a sentinel over this corner of Anatolia, their burial markers turned — perhaps wistfully — westward towards the setting sun. The juxtaposition of natural beauty and history remains as striking as Layard recorded it. Crows flit from tombstones to the occasional mulberry trees that stand amid the monuments, and distant Mt Süphan, snowcapped even in high summer, provides a stately backdrop. 

Although Layard found Ahlat largely forgotten, efforts by the Erdogan government to rehabilitate Turkish history have sparked interest in such places among modern Turks. Erdogan recently stated, “Since we took office, we have deemed it a duty of ours to revive Ahlat like a capital city and [we] have always acted with this understanding.” Equating Ahlat to a capital city may be overstating things, but it has certainly become a must-see sight for vacationing Turks.

Visiting the mezarlık during kurban bayram, one of the most important holidays in the Turkish calendar, I shared the paths with visitors from western Turkey. Dads wearing football t-shirts spoke on mobile phones as children ran excitedly on the boardwalks. Women in heavy gabardines and headscarfs, even though the midday temperature crept towards 100 degrees, walked solemnly amid the tombstones, pausing to admire stonework and read inscriptions. On the eastern edge of the cemetery, a white-haired elder stopped to pray at a small mosque beside the Emir Bayındır Kümbeti while a small child sang in the sunshine and squirted me with a water pistol. Later, a bride appeared in an elaborate wedding gown sparkling with blue sequins to pose for photos among the tombstones.

It is Turkish visitors who are most interested in visiting the mezarlık at Ahlat, but the history of the region reveals a patchwork of ethnic diversity. On the dolmuş (minibus) that carried me to Ahlat, a mustachioed elderly man lifted aloft his ringing cell phone to better see the screen, revealing to all passengers the caller’s name: “Aşkım,” Turkish for “my love.” He then proceeded to speak loudly in Kurdish. Another passenger told me that the population of modern Ahlat is “hepsi Kürt” (“entirely Kurdish.”) The name of the town itself descends from the Armenian, Khlat. Prior to the arrival of the Seljuk Turks, control of Ahlat, a strategic fortress at the junction of several trade routes, passed through many hands, from the Caliphate of Omar in the seventh century, to Armenian princes, Georgian warlords, Kurdish chiefs and Arab emirs. In one intriguing historical footnote, from the mid-1240s, Tamta Mkhargrdzeli, a woman of Armenian birth, raised in the Georgian court, twice married to Ayyubid emirs and once kidnapped by Mongols, was governor of the city for a decade.

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It may not please modern Turkish nationalists who claim long-term custodianship of Anatolia in its entirety, but the governorship of Ahlat by someone of such diverse cultural heritage as Tamta was not atypical. It was not until the 16th century that the Ottomans consolidated Turkish rule over all of Anatolia. Historian Gary Leiser characterizes Anatolia during the Seljuk period as a “salad” where the interaction of religious and ethnic groups and blurring of boundaries between them was the norm. And while the victory of the Turks at Manzikert foreshadowed the eventual Islamification of the peninsula, indigenous Christians communities were not immediately imperilled or forced to convert, with some even prospering after oppressive Byzantine control was lifted. Tamta’s governorship was a case in point.

Historian of Byzantium Antony Eastmond notes in his magnificent examination of the life and times of Tamta that it was during her reign that the funerary monuments of Ahlat began to appear. Some have drawn parallels between the tombstones of Ahlat and the Orkhon inscriptions created in the 8th century in Mongolia by the Turks’ predecessors, the Göktürks. However, the Orkon inscriptions are solely embellished with the Ancient Turkic script and reveal none of the artistic sensibilities and ornamental genius apparent in Ahlat. It is not unreasonable to assume that the interactions and engagement of diverse peoples in Anatolia influenced the artisans of Ahlat and infused the artworks that they created. Leiser notes that the “eclecticism” of other architectural creations of the Seljuk period, such as the mosque and hospital complex at Divriǧi, may be attributable to the coming together of craftsmen and architectural conventions from different ethnic and religious traditions. Just as political control and tactical alliances shifted in Anatolia over centuries, some artisans moved between principalities, working on different architectural projects and bringing with them accumulated experience, techniques and aesthetics, which manifested in new modes of artistic expression and distinctive architectural creations.

In parallel to overlapping artistic traditions, for centuries the cemetery of Ahlat was far larger due to the presence of numerous Christian graves. A single photo published in German traveller Walter Bachmann’s 1913 documentary account of the churches and mosques of eastern Anatolia shows tombstones not unlike those that remain today, but which are decorated with Armenian khatchkar (cross) motifs and Armenian script. The Christian tombstones have since been destroyed in an unutterable loss to the architectural and artistic heritage of Anatolia.

Sadly, this example of heritage destruction in Anatolia is not isolated. Perhaps the most egregious recent example is that of Hasankeyf, the mostly Kurdish populated town on the upper Tigris River that was inundated by the waters of the Ilisu Dam in 2020. A desperate campaign by locals, as well as listing by the World Monuments Fund and an attempt to have the site protected by UNESCO were not sufficient to save it. Inhabited for thousands of years, and home to a range of archaeological and historical sites — an ancient citadel as well as mosques, bridges and mausoleums that date to the Artuklu, Ayyubid and Akkoyunlu dynasties — Hasankeyf would appear to be of similar if not more historic and artistic significance than Ahlat. Yet Hasankeyf was deemed expendable, the government giving a green light to the dam in order to generate hydroelectricity and making only token efforts to salvage some local archaeological treasures. 

The contrast between government attitudes to Hasankeyf and Ahlat highlight that ways in which art treasures may only be valued or protected if they can be incorporated within state-prescribed historical narratives. The mezarlık of Ahlat has received a delegation of government ministers and entered the public consciousness due to its association with triumphant Seljuks and the symbolism of Manzikert, but the dynasties that passed through Hasankeyf are afforded less cachet and their legacies are undervalued. Thus, the tombstones of Ahlat maintain their stony vigil over Lake Van, while the monuments of Hasankeyf slumber in the depths of the rising Tigris.