home  shooting plan   journal  locations  panoramas  team  documentaries

MON. 10/02/2000

Ever since I first visited Zeugma in early June of this year,  and learned that the waters would rise to submerge some 30% of the ancient Roman outpost, I thought it would be a wild experience to return at a later date and dive the site.

Instead of making a documentary only on Zeugma, the show expanded to include other ancient sites along the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers.  Because of Turkey's energy needs, the government conceived of an ambitious plan, headed by the GAP agency, to utilize their natural resources to generate electricity and create opportunities for agricultural irrigation by building 22 dams along these fabled rivers.  As the focal point for  the birthplace of civilization, and both a bridge and a junction between the East and the West, Turkey's rich archaeological resources are perhaps unmatched anywhere on the planet.  As I walked through the villa of what was most probably a wealthy citizen of Zeugma in the 2nd Century AD in June, I imagined what it would be like to come back in full scuba gear and swim through the rooms, over the stone floors, past the columns, and explore the past in yet another different way.

Like most things, reality does not always measure up to fantasy......

My divemaster was Tufan Turanli, an explorer of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA) in Bodrum, Turkey, and an experienced underwater archaeologist with over 7000 dives.  Tufan brought his team and all the gear from Bodrum, a beautiful city on the Mediterranean coast, and home to the INA.  I brought my mask and snorkel from Los Angeles, and the 9 dives I had in my log since becoming certified by PADI earlier this year.

There were two things people warned us about.  A Zeugma archaeologist told us a CNNTurkey crew tried to dive the site earlier in the summer and were terribly disappointed.  It was unclear whether they actually got into the water or not.  Perhaps they didn't, once they were told about the parasite bilharzia that was known to inhabit the Euphrates.  This little bug reportedly makes your skin itch, and causes blood to issue from several orifices....not a pleasant thought.  But one of the archaeologists on the project, Julia, told me she and several other members of her team had been swimming in the river, and had not experienced any ill effects.  Tufan and I decided to tough it out.....

The wetsuit Tufan brought for me was a two-piece, 3.2 mil, with a long john and a jacket.  It didn't fit as well as my trusty new Akona 7 mil that keeps me warm off Catalina Island and my other dive spot, Monterey Bay, and the front zipper kept working its way down as I put on my Mares b.c.  The regulator was a workhorse Oceanic, and we had steel 80s filled to 200 bars, which is the equivalent of 3000 psi.  I was given 15 pounds to wear; taking into consideration the freshwater, and the thin wetsuit, it seemed like a reasonable amount of reduction from my normal 24 pounds I normally wear.

Archaeologists working the site told us that Villa A, the villa where I had stood in June and watched the waters lap the edge as they slowly rose, was 20 meters away from shore, and about 10 meters deep.  As Tufan and I stood onshore doing our pre-dive scout and plan, we observed the significant murkiness of the water.  The winds were up a bit; ripples on the river were visible; combined with the increased current due to the operation of the hydroelectric plant, and the disposing of excess dirt from the last-minute rescue excavations being carried out  by the archaeologists and workers, conditions looked, in a word, crummy. 

Tufan suggested we use a line to connect ourselves to significantly raise our chances of staying together.  I agreed.  One reason I thought this was a good idea was because of my previous dive in August off the Monterey Coast.  Taking time out from a multi-family Big Sur camping trip, four of us signed up for a boat dive out of Monterey Bay.  Our first dive site that day had 10-foot visibility.  Our second dive of the day saw our four-person group becoming separated in five-foot visibility.  During that California coastal experience, I faced for the first time the disorientation of being underwater, breathing from a tank, without the normal visual clues that guide a sighted person's orientation to his or her environment.  There was a long moment when I had to focus my mental energy on dealing with a new set of sensory inputs, process it carefully through my training, and realize there were procedures, there was no immediate danger, and continue on with the dive.

Diving Zeugma was another order of magnitude of strange.

The five-inch layer of silt that has built up over the centuries, and been rapidly accelerated since the rescue archaeological operation began in earnest in late June, was easily disturbed by the slightest touch.  Despite my relative comfort with buoyancy control in the ocean, I felt like a first-time diver (not that I'm that far away anyway) trying to maintain a constant depth in the Euphrates.  Maybe it was a combination of  the freshwater, the constantly changing temperature, and the almost zero visibility; we dropped to 15 meters and tried  to make our way along the bottom, just off the bottom, to search for the villa walls and columns.  I kept trying to just  lightly touch the bottom with one ungloved hand; instead I repeatedly sunk my hand into the four or more inches of silt, kicking up a cloud of dust the Lone Ranger and Tonto could both hide behind for days.  If not for the rope, Tufan and I would surely have lost each other.

Eventually we found a wall; it was definitely Roman; Tufan turned on his Sony VX1000 in the Amphibico case and started shooting.  I was excited; perhaps we were going to get what I had hoped for, what I thought we needed to add a touch of visual drama, an exclamation point, to the documentary on what will essentially be lost archaeological resources.  After a few shots of some walls, Tufan signaled that we should surface and talk.  Once on top of the water again, we compared notes on the strangeness, the lack of visibility, and the success of our linking rope.  We descended again, found more walls, and continued shooting, sometimes with our light on, sometimes not.  It was eerie, and fascinating, to swim along slowly, one hand extended in from, trying to interpret the paltry visual information presented to us amidst the murky brown haze.  Occasionally we would swim through a thermal, or a patch of clear water; but in a moment we would be back inside the brown soup.  

Overall we spent nearly 75 minutes in the Euphrates, with a few trips to the surface to discuss our progress and strategies.  In the end we achieved our goals--we found the Roman villa, we videotaped the millennia-old handiwork, and emerged safely from our dive.  We'll know in a few weeks if we've also brought with us more than memories and images, in the form of the parasite.  Luckily, there is a known and effective treatment, so even if we've been exposed, the long-term risks seem survivable.

What will happen to Zeugma?  As the archaeologists finish up their rescue salvage operation of the 30% of the city that will be submerged under the floodwaters of the Euphrates, the Ministry of Culture, the head of GAP, the Director of the Gaziantep Museum here in Turkey are all attempting to formulate plans for the future.  There is hope that the archaeological work will continue on the other 70% of Zeugma that will remain aboveground, perhaps creating an open-air archaeological park.  Some have talked about turning Villa A, now underwater and largely hidden by murky waters, into an underwater park, a possible ancient diving destination for other eager divers from around the world.  Perhaps next time I dive Zeugma, there will be more to see......