home  shooting plan   journal  locations  panoramas  team  documentaries  e-mail

WEN.- THRU.- FRI. 9/27-28-29/2000

Wednesday morning we left Mt. Nemrud and went to New Samsat village.  Two nice young boys showed us to the dam and told us were old Samsat was located.  The village was submerged in 1988 and lies now 70 meters below the surface. We visited some of the villages near by and had a sample interview with one of the villagers to show Tod Mesirow the possibilities of the area.

Then we headed towards Sanliurfa.  The Museum in this historical city has three copper ingots dating from the Bronze Age.  It will be very interesting to compare these finds with the 250 copper ingots found in the Uluburun shipwreck, the oldest shipwreck ever excavated in the world (14th century BC).  We stopped in Sanliurfa museum to photograph, draw and weigh the ingots, collecting as much information as possible for Cemal Pulak of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, Director of the Uluburun excavations.

Once there, we were so impressed with the quality of the museum display that we decided to include a section about the museum in this web site (see Sanliurfa Museum). We spent Wednesday night in Sanliurfa.

On Thursday, once again on the road, we went to the headquarters of the Zeugma excavations where all the teams working on the area live and work.  They have a very impressive system of data recording: all the data of the different excavation groups is collated in a sophisticated computer system. We asked about the possibility of staying with the excavation team for few nights to film their work more closely, and we'll have an answer from them shortly.  At that point we'll decide what would be more convenient for our work. 

The person in charge of the general organization of the Zeugma project, the coordinator of the different research groups, is the director of the Gaziantep Museum, Mr. Kemal Sertok, also, and by chance,  an old personal friend of Tufan Turanli. 

Thursday evening we arrived in Gaziantep; it was raining.  Friday was a shopping day:  we refilled our store of batteries, note pads, and snacks and soft drinks for the long road trips.  In the evening Deniz --- joined us, and will be helping us for three days. She is an archaeology student at Ankara Bilkent University, and could not resist the impulse to come and see the work done at Zeugma.

All Saturday morning was spent cleaning and testing our equipment to have it in top shape for Tod Mesirow. We checked all the lighting, sound and film equipment and made sure all the batteries were charged and ready. Thursday afternoon Bridget Buxton also joined us for a short period of time, having been generously granted a few days leave from another archaeological project in nearby Cilicia. Bridget is a Ph.D. student from the University of California at Berkeley. She specializes in the history and archaeology of the Hellenistic and Imperial Greek East and has been following the development of the projects on the Euphrates for a few years now.  She is an excellent scholar, and will be useful for providing archaeological and historical background knowledge.

In the evening Tod Mesirow arrives in Gaziantep and we hope that after a good dinner he will be able to rest and get over his jetlag soon  to start working hard on the show.