All rights reserved. True, in order to save your lifeβfor example, as militants assault your villageβyou might first speed away by whatever conveyance possible. In the family car. Aboard a stolen bus. Inside a cart pulled behind a tractor. But eventually: a border. And it is here that you must walk.
Because men in uniforms will demand to see your papers. What, no papers? Did you leave them behind? Or perhaps you packed a bag with food, with money? Get out of your vehicle. Stand over there. Now, papers or no papers, your life as a refugee genuinely starts: on foot, in the attitude of powerlessness.
They were ethnic Kurds. They were running from the bullets and knives of the Islamic State. Many came in cars, in sedans and hatchbacks, in delivery vans and pickup trucks, raising clouds of fine, white dust from some of the oldest continuously farmed fields in the world. The Turks would not allow such a motley caravan to pass. A parking lot of abandoned cars grew at the boundary. One day black-clad Islamist fighters came and got the cars, stole them from right under the noses of Turkish soldiers.
The soldiers watched. So it begins. You take a step. You exit one life and enter another. You walk through a cut border fence into statelessness, vulnerability, dependency, and invisibility. You become a refugee. There were many wars back then. Engin is a Turkish archaeologist from the University of Cumhuriyet. The hole was 30 feet deep, and the mound was among the biggest in Turkey: feet high and yards long, a lopsided layer cake of time.
Its oldest evidence of occupation dated from the Neolithic, some 9, years ago. But above thatβbuilt, abandoned, and long since forgottenβlies the debris of at least nine human eras. Copper Age masonry. Bronze Age cuneiform tablets. Hellenistic coins. Roman and Byzantine brickwork.
