Mountain home of the storm god: Hittite İvriz

Separating the austere plains and rolling hills of the Anatolian plateau from the languid blue expanse of the Mediterranean, for millennia the jagged, weathered spine of the Toros range has protected coastal dwellers from the worst excesses of the harsh Anatolian winter. While places like Konya and Karaman freeze in the icy Poyraz wind, blasting its way down from the Russian steppes, south across the Toros banana trees flourish and bear fruit in balmy Gazipaşa and Anamur.

Some history

Small wonder then that the early Greeks, and later their Roman successors, chose to settle in numbers all along the sun-kissed Mediterranean coast of Turkey. The harshness of a Central Anatolian winter has never been a barrier to human endeavor, however. One of the world’s earliest settled communities was at Çatal Hüyük, just south of Konya, and the Hittites presided over a great Anatolian empire in the second millennium B.C. from their capital of Hattuşa, set in bleak hills east of Ankara. Following the collapse of the great Hittite Empire centered on Hattuşa, a number of successor kingdoms, inhabited by peoples known to modern scholars as Neo-Hittites, emerged in the lands to the south of the imperial Hittite heartland. One of these territories, which stretched from near modern day Kayseri to the northern foothills of the Toros around Ereğli, was known to the Assyrians as Tabal.

Little is known about the mysterious land of Tabal. No great walled city remains as at Hattuşa, nor a great settlement mound as at the best-known Neo-Hittite site, that of Karkamiş (Carchemish) on the Euphrates southeast of Gaziantep. Tabal does, however, provide us with one of the most beautifully executed and fascinating relief carvings in Turkey, set in a location of stunning natural beauty. Taken as a package, the superb Neo-Hittite relief at İvriz, backed by soaring, gorge-cleft limestone peaks and fronted by a racing mountain torrent (a stream lined by some of the most prettily situated trout restaurants in Turkey), merit a considerable detour.

The approach to İvriz

For the relatively few people who do visit İvriz, the most common approach is from Konya, cutting east-southeast across the plain via bleak Karapınar to Ereğli, a gateway town to the splendors of İvriz. Alternatively, it’s only a short detour to Ereğli if you’re heading south from Cappadocia to the Mediterranean at Tarsus/Adana. Apart from the dramatic views south to the dazzling snow peaks of the Bolkarlar (“Snow-filled”) range of the greater Toros, there’s little of interest in Ereğli, a pleasant enough but nondescript provincial town of some 100,000 souls.

Carvings of Tarhunzas and king, İvriz

Despite a history going back at least 2,500 years, and a strategic position close to the Cilcian Gates (the narrow pass through the Toros which has for millennia funneled traffic between Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean and beyond), the town today has no sights of specific interest. Known as Heraclea Cybistra in the Hellenistic period, it was a crucial Byzantine garrison town until its capture by the Arabs in the ninth century. It fell to the Selçuk Turks in the 11th century, and later become capital of the Karaman Beylik. It had declined to little more than a village by the early 20th century when, as it lay astride the railway linking İstanbul and Konya with the Middle East (the Berlin-Baghdad railway), it began to develop anew.

On the Berlin-Baghdad railway

When the British traveler W.J. Childs was in the region not long before the outbreak of World War I, he travelled from the Berlin-Baghdad railhead, then the small town of Ulukışla, some 30 kilometers east of Ereğli, to Konya. Passing through Ereğli, Childs wrote: “At Ereğli you are clear of the mountains and have entered upon Axylon, the great interior plain of Anatolia. Here the road from Kaisairiyeh and Sivas meets the railway and also the ancient route through the Cilician Pass. At Ereğli, therefore, were many waiting arabas with clamorous drivers, hopeful of passengers from the south intending for Kaisairiyeh.” The railway, of course, is still here, and you pass in front of its solid, German-built station en route for İvriz. Childs describes how his guide, a Turk called İghsan, dismisses the similar station at Ulukışla as “another German castle.”

Picnicking on the Toros Mountains

The half-hour drive south from Ereğli to İvriz, heading straight for the mighty wall of the Toros, is beautiful. Soon forgotten is the drab, austere Konya Plain, here replaced by lush, water-fed orchards of apricot and cherry, stands of swaying poplar and swathes of meadow carpeted, in spring, with bright red poppies. The road ends at İvriz, the modern village of Aydınkent, right at the feet of the Toros, its traditional flat-roofed houses beautifully framed by a wall of towering limestone rent by the black slash of a mighty gorge. The stream issuing from the cleft gushes through lush grassland shaded by walnut and cherry trees, and a number of simple restaurants here dish up delicious trout grills served in the dappled shade, accompanied by beers kept chilled in the icy stream.

Even without its famed rock-relief, İvriz would be popular, as few such pretty spots are so easily accessible by road, and summer Sundays see the shady meadows besieged by picnicking families from the town of Ereğli. But for anyone who has made the effort to get here from afar, the focus is most definitely the four-and-a-half-meter high by two-and-a-half-meter wide rock-relief. The Hittites revered water, and a number of sacred springs and stream sites have been found across Anatolia. None, though, not even the well-known Eflatun Pınar near Beyşehir, can match the images carved into a limestone rock-face at İvriz.

Traditional houses, İvriz Aydınkent

The great Tarhunzas of Warpalawas

Two figures are depicted, their features as clearly delineated as if they were carved yesterday. The largest of the figures is the Hittite storm god Tarhunzas. Anthropomorphic in form, the bearded god sports a horned helmet and wears a short tunic and upturned shoes. Tarhunzas’ dress clearly shows the influence of the then-powerful Mesopotamian Assyrian civilization, but his stocky form, calves bunched with muscles, befits the sturdy Anatolian farmer on which he was no doubt modeled. Associated with fertility as well as the power of the weather, Tarhunzas grasps a wheat sheaf in his left hand and clutches bunches of grapes and twists of barley in his right. The curious symbols carved behind and in front of the god’s head are Hittite hieroglyphics, proclaiming, “This is the great Tarhunzas of Warpalawas.”

Facing Tarhunzas is the smaller figure of a king, Warpalawas, in supplication to the great storm god. The king, who was a contemporary of the famous Assyrian king Tilgath-Pileser III, has the elaborately coiffured hair and beard typical of the Assyrians, and his geometrically patterned robe again reflects Mesopotamian, rather than Hittite, style. Water, then as now, was an essential of life, and the Hittites of Tabal believed the İvriz relief, in which their king acknowledges the omnipotence of Tarhunzas, would ensure that the “sacred” stream would flow uninterruptedly and irrigate their lands.

Today the force of the stream has been tamed by a holding tank and sluice, but the snow-melt fed stream still tumbles north with vigor. Rock nuthatches patrol the fissured gray rock around the relief, and buzzards, eagles and vultures soar the thermals above the higher crags. There are more Hittite reliefs in the mountains behind, though none so finely carved or well-preserved as at İvriz, and difficult to locate without the help of a local. For the intrepid, İvriz is a potential starting point for treks into the Bolkarlar range of the Toros Mountains. At 3,480 meters high, Mount Aydos is only some 20 kilometers south of the relief.

İvriz may lay well off the beaten track for most travelers, but it is quite unique and well worth a day of anyone’s time.