The Economist UK - 16.11.2019

The EconomistNovember 16th 2019 75

1

I

t was 2009and Antakya, a city in south-

ern Turkey known in antiquity as Anti-

och, was thriving. Tourists were visiting it

in record numbers. Trade with neighbour-

ing Syria was booming. Sensing an oppor-

tunity, Necmi Asfuroglu, a local business-

man, decided to build an upmarket hotel

on land that he had owned since the 1990s.

The plot was only a few hundred metres

from the Grotto of St Peter, one of the

world’s oldest churches.

Before construction could start, a team

of archaeologists was called in to examine

the site. They excavated a broken amphora

here, a statue there, and almost everywhere

colourful mosaic pieces, spread across an

area of some 17,000 square metres. By the

time they had finished, they had unearthed

parts of what had once been the heart of

Antioch, one of the biggest cities of the Ro-

man empire. The finds included a bath-

house, a huge marble-floored forum, thou-

sands of artefacts and the world’s largest

floor mosaic.

With these discoveries, Mr Asfuroglu’s

plans went up in smoke. “We had to rethink

everything,” he says. Rather than walk

away from the project, he asked an Istanbul

architect, Emre Arolat, to design a struc-

ture that would accommodate both a mod-

ern hotel and an archaeological museum.

Construction began in 2010, but stopped

again for almost two years after workers

came across another dazzling mosaic, de-

picting a winged Pegasus attended by three

nymphs. It finally ended earlier this year.

Rooms with a view

For Mr Arolat, the challenge was to find an

architectural language that merged what

he calls the “sacred” of an archaeological

site and the “profane” of a business ven-

ture. For inspiration, he says, he looked to a

museum showcasing the medieval ruins of

a Norwegian town, designed by Sverre

Fehn, and the paths around the Acropolis

devised by Dimitris Pikionis. The result is a

hybrid that exemplifies how conservation

and commerce can profitably coexist.

From the outside, the “museum hotel”

that Mr Arolat designed resembles a steel

and glass Jenga tower lying on its side and

stacked with long rectangular blocks the

size of shipping containers, each housing a

hotel room. The interior is a vast open

space criss-crossed by bridges and walk-

ways that overlook the mosaics and ruins

below. The whole structure rests on over 60

columns. One entrance serves the hotel,

another the publicly accessible museum.

In Turkey, where the earth teems with

the relics of dozens of ancient civilisa-

tions—and where over the past couple of

decades the economy has been powered by

a construction frenzy—development regu-

larly takes priority over heritage. This hier-

archy applies to small and mega-projects

alike. A few years ago, when the discovery

of three dozen Byzantine shipwrecks and a

Neolithic settlement from the sixth mil-

lennium bcdelayed the opening of a tun-

nel under the Bosporus, Turkey’s presi-

dent, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, scolded the

researchers who caused “three to five pots

and pans” to hold up progress. More re-

cently, flooding from a hydroelectric dam

on the Tigris river has begun to submerge

one of the longest continuously inhabited

places on Earth, a 12,000-year-old town in

Archaeology and development

A night at the museum

ANTAKYA

Some construction projects threaten Turkish antiquities. Others save them

Books & arts

76 Remembering Kurt Vonnegut

77 The Cartiers

77 A history of The Economist

78 Johnson: Unspeakable things

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