The Carian Trail

http://www.kariayolu.com/

The Carian Trail was officially opened this week. A 800 km route through the counties of Muğla and Aydin, this trail passes through villages, countryside and mountains and aims to spread some of the income from tourism presently concentrated on the coast, to the inland areas.  As you can see from the Karia Yolu map above, Bodrum is not on the main route, but it does branch off to encompass our Carian history and take in  Theangela and Ceremos. 

The finished way will have international path signs every 50 metres and 220 signposts  to keep travellers from getting lost.  It's an exciting project which has been relatively low key up to now.  A guide book to the route is being published and should be available in 2 months. 

This initiative is presumably inspired by the The Lycian Way made by Kate Clow, which runs along the Mediterranean Coast.  In the past couple of months,  part of the Lycian Way has been bulldozed to make way for a large hotel, so finger-crossed the Carian Way doesn't open up our so far unspoilt interior to the developers diggers. 

Itchy Trowel Syndrome

I wasn't a very good archaeologist. I preferred the theory as most of the practice involved getting wet, muddy and cold with little chance of warming up in the old caravans or disused schools and farm houses that we went back to after a day pickaxing and wheelbarrowing.   I didn't really start to enjoy the digging until I worked on summer digs in  Greece and Italy. When there is the choice of a post-hole in pissing rain and a Corinthian column in the sunshine, you can understand why I decided to stay in the Mediterranean for 20 years.  In the last two weeks though, I have started to develop a strange affliction I call "itchy trowel syndrome". We have been exploring Theangela and Bargylia, both un-excavated sites and there are so many tempting corners of dressed stone sticking out at odd angles,  I'm beginning to wonder where my trusty trowel is hiding. ( I remember seeing it in the workshop about 20 years ago!) I wouldn't dream of giving into the temptation as unofficial "excavation" in Turkey is a serious offence but I'm thinking of finding out if Turkey has a similar archaeological volunteer program to Europe and seeing if I can spend a couple of weeks on a dig.

I'd love to know what's going on under here

or here. 

I hope Theangela is on someone's excavation list because we saw plenty of evidence of illicit digging, there were several pits like this one.