I brought the first visitors to Karahan Tepe when the excavation ropes were still up. What I saw then — and what archaeologists continue to uncover — has changed everything I thought I knew about the people who built Göbekli Tepe.
Something Is Coming Out of the Ground in Turkey. And Almost Nobody Knows About It Yet.
I want to tell you about a hillside in southeastern Turkey. It looks unremarkable from a distance — dry stone, pale soil, the kind of landscape that makes you squint in the summer heat. But beneath it, archaeologists are uncovering something that is quietly rewriting the story of what human beings are.
Not what we built. Not how we organised ourselves. What we are. What we have always been.
The site is called Karahan Tepe. It is 46 kilometres from Göbekli Tepe — about 45 minutes by road. And if Göbekli Tepe was the discovery that shook the foundations of how we understand civilisation, Karahan Tepe is the discovery that is now shaking the foundations of how we understand ourselves.
I was there before it was open to anyone. Here is what I found.
When the World Locked Its Doors and the Earth Opened Its Secrets
Cast your mind back to 2020. Remember what it felt like. The borders closed. The flights stopped. That vast, restless human project — of going somewhere, of seeking, of following curiosity across a map — suspended overnight. Billions of people confined to the same four walls, watching the same screens, waiting.
While that was happening, Professor Necmi Karul and his team from Istanbul University were underground in southeastern Turkey, brushing soil off stone carvings that had not felt air in eleven thousand years.
The Turkish government had launched the Taş Tepeler project — an investigation of twelve interconnected prehistoric sites — in the same year the rest of the world went quiet. The timing felt almost philosophical: as living humanity turned inward, ancient humanity was finally being let out.
The living were locked inside their homes. The dead were being freed from theirs.
Turkey kept its borders partially open. A small number of travellers — the ones who couldn't stop being curious just because a pandemic had arrived — continued to come. I continued to guide them. And it was in that strange, empty, strangely electric period that I drove a small group of Americans 46 kilometres east of Göbekli Tepe, down a road that appeared on no tourist map.
There was no visitor centre. No signage. No other tourists. No sound except wind and the careful scrape of excavation tools.
When we arrived, the archaeologists looked up from their work. I will not forget their expressions. It was the look of people who had been working alone on something important for a long time, and had just discovered, unexpectedly, that someone had come to bear witness. They put down their tools. They walked us through the site themselves. And as they spoke — pointing to carved stone, tracing shapes with careful hands — their eyes had that particular brightness I have come to recognise as the look of someone who knows they are standing at the centre of something history will remember.
For the people with me that day, it was the rarest thing travel ever offers: not a monument to visit, but a discovery to witness. Not the past behind glass — but the past in the act of being found, by the very people finding it, who were also — in that moment — your guides.
I have returned every season since. Each year, more of the site is uncovered. More chambers. More sculptures. More questions than answers — which is how you know the work is real. The relationship I built with the team in those early COVID visits — the guards, the archaeologists, the excavation directors who remember the days when no visitors came at all — runs through every tour I bring here now. It cannot be replicated by booking a standard itinerary.
The Faces
I want to try to explain what makes Karahan Tepe different from Göbekli Tepe, because I think this difference matters in a way that is hard to put into words — and I have been trying to put it into words for years.
Göbekli Tepe speaks in symbols. Its great T-shaped pillars are carved with animals, abstract forms, geometric patterns — extraordinary, ancient, unmistakably intentional, but at a certain remove. You encounter them the way you encounter a great cathedral: with awe, from the outside. They do not look back at you.
Karahan Tepe looks back.
The carvings here are faces. Fully realised, three-dimensional human faces, emerging from stone walls as though someone pressed their features against the surface from the other side and pushed through. A 2.3-metre statue with fingers and ribs and an expression of unsettling specificity. Heads staring directly outward. Not symbols of people. Specific people — rendered by someone who understood the difference, who wanted these particular faces to last.
I have stood in front of these carvings many times. The same thought comes every time, and I have stopped trying to make it sound less simple than it is:
Eleven thousand years ago, someone sat in front of this stone and chose to carve a face. Not an animal. Not a pattern. A face. Someone they loved, perhaps. Someone they needed to remember. Someone whose existence felt too important to leave only to memory, which they already knew — because they were human — was unreliable.
We do not know whose faces these are. We may never know. But the impulse behind them — the need to say this person was here, this person mattered, I refuse to let them disappear entirely — that impulse is not ancient at all. It is the most recognisable thing I have ever seen carved in stone.
Explore the carved heads →A Living Book, Still Being Written
Here is the thing that I find myself returning to when I try to explain why this site matters so urgently right now, today, in 2026.
Only about five percent of Karahan Tepe has been excavated. Five percent. Think of it this way: if this site were a novel, we have read the first three pages. We do not yet know the characters. We do not know the plot. We do not know what kind of story this is.
What those three pages have already told us is enough to overturn decades of archaeological certainty. The remaining ninety-five percent of the book is still in the ground, unread, waiting — and Professor Karul's team is turning the pages one careful season at a time.
Coming to Karahan Tepe now means standing at the edge of what is currently known. Not the edge of what was known fifty years ago, made accessible for tourists. The actual edge, today, of what any living person understands about the people who built this place. That is not a selling point. It is simply a fact, and a strange and precious one.
What I Do Here
I am not an archaeologist. I want to be honest about that from the beginning.
What I am is someone who has spent twenty-five years paying attention — reading every paper, visiting every season, building genuine relationships with the people doing the excavating, and asking, always asking: what does this mean for the person who stands here and wants to truly understand what they are looking at?
The academic literature on Karahan Tepe is rich and growing. It is also dense, technical, and written for specialists. What it rarely does is answer the question that I believe most visitors are actually carrying inside them — not what did they build, but who were they. What did they feel when they came here. What were they trying to preserve, and why did it feel so urgent.
Those questions don't have complete answers yet. But they are exactly the right questions. And standing at Karahan Tepe, in the right company, with the right context — they stop being abstract and start happening in your chest.
That is what I am here to help you find.
If Göbekli Tepe is on your list, Karahan Tepe should be too. I would be honoured to take you to both.
— Fazli, Serendipity Tours Turkey
Plan Your Visit
Experience Karahan Tepe
Karahan Tepe has been open to visitors since 2023. The site is located about 46 km from Göbekli Tepe — about 45 minutes by road. We recommend combining both sites for the fullest experience.