Midas City Excavations And Surveys in The Highlands Of Phrygia_{I am the Last of the Travelers}

I wish the world-the scholarly world-knew about Miss Haspels, about the modest, heroic life she led, her real personality hidden modestly under a simple outward appearance. She really deserves to be known and to be remembered-in fact, to be cared abaout (Halet Çambel)

Emilie Haspels (1894-1980), a Dutch archeologist, tells about her excavation of Midas City that we nowadays know to have been the religious center of the Phrygian empire (9th-7th century BC). She also writes about the adventurous quest for Phrygian rock-cut monuments in a romantic landscape that is still intact today . Woven into the presentation of her archaelogical findings she tells about the customs and culture in rural Turkey before and after World War II. Her vivid style of writing is amazing.

It sometimes seems as if she had experienced certain things just a couple of hours ago. You have the impression that she had just had the conversations, she writes about that she had just seen the reflections of the sun in the shining shovels of the workers and that she had only recently discovered the empty rakı bottles of an abandoned husband in a rock-cut tomb. It always seems as if very little time has passed since she last felt the atmosphere in Yazılı Kaya or dug up the statue in cave B. (Dietrich Berndt)