Çatalhöyük Neolithic Site (7400 BC) and the New Timber Visitor Centre

Forty-five kilometres south-east of central Konya near the town of Çumra (40 minutes by car or taxi across the flat agricultural plain), two low mounds rising above the wheat fields hold one of the most important archaeological sites on planet Earth: UNESCO-listed Çatalhöyük. Occupied for nearly two thousand years between 7400 BC and 5600 BC during the transition from hunter-gathering to settled agriculture, Çatalhöyük was home to up to 8,000 people living together in a dense, egalitarian settlement, three thousand years before the pyramids of Egypt or the cities of Mesopotamia were built.

Why Had Çatalhöyük Zero Streets and Zero Doors?

First excavated by British archaeologist James Mellaart in 1961 and later by Stanford University's Ian Hodder and Turkish teams under Prof. Ali Umut Türkcan, Çatalhöyük's architecture is unique in world prehistory:

• A Honeycomb Entered Through the Roof: hundreds of rectangular mudbrick houses were built pressed directly wall-to-wall against one another like cells in a beehive, leaving zero streets, zero alleys and zero ground-floor doors. Daily social life took place up on the flat mud roofs. Residents entered their own homes by climbing down a wooden ladder through a smoke-and-light hole in the ceiling directly above the kitchen hearth.
• Burials Under the Beds & Bull-Horn Shrines: families buried their ancestors curled in the foetal position directly underneath the whitewashed plaster sleeping platforms inside their living rooms, and decorated the white interior walls with wild bull skulls (bucrania), geometric red-ochre murals, leopard reliefs and the world's earliest landscape painting.

Touring the Site: The New Timber Welcome Centre, Reconstructed Houses & Shelters

In 2023, Çatalhöyük inaugurated its extraordinary 4,500-square-metre Çatalhöyük Promotion and Welcome Centre, the largest public wooden structure in Turkey, designed to echo the mudbrick geometry of the Neolithic mounds with interactive holographic exhibits, replica artefacts (since the original Seated Mother Goddess of Çatalhöyük is in Ankara's Museum of Anatolian Civilizations and local finds are in the Konya Archaeological Museum) and a café:

1. Start inside the Welcome Centre, then step into the four full-scale Reconstructed Experimental Neolithic Houses outside, where you can climb down the ladder to sit on the raised plaster platforms beside replica bull horns and wall murals.
2. Walk up the mound into the giant vaulted North Shelter (4040 Area) and South Shelter to look straight down into actual 9,000-year-old excavated mudbrick walls and hearth ovens (Museum Pass Turkey is valid).