For those of us who have used Bodrum, Turkey, as a base of operations since 1960, the new INA facilities there can only be described as far beyond any dreams we might ever have had. Over the decades we moved repeatedly from one rented house to another. One building was so crowded that some of the staff lived in tents outside, and 18 of us shared a single bathroom. There were no offices. Drafting surfaces were often boards laid across empty oil drums, or a dining table cleared of dishes three times a day. Machines and diving equipment were repaired in open air.
As INA acquired a permanent Bodrum staff, they worked from their homes, scattered over the town, while seasonal staff continued to look for rented apartments and houses. With no central location, and with multi-year waiting periods to acquire telephones, we wasted hours each day walking between homes, looking for one another, too often finding that the person we wanted to consult was somewhere else.
Under Don Frey's presidency, INA made a serious effort to establish a permanent center that would allow us to work more efficiently. On the crest of a hill overlooking the town, just outside the Hellenistic city wall of ancient Halikarnassos, Tufan Turanli found a reasonably priced, ten-donem olive grove for sale (a donem is 1,000 square meters, or about a quarter of an acre). We purchased four donems for INA. Of the INA staff, Frederick van Doorninck and I each purchased one donem, under a recent law that allows foreigners to own property in Turkey, and Tufan Turanli and Cemal Pulak two donems each, all for our own homes.
After studying commissioned sketches by European and Turkish architects, we chose for our INA headquarters a complex of buildings, based on Ottoman concepts, designed by one of Turkey's most noted architects, Turgut Cansever, who has won two Aga Khan Awards for his work. Thanks especially to the generosity of John Baird, Gregory Cook, Charles Consolvo, Donna and Bob Dales, Claude and Barbara Duthuit, Danielle Feeney, the late Nixon Griffis, Harry C. Kahn II, Jack and Jean Kelley, John Merwin, the Nason Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mary and Richard Rosenberg, Ray and Milann Siegfried and their family, Martin Wilcox, Frederick Campbell, and Ron Bural, the main building and much of the dormitory have now been constructed and are in use.
The main building is a long corridor with side vaults for offices on the front, and larger rooms for a drafting lab and a director's office at either end. On a lower floor are a coffee/meeting room, a darkroom, bathrooms, showers, and temporary bedrooms that have housed seven students for the past two years. Now that the dormitory building is nearing completion, and partly occupied, the temporary bedroom walls in the main building are being removed to make a library capable of shelving perhaps 10,000 volumes. This is in anticipation of shipping to Bodrum in 1995 the Homer and Dorothy Thompson library, the G. Roger Edwards library, and the Peter Throckmorton library.
The dormitory is a series of two-story rectangular blocks joined by one-story connections; the one completed connection serves as a kitchen and dining room, although in warm weather students often eat on a patio outside. Planned for the future, as funds become available, are a three-story library building, a conservation laboratory, and an additional wing for the dormitory. All of the buildings are of stone-faced concrete, with marble flooring.Running along the west side of the complex is a short, unpaved road that the city has allowed us to name Sualti Sokak ("Underwater Street"). On it, van Doorninck, Turanli, and I have completed our homes, all in different styles designed by different architects, and Pulak's house is under construction. It is a unique neighborhood of colleagues who have worked together for 20 to 30 odd years, and remain, with our families, the best of friends.
This Bodrum "campus" has dramatically changed our lives and the way we work. For the first time we have proper offices and work spaces -- with computers, printers, a photocopier, and a fax machine -- in one location. It has allowed us to hire multi-lingual Marion Degirmenci as a secretary and accountant. Having the staff together in one place has increased both efficiency and morale.
Construction of the dormitory has allowed INA to at- tract a staff of volunteer students and professionals from around the world to study materials raised from the wrecks we have excavated. Our product is knowledge, dissemi- nated through displays (in the Bodrum Museum of Un- derwater Archaeology, a 20-minute walk away), through films, and, especially, through publications.
The completion of a site as large and complex as the 11th-century shipwreck we excavated at Serce Limani, between 1977 and 1979, or the Bronze Age shipwreck at Uluburun, is a massive undertaking, for before publication or display, thousands of artifacts must be conserved, cataloged, drawn, photographed, and studied. This requires a tremendous number of working hours over a period of many years. To hasten ultimate publication and display, we can now offer a mutually beneficial arrangement to volunteer students and technicians from around the world. They gain experience, or publication rights, and INA gets the job done! Without them, we would have to triple or quadruple our salaried staff.
Two years ago, for example, l wrote to dozens of universities that offer courses in medieval Islamic art, asking for volunteer graduate students. Five were chosen from the applicants: two from the United States, two from Spain, and one from Scotland. Each spent from a term to an academic year in Bodrum, and several returned for 1994-95, along with two new volunteers. What would have taken our own staff many, many years -- to publish the largest collection of medieval Islamic glass in the world -- is now almost completed, with 25 chapters out of a planned 32 in hand! For some of the students, their chapters will be their first scholarly publications. This is good for the students, good for INA, and good for archaeology.
Conservation of the myriad artifacts from Uluburun is being similarly speeded. In 1994, five advanced conservation students came to Bodrum for a summer training course offered by INA and sponsored by the National Enddowment for the Humanities. Other conservators came from Egypt, the United States, and England during the summer and fall for the experience of working with materials from the sea, materials that require special treatments. They and the volunteer artists work under the supervision of the two professional conservators and two highly skilled illustrators on our staff. The new INA headquarters also housed last summer the three Nautical Program students who worked with Turkish students under the direction of INA president Fred Hocker on the fullscale reconstruction of the seventh-century Byzantine ship we excavated at Yassiada in the early 1960s.
We now have a waiting list of volunteers who want to work in Bodrum while housed in our new campus. It should be noted that virtually all of INA's current staff in Turkey -- Don Frey, Cemal Pulak, Tufan Turanli, Sheila Matthews, Robin Piercy, Jane Pannell, and Sema Pulak -- began as volunteers.
The combination of INA's new campus and the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology, under the dynamic direction of Oguz Alpozen, has made Bodrum the international center for underwater archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean. When I join our students for meals or coffee in the new complex, or watch them at work in the museum, I am sometimes surprised to realize that those at the same table are from Belgium, Spain and Egypt, or from Finland, Israel, Canada and Italy, or from Turkey, Britain, Pakistan and the United States. It seems that the reputation of our approach to ancient shipwrecks, started from Bodrum in 1960, is spreading around the world. The new INA headquarters in Bodrum is helping to speed that approach on its way.