by Fokke Gerritsen
Between 28 February – 28 March 2025, the Through the Lens of Emilie Haspels. The Phrygian Highlands 1937-1958 [Emilie Haspels’in Gözünden. Dağlık Frigya 1937-1958] photography exhibition is on display at the Eti Archaeology Museum in Eskişehir. Who was Emilie Haspels, and why is there an exhibition of her photographs at the Eskişehir Eti Archaeology Museum?
Emilie Haspels was a remarkable person. She was born in 1894 in the Netherlands and was trained as a classical archaeologist. In 1937, the director of the French Archaeology Institute in Istanbul asked her to conduct archaeological fieldwork at the Midas Monument in Yazılıkaya. She agreed and this brought her for the first time to the region between Eskişehir, Afyonkarahisar and Kütahya. This was an area that had been explored by early travelers in Ottoman times, but its archaeological treasures had never been seriously studied. It quickly turned out that Emilie Haspels had the expertise to systematically document archaeological monuments in the region, and the drive to lead a series of fieldwork campaigns under difficult circumstances.
She became fascinated by the Phrygian people who had ruled over the area more than 2500 years ago, and by their hilltop castles and rock-cut burial monuments. She excavated at Midas City, and she documented archaeological monuments throughout the region, made drawings, took measurements, wrote down detailed descriptions; and she photographed. For archaeologists nowadays, it’s common to survey a region and to document archaeological sites of all periods and cultures that had been present in the region. At the time of Haspels, this was quite innovative. In 1971, long after her retirement, she published the book The Highlands of Phrygia. Sites and Monuments in which she shared her discoveries. To this day, this is the main publication on the Phrygian archaeology of the region.
In her years of research, Professor Haspels built up lasting friendships with some of the younger Turkish archaeologists that assisted her. Among those, Halet Çambel and Aşkıdil Akarca are especially noteworthy. Both would go on to become full professors at Istanbul University. Halet Çambel also visited Emillie Haspels in the Netherlands and gave a lecture at the University of Amsterdam.
Haspels was very interested in the inhabitants of the region, their villages and their lifeways. You can imagine that it must have been quite a sight for villagers, to have this foreign, female professor come to their area, often alone or with one assistant, and traveling in a horse cart. She was always working on her notes, always getting up before dawn to have the best light for her photographs. She was very grateful for the hospitality that she encountered, staying in village houses and eating the food that people served her. Sometimes, she could do something in return by getting medical help for sick children or by buying lamp oil for people. Over the years, she built up a deep bond with the Phrygian Highlands and its people. She expressed this feeling in her memoirs as follows: “[the area] takes hold of you like nothing else. You can’t free yourself from it, it captures you, and when you surrender, you become absorbed in it. “
The exhibition shows a selection of photos from the archives of the Allard Pierson Museum of the University of Amsterdam. Most were shot by Haspels herself, some by her team members. The exhibition revolves around several themes: Yazılıkaya village and the archaeological work at the Midas Monument, the expedition house, Phrygian, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman monuments, villages and village life, landscapes and modernization in the city.
Charlie Smid and Wolter Braamhorst are the curators of the exhibition, with related research by Pleuntje van Lieshout. Project coordination was in the hands of Fokke Gerritsen and Eray Ergeç; exhibition design by Melisa Tez, translations by Aysel Arslan and Gülşah Günata. It was developed in the framework of the celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the Friendship Treaty (1924) between Türkiye and the Netherlands, in a collaborative project of the Netherlands Institute in Turkey, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ankara, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Allard Pierson Museum, Eskişehir Eti Archaeology Museum, and the Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
If you would like to read more about the life and work of Emilie Haspels, also before and after her years in the Phrygian Highlands, a wonderful biography was published by Filiz Songu in 2021: Emilie Haspels, archeoloog en avonturier. Leven en werk in Amsterdam and Anatolië, 1894-1980, Allard Pierson Museum & Walburg Pers. The quote above from Haspels’ unpublished memoirs comes from page 137 of Songu’s book.