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Treasure hunting is long associated with endeavors to unearth concealed artifacts, illustrated best by buried troves of gold left behind by past communities. Cryptic signs leading to invaluable treasures have inspired hunters to go on often dangerous quests to retrieve them. Hoping to unearth artifacts of long-gone communities, treasure hunters, we are told, descend into harrowing caves with foul air, wander into thick forests, or dig for days—all to get rich quickly. Such mythical evocations of treasures, however, often end in disappointment or disaster—both for those involved and the social environment they operate in. Accidents happen in dangerous sites, the promised artifact eludes hunters, or suspicion and disagreements turn violent.

Treasure hunting often defaces or even destroys archaeological and environmental heritage. This potential harm to tangible heritage raises the ire of conservationists across government agencies, museums, universities, and other non-profit organizations. Striving to preserve material cultural heritage, experts disapprove of treasure hunting, which they view as a financially motivated and rather vulgar search for material riches. Treasure hunting, for conservationists, emerges as a greedy and destructive endeavor reducing historical artifacts, whose value stems not from their use value but from their cultural significance, to commodities to be (illicitly) exchanged in markets, which is detrimental to the ethos of conservation. From this vantage point, treasure hunting pinpoints a rift between two approaches to cultural heritage, with one practiced by treasure hunters, allegedly reducing the remnants to their use/exchange value, and the other one embraced by educated middle classes across the world, raising the sociocultural worth of artifacts in ways that allegedly decouple it from its market value—even though conservationists may also have financial interests at stake for their preservation efforts (e.g., tourism).  

While for archaeologists and conservationists, treasure hunting is a straightforward threat to preservation efforts, my ethnographic research in northern Turkey, alongside the Black Sea littoral complicates this depiction since many such quests targeted seemingly natural sites, such as meadows, woods, or hills, and continued despite the spectacular absence of any such material traces. Do treasure hunts, then, seek solely material—and presumably valuable—artifacts? What else, beside a widely-reported desire to acquire financial benefit, may motivate hunters? May engagements with the past be a part of the picture?

Even though the goal of amassing wealth may play a role in such engagements with ever-elusive treasures, such reduction of the complex dynamics undergirding treasure hunts fails to account for their enduring appeal, often despite their staggering fruitlessness, which seem to defy its allegedly materialistic foundations. Even when hunters obediently pursue the clues and signs of maps, rumors, and dreams, the failure to retrieve the alleged treasure does not necessarily deter them from continuing their quest. The desire to locate troves gets aggravated, excuses are conjured to explain the failure, and past and future costs (both financial and social) of the quest are justified—all in apparent contradiction to a cost-benefit analysis. The absence of a financial reward does not seem to hinder treasure hunting. What else may motivate one to search for treasures, then?

The question of which socio-economic dynamics aggravate and/or hinder treasure hunting has become one of my focal points during my field research in the Trabzon region in northeastern Turkey. Even though I had not intended to explore and analyze local men’s engagement with treasures and treasure hunts, the ways in which they permeated everyday conversations as well as local senses of the landscape have forced me to slowly but steadily question the localized configurations of treasures and how they are narrated. While my interlocutors’ enchantment of local topographies with spectral treasures have seemed rather intriguing, the main problem, for me, was to make sense of assertions by my interlocutors around the existence of treasures across seemingly “natural” interfaces, such as hills, woods, meadows, rocks, or lakes. I was familiar with unsanctioned diggers clandestinely roaming through rubbles and archaeological sites to unearth treasures, but my interlocutors’ designation of the whole landscape, regardless of the presence of such physical remnants of past communities, puzzled me. Treasure hunts conventionally presume that the treasure itself is artefactual, that is, it is generated through the processing of natural substances by humans (e.g., a golden jewelry). In other words, treasure is distinct from “natural” matter (e.g., unprocessed gold fragments). That is why most treasure hunting activities target remnants of past communities, such as a long-gone edifice or a tomb. And yet, none of the sites where my interlocutors sought treasures seemed to fit into this conventional picture. The local topography they surveilled incessantly did not necessarily evoke any human activity other than some spectral conjuring of symbols.

Kerim was a man in his early thirties, a high school graduate working as a tradesman in construction. I found him in his usual afternoon spot at a local coffeehouse engaging in conversation with local elderly men. He nodded enthusiastically when one of the elderly men vividly described the “chambers” of a castle allegedly carved into a mountain top in a nearby village. They recounted how the chamber they had never seen was full of gold and other valuable artifacts, allegedly stashed by bandits for safe keeping. When I asked how they knew of this chamber, the justification came in the form of figures on top and at the bottom of the mountain: A number of symbols carved on to rocks indicated the entrance to the “castle-in-the-mountain.” They took me to the site, in hopes of getting a trained anthropologist to potentially decrypt the symbols to facilitate their access to the treasures. Try as I might, I could not see any decipherable figures or symbols indicating the exact locations of the gates of the alleged castle. The hilltop looked rather natural. And yet, Kerim was rather convinced that the castle was to be there. The fact that something could look “natural,” for him, did not eliminate the possibility of man-made treasures having been stashed there. 

Indeed, such frequent focus on natural features signaled to me that something else was going on. Yusuf, an eloquent pensioner in his sixties, similarly recounted his quests to retrieve treasures across the region throughout the past decades. Yusuf remarked how horasan, an ancient mortar mix, was widely used to conceal treasures as it looked exactly like a rock—an untrained eye would not be able to differentiate the rock surface from such artificial interventions. Only seasoned hunters, he told me, were aware that treasures may be all around: “You just have to carefully survey and check the landscape for any signs.” For Yusuf, this involved both feeling the rock surfaces he suspected to contain stashed treasures to check for telltale horasan textures and splashing water on the surface to check whether they dry up at different rates—potentially indicating the presence of mortar. Horasan, in this sense, marked the space as a site of past human activity, resonating with conventional differentiations between substances and artifacts, despite its “natural” appearance.

Hunters’ conviction that nature can be dissimulating, concealing the treasures lying beneath illusory appearances, was not limited to the communities I worked with in Trabzon. In 2019, for instance, treasure hunters proceeded to destroy a glacial lake in a pasture in Gumushane, immediately to the south of the area I conducted my field research. Even though geographers indicated that the lake itself was a natural formation, the search party was convinced that it was actually an artificial body of water, a reservoir created to hide the treasures buried beneath it. The drainage of the lake has (pertinently) caused an uproar in the aftermath, due to the destruction of a rather fragile aquatic ecosystem, but the ultimate question undergirding the quest remained largely unattended: Why would one assume the presence of treasures in natural sites?

My ethnographic research in contemporary Turkey pursues this rather simple question and poses questions to challenge the prevailing presumptions around treasures and treasure hunting: Are treasures reducible to valuable artifacts? Are searches for treasures, in return, always motivated by desires to enrich the hunters? May treasures take elusive and dream-like forms? May treasure hunts ever be related to a reworking of the past, a memory-praxis? Attending to these questions, I believe, explores why conservationists’ conventional depictions of treasure hunting as simply endeavors to enrich through commodifying historical artifacts fails to account for the diverse paths—well beyond the “desire for riches” trope—through which treasures are configured in relation to local cosmologies and socio-political dynamics. This exploration of treasure hunting across seemingly natural settings reflects on the ways in which spectral memories play a role in the way the past leaks into the present in topographical forms.

One of the first themes that forced me reconsider treasure hunting as remembering was the fact that almost all narratives undergirding such instantiations of treasures also involved past communities, primarily Armenians and Greeks, whose violent expulsion and destruction in the 20th century was abjected from nationalist historiography. In almost all my encounters, I could not help but notice that hunters almost incessantly situated Armenians and Greeks in the vicinity of rather intimate sites, such as houses and villages, despite their public succumbing to nationalist accounts and erasures. One such treasure hunter, a well-spoken and witty pensioner who self-identified as a Turkish nationalist, explicitly negated the fact that non-Muslim communities of the region were subjected to state and communal violence a century ago, all the while justifying his quests as endeavors to retrieve Armenian treasures across the landscape. Hasan’s remarks on treasure hunts incessantly enchanted the local topography by bringing fragments of past Armenian communities forward: Multiple search parties he personally attended sought after troves presumed to be buried by Armenians across hills, meadows, woods, or their hazelnut farms. When I inquired why he was convinced that such seemingly “natural” spaces secretly contained treasures, Hasan recounted the rather discreet history of the village: Contrary to the common presumptions around the (lack of) history of the area by Unye, a town on the Black Sea littoral to the west of Trabzon, the village had originally been an Armenian one (with a characteristically Armenian suffix of –yan) and the local Armenian community had been destroyed [kırıldılar] and exiled before the arrival of Turkish-speaking Muslim communities alongside the settlement of Georgian-speaking Muslims in the 1950s. In a similar vein, Selime, one of the few women I could talk to with regards to treasures, recounted how many men in her village by Terme, a mid-size town to the west of Unye, used to repeatedly dig around a hill in the hope that they would unearth what past Armenian communities left behind. When I inquired how they knew about the existence of such treasures supposedly concealed by long-gone Armenians communities beneath the readily visible natural forms, she recounted the dreams that she and others have had in the past, all indicating the existence of a treasure that Armenians left in a cavern in the village prior to their “collective death” [kırım]. The same story, but this time with Greeks, was also prevalent in Trabzon. It seemed, even in their absence, those fragmented narratives about treasures preserved the memory of these long-gone communities in intimate sites.  

Listening to those narratives that resuscitate long-gone communities of the region—all despite the staunch identification of locals with the Turkish nationalist accounts of history—I was perplexed not only because these quests to unearth treasures were not really driven by artifacts of any kind, but also because they constituted an alternative recounting of the past through which abjected fragments of local experiences leaked into the present in spectral forms. While almost all my interlocutors identified as Turkish nationalists and vehemently denied that local non-Muslim communities were subjected to violence, the stories they weaved around spectral and ever-elusive treasures incessantly involved the displacement and destruction of those communities. This very seclusion of the memory of Armenians and Greeks as well as their non-existence in the present to spectral narratives around never-to-be-found treasures, in this sense, underlined the possibility of treasure hunting being a memory praxis through which the past is remembered in topographical modalities.

While it is evident that such unsanctioned diggings may pose considerable risk to cultural and environmental heritage, my explorations in northern Turkey invite us to be attuned to the situated configurations of treasures, as well as their relations to the past and landscapes. These particular configurations, as I learned through my interlocutors’ stories, cannot simply be dismissed as hunters’ desire to get rich quick. Rather, their imaginative reconstructions of the long-gone communities of the past, as well as their convictions of the presence of spectral treasures in natural sites, despite the striking absence of treasures to lay their hands on, hint at another possibility for us to reflect on: treasure hunting may very well incorporate what is banished from official historiographies so as to present a mythicized story of local sites and communities.  

Authors

Erol Saglam

Erol Saglam is a social anthropologist working on reconfigurations of statecraft, conspiracy theories, societal violence, and collective memory. Following his undergraduate and graduate studies at Bogazici University, Istanbul, Saglam earnt his Ph.D. degree in 2017 from Birkbeck, University of London with his anthropological research on nationalist communities of northeast Turkey. Following his doctoral studies, Saglam worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Stockholm University, Freie Universitat Berlin, University of Cambridge, and is currently a lecturer at Istanbul Medeniyet University, Istanbul, and a research fellow at University College London.

Cite as

Saglam, Erol. 2024. “Seeking Ever-Elusive Treasures: Reflections on Collective Memory and Spectrality of the Past.” Anthropology News website, September 16, 2024.