The destructive quest for the buried treasure of the Armenians

By Erin O’Brien

The Economist

In eastern Turkey there is a steep-walled canyon known as the Devil’s Valley. According to legend, anyone who drinks from the black stream that flows through it will be cursed. Another story tells of a man from an ancient civilization who hid 70 perfect crystals there, underneath a rock shaped like a cockerel. The treasure lay undisturbed for thousands of years.

I first heard about the crystals from Muhsin Ozgur, a 65-year-old furniture-maker who lives in Erciş, a dusty city near the Devil’s Valley, on the edge of the vast Lake Van. Ozgur’s father was a treasure hunter, and spent his free time searching for riches and antiquities he believed were buried in the nearby hills. He told his son thrilling stories: the man who stole treasure from a grave only for jinns to relieve him of it; the time a sunbeam magically made a hunter’s haul disappear from his hands.

None of those tales captivated Ozgur quite like those linked with the Devil’s Valley. He told me about one hunter who had set out in the 1960s to find the treasure. The man followed a dry riverbed into the gorge and found a shepherd who led him to the cockerel-shaped rock. Digging deep into the  earth and rubble at the base of the stone, the man eventually found a small cave. Inside it were the crystals, each over a meter tall, which glowed as the sun rose.

The man tried to wrest the crystals from the rock. He managed to extract one, but it broke in his hand. Taking the fragment home, he decided to return the next day with a team of horses to retrieve those that remained. But when he arrived in the morning, a group of locals was waiting for him and chased him away. The man was said to have sold the broken crystal on the black market – probably, as Ozgur put it, to “some dog on the street”.

Ozgur decided he would devote his life to searching for the crystals, along with other treasures he suspects are hidden across Turkey. Some of these are mythical: caverns full of gold lying beneath farmland, for instance. But many are not, such as metalwork and jewelry from the Iron Age kingdom of Urartu; and valuables left behind by the victims of the Armenian genocide during the first world war.

As a young man Ozgur moved to Istanbul to work as a carpenter but continued to hunt for treasure. Once, he said, he was digging in a park when he unearthed the basement of an Ottoman palace. Inside he found priceless china. Photos from the time show a dashing young man, with a sharp jawline and a thick, dark moustache. In one, the edges of his lips curl into a subtle smile, as if he’s hiding a secret.

In the 1990s, when Ozgur was in his 30s, he returned to Erciş and took a job with a friend who owned a prospecting company. While searching for copper or iron, it was easy to look for treasure, too. Over the following years, he made a number of valuable finds, including a shovel with a gold handle, which he sold in Istanbul. Today, Ozgur is regarded as one of the city’s most successful treasure hunters.

But the crystals of the Devil’s Valley have so far eluded him. Ozgur estimates that at one point he was travelling into the valley a hundred times a year. He told me he had successfully identified the shepherd who guided the hunter to the treasure in the 1960s, only to find that the man had died. On one occasion, Ozgur said, he went to the Devil’s Valley with a mystic who claimed he could help find the crystals. The mystic brought along a cockerel – if it jumped in the air, he said, it would indicate the presence of treasure. The cockerel did indeed leap, but the treasure failed to appear. One of Ozgur’s less plausible stories involves searching for the crystals alongside a team of “high-level” American officials. They couldn’t find them either.

Digging for gold Opening image: A treasure hunter explores a field using metal detectors. From top to bottom: Treasure hunting has become popular among locals in eastern Turkey facing economic hardship. A stone with an Armenian cross. The village of Dinlence is believed to contain riches left behind by the victims of the Armenian genocide

Ozgur doesn’t go treasure hunting as often as he once did. His wife, he says, would divorce him if he kept up his old pace. But he still believes that with the right equipment, he could find the treasure hidden in the Devil’s Valley. “These stones”, he said, “are worth more than anything you can imagine.”

Turkey is littered with the remnants of disappeared empires. In Istanbul the Byzantine-era Hagia Sophia sits opposite the Ottoman Blue Mosque, which was built next to the Roman Hippodrome of Constantinople. Nearly every major construction project unearths traces of ancient civilizations. Around Erciş, farmers have found statues and belts dating back thousands of years while ploughing their fields. “You can’t step anywhere in this country without stepping on something historical,” said Gurkan Cagan, a conservator and archaeologist at Istanbul’s Rezan Has Museum, which houses one of the largest Urartian collections in the country.

This proliferation of ruins – and the lax enforcement of laws designed to curb the illegal trade in antiquities – has made treasure hunting ubiquitous across Turkey. On the Mediterranean coast, treasure hunters seek out Greek and Roman antiquities; in Istanbul, they loot Ottoman graves.

Now treasure hunting appears to me more popular than ever, partly as a result of Turkey’s ongoing economic crisis. In July inflation rose to 60% over the past year and the lira has lost more than 80% of its value against the dollar in the past five years. Less than half of Turks work full-time.

Provincial cities such as Erciş, in a largely Kurdish region of the country, have been hit particularly hard. Erciş has an unemployment rate that is more than twice the national average. Many of the city’s residents were once farmers or owned livestock, but the water supply is now drying up, compounding the city’s economic pain. There are few factories in Erciş and no tourists. In 2011 an earthquake caused severe damage in the city; many of the buildings that were rebuilt remain unoccupied. A good proportion of the shops have closed down and the only customers in cafés seem to be old men sitting on stools, waiting for the stifling heat to abate before they head home. Many of the city’s young people have gone to larger cities to find jobs in the construction industry – just last year, net migration from the Van region was nearly 15%

Treasure hunting offers the dream of escape from economic deprivation. It’s common for middle-aged men to pull out their phones to show visitors photos of treasure maps, or of coins and bits of pottery their friends have found. Hunters often have particular specialties: some concentrate on Urartian jewelry and belts, others on Persian coins. But the vast majority are looking for treasure they believe was left behind by Armenians.

By the time it entered the first world war on the side of the Germans, in October 1914, the Ottoman Empire was on its knees. A series of military defeats in the previous few years had resulted in the loss of nearly all of its European territories. Various nationalities within the empire were clamoring for independence – calls that grew louder by 1915 after the Ottoman war effort  got off to a bad start. Faced with a crumbling polity, the Ottoman government stepped up its repression of non-Muslim minorities, which it blamed for its defeats. Armenian Christians – who had inhabited eastern Turkey for centuries – fared the worst. Aided by Kurdish tribes, the government embarked on a campaign to purge the empire of its Armenian population. In the ancient city of Van, 65km from Erciş, Armenian rebels held back besieging Ottoman troops for a month in 1915. By the time the Ottomans captured the city, an estimated 55,000 Armenians had died.

Some Armenians who survived the bloodshed fled eastward; others were forcibly marched south into the harsh desert of modern-day Syria and Iraq, many perishing along the way. By the end of the first world war, nearly all of the 2m Armenians estimated to have been living in the empire in 1914 had been killed or deported. Armenian orphans were adopted by Muslim families, given Turkish names and taught to speak Turkish; some girls were forced into marriage.

Drill, baby, drill (from top to bottom) Muhsin Ozgur, a 65-year-old furniture-maker, comes from a lineage of treasure hunters. The ground around Dinlence is riddled with holes from the excavations. Erdal Gunduz works as a toilet attendant and hunts for treasure in his spare time

Racist stereotypes in Turkey had often depicted Armenians as rapacious hoarders (ignoring the fact that many were very poor). It didn’t take long for people to speculate that Armenians fleeing the genocide had buried their valuables, in the hope that they would one day return. Scholarly opinion varies as to how widespread the practice actually was, but experts generally agree that whatever treasure was buried was probably found shortly after the genocide.

Even so, Turkey’s treasure hunters are not deterred. What was once just a hobby has ballooned into an industry. Sometimes the pursuit of riches is harmless. But the frenzied digging taking place in Armenian churches and graveyards is destroying the country’s historical fabric. Artefacts are siphoned off to private dealers, and the hunters’ crude methods cause irrevocable damage to archaeological sites.

The government of President Recip Tayyip Erdogan has largely neglected the plundering of regions formerly occupied by Armenians. After Erdogan was first elected prime minister, in 2003, he preached cultural pluralism and even hinted that he might recognize the violence against the Armenians as genocide, a suggestion that previous Turkish governments furiously rejected. But since Erdogan’s election to the presidency a decade ago, his government has grown increasingly nationalistic, and has sought to celebrate the Islamic elements of the country’s history while downplaying other influences. In 2022, when Garo Paylan, an Armenian mp, put forward a resolution to recognize the Armenian genocide, Erdogan called him a traitor. With the government willing to look the other way, Turkey’s treasure hunters have been allowed to dig at will, carelessly eradicating the country’s last traces of Armenian heritage.

In July 2023 I joined Ozgur by the side of a motorway outside Erciş. Before us was a towering rock face. Cars and lorries whizzed by, spraying gravel and leaving clouds of dust in their wake. On the horizon you could make out the murky blue of Lake Van. Ozgur, dressed as always in a utility vest, placed his hands on his hips and studied the rock for a while. He pushed his thick glasses up on his nose, ran his hand over his head and pointed upwards. He could see it, he said. The remnants of a great Urartian temple.

Ozgur pointed out a narrow crack running from an overhang at the top of the precipice to the ground. “It’s a camel’s neck,” he said. “It’s lying on its side.” He pointed to another formation, about three meters tall. “And that is a lion; those are its eyes.” I stared at the rocks, until I thought I could make out a muzzle and two eyes. “There is treasure behind those eyes,” Ozgur said, flashing a toothless smile. “If you see a snake, that can also mean treasure.” I squinted, blinked but still found myself unable to make out the lion’s face.

Ozgur is a keen amateur historian, whom locals refer to affectionately as “the professor”. Much of his knowledge, he says, was passed down to him by his father and by Armenians he has met over the years. He combs the landscape for clues that might indicate the presence of treasure or ancient tombs. As well as cockerels, the Urartu people often marked tombs with rocks shaped like turtles or eagles; Armenians, according to Ozgur, would engrave stones with the image of a cross or snake to remind them where their valuables were buried. Once he’s found a promising site, he turns to a divining rod and pendulum to tell him exactly where to dig.

This method sounded dubious to me, but when Ozgur clambered up the slope, he came upon a perfectly rectangular niche, marked with a cuneiform inscription that had been graffitied over. He grinned and patted the rock – these ancient traces, hidden in the landscape, proved his instincts had been correct. “There was once a great city here,” he said. When I asked if he thought there was treasure buried under the rocks, he shrugged. “Probably yes,” he said.

Hidden gems (from top to bottom) Heritage sites like the Seljuk cemetery in Erciş have become popular spots for plundering. Urartu objects from Van in the Rezan Has museum in Istanbul. The ruins of an Armenian monastery

Ozgur’s traditional techniques are dying out. These days, most treasure hunts begin on social media. A search for #defineci (treasure hunter) on TikTok yields thousands of videos with millions of views, and a private Facebook group called “Treasure Symbols and their Solutions” has nearly 400,000 members. Countless treasure maps supposedly drawn by Armenians circulate online, the vast majority of which are amateurish fakes, with notes written anachronistically in modern Turkish. The business is rife with scammers. People purporting to be imams or Armenian priests will perform – for a price – rituals they promise will reveal the location of treasure. Another common tactic involves drawing a fake map showing a cache buried on a rich person’s property. The con artist produces a coin he claims to have found there, and convinces the landowner to pay him to conduct further excavations. Then he absconds with the money.

Thanks to social media, the interest in Turkish treasure has spread far beyond the country’s borders. Yabancilar – foreigners – come to Erciş from across Europe professing to know where treasure is hidden. During my reporting I was mistaken several times for an Armenian searching for my family’s treasure. In Van, a man claiming to be an Armenian mystic gave me photocopies of crudely scribbled “treasure maps” and asked me to help interpret them. Men on the street would shoot me furtive looks, and people would phone the treasure hunters I was interviewing to ask who “the foreigner” was. I even received anonymous phone calls requesting information leading to treasure or threatening to come and find me.

Despite its popularity, treasure hunting is a time-consuming and expensive pastime. Men (it is a male-dominated pursuit) traditionally go hunting on Sundays, while their wives stay behind to look after the children. Often, they travel in groups, splitting the cost of the petrol and a rented metal detector, if they don’t have one of their own. On the rare occasions when they find something of value, they’ll share the cost of the digging equipment used to get it out of the ground, as well as the price the treasure ultimately fetches.

Last summer a hunter named Zafer (he asked me not to use his last name as many of his digs are illegal) brought me to a graveyard in the small town of Dinlence, which the Armenians who once lived there called Pertag. Evidence of this long-departed population was everywhere. Everyone, it seemed, had found human bones buried near their houses. But Zafer suspected that there might also be valuables hidden beneath the village. When we told Ozgur where we were travelling, he informed us that seven priests were entombed in Dinlence and that the site was full of riches waiting to be discovered. “The holy treasure of the Christian realm is there,” he said.

After Zafer assembled his metal detector, he walked to the top of what he said was a burial mound and began scanning. He wore a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his ears to protect him from the sun, and cradled a chunky laptop in one arm. His detector was a sophisticated model, capable of penetrating several meters underground and rendering 3d scans. (Top-end detectors cost tens of thousands of dollars. Zafer and his business partner, Idris, own several, and hire them out to people who can’t afford their own.)

Zafer moved slowly and methodically over the grass, turning whenever the detector told him to change direction. “Head straight,” said a robotic female voice, “Turn.” Sometimes the machine would beep insistently and Zafer would squint at his laptop screen through his thick, heavy-framed glasses. Each time, he was disappointed – the detector had sensed an irregularity below the surface, but from the scan Zafer could tell nothing of value was there. We left empty-handed, as Zafer said was almost always the case.

Riches and rags Carvings adorning Armenian monasteries frequently end up in private hands (top). Many hunters admit to finding more bones instead of treasure (above)

Ozgur thinks metal detectors are a menace: they encourage the gratuitous destruction of archaeological sites each time the machine bleeps. Although Zafer seemed relatively cautious about digging, other hunters equipped with detectors lack discretion. In eastern Turkey the ruins of towns, churches and Armenian graveyards are pitted with craters where excavations have taken place, sometimes with dynamite. Online, viral videos of treasure hunting disasters show hunters blowing themselves up in search of their fortune. “It is very difficult to deal with an ignorant nation,” Ozgur told me.

According to Turkish law, would-be treasure hunters are required to obtain a license from the ministry of culture and tourism. These licenses, however, are granted for use only in areas that the government deems devoid of any cultural or environmental value. These include many Armenian historical sites. They also lapse after a month of digging, whereupon the search – which must take place within a plot of 100 square meters, and be overseen by an official from a local state museum – has to be abandoned if nothing has been found. Anything unearthed that the ministry considers to be culturally valuable – generally artefacts from Turkey’s Islamic, rather than Christian, past – is transferred to the local state museum and becomes property of the ministry. The treasure hunter then receives a fee worth 50% of the value determined by the government if the land where the treasure was found is public, and 40% if the land is private (10% goes to the landowner).

For the treasure hunter, this system presents a series of problems. First, there are limited public resources for carrying out these digs. The culture and tourism directorate is chronically underfunded, so licensed treasure hunters often have to wait a long time for an approved digging team to become available. Second, the government generally lowballs the value of discoveries. Even if the treasure hunters are offered a reasonable price, they often have to wait several years to be paid. Many never are.

Unsurprisingly, most treasure hunters eschew the official process and dig without permits. And as soon as they find something, they turn to the vast network of dealers and middlemen, who sell the objects to private collectors.

Many of the treasure hunters I spoke to had mentioned a certain Jewish dealer based in Istanbul. Some called him Simentof, others Simentov, or Simento. But although several hunters promised to put me in touch with him, none of them ever followed through. I started to suspect that, as with many things the treasure hunters told me, Simentof was a myth.

Then one day, I told a taxi driver in Istanbul that I was having trouble finding an antiquities dealer who would speak to me. The driver unexpectedly offered to help, and gave me directions. First, I was to go to the city’s Grand Bazaar, he said. Then, “through the swordsman’s gate, you’ll see a bank. In front of that bank there will be a row of antique stores. One of them will be able to help you.”

After a few false starts, I found Ziva Antiques, the tiny shop the driver had mentioned. It was dimly lit, with glass display cases packed full of religious icons, ceramics and jewelry. In the back, a mustached old man in a lime-green polo shirt was sitting behind a heavy wooden table covered in brocade. He removed his reading glasses to get a look at me.

“Welcome,” he said. “How can I help you?”

I told him I was looking for someone who sold the antiquities found in Van. “You’ve come to the right place,” he said. Then I asked his name. “Simentof,” he replied. I said that I had heard a lot about him from people in Erciş. “They would know me,” he said, smiling.

Simentof was born in 1950. His father was a barber who shaved the shopkeepers of the Grand Bazaar. The sale of unregistered antiquities was not formally banned in Turkey until 1983, and the trade in ancient artefacts flourished. Encouraged, as a boy, by the bazaar’s dealers, Simentof read “books and books and books”, and gradually learned how to appraise items found by treasure hunters.

Fickle fortunes (from top to bottom) Simentof, a dealer in the Bazaar in Istanbul, displays a Russian Orthodox triptych. His favorite item is a Persian cup from the Qajar period

He claimed to be knowledgeable about every era of Turkish history. “I am a Seljuk expert,” he told me. “I’m a Greek expert. I am an expert in Byzantium. I’m an expert in icons. No one taught me, I learned by touch.” Over years of trading antiquities, he said, he’s taught himself to value and date them simply by holding them in his hands.

Simentof opened a drawer and pulled out a paper envelope. Inside, there was a small gold amulet, with two lapis-lazuli birds inlaid at its center, and strings of pearls hanging from the bottom. He asked me to feel its weight in my hand. “That’s Byzantine,” he said. He estimated it was over 1,000 years old. “You’ll probably never hold something like this again in your life.”

He took care to emphasize that he no longer deals in illegal treasure, though he received near-constant phone calls while we spoke about objects that dealers and diggers wanted appraised. At one point, a crowd of men burst through the door carrying something wrapped in a piece of canvas. They placed it in front of Simentof, and he slowly unwrapped a golden horn-like instrument adorned with images of fig leaves and a ram’s head.

“Fake,” he said, placing the horn back in the fabric. On closer inspection, I noticed its gold plating was chipped. “You can buy this for €10 [$11] on the street in Greece.”

Many antiquities trafficked by Turkish dealers find their way out of the country. Some are hidden in shipping containers holding commercial goods and are labelled as something innocuous, like “appliance”. The owners of the containers, and sometimes the customs inspectors, can be paid to look the other way. There are simpler ways, too. British nationals and other Europeans have been caught smuggling pottery out of Turkey in their luggage. One dealer I spoke to wraps ancient tiles and tablets in newspaper and throws them in a carry-on bag.

The Turkish government is attempting to crack down on the international trafficking of antiquities. A decade ago, Erdogan’s administration launched a well-publicized campaign to reclaim items they said were looted from Turkish soil. It demanded the return of objects from prominent cultural institutions including the Getty Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and refused to lend to the British Museum until certain antiquities from Turkey were returned. More recently, in 2021, the government signed an agreement with America aimed at preventing illegal antiquities from entering the country. It has also launched police operations to stem their flow to markets in Europe and beyond.

None of this, however, has curbed the freelance looting of Turkey’s cultural heritage by part-time treasure hunters. In fact, some critics see Turkey’s lax policies towards local treasure hunters as part of a broader nationalist project of keeping antiquities within the country’s borders. According to Alice von Bieberstein, an anthropologist who studies treasure hunters in and around Van, the entire “shadow economy” of treasure operates in “complicity with the state apparatus”. The state, she writes, is tacitly encouraging looting by turning a “blind eye” to treasure hunts. Valuable objects therefore stay in Turkey under the protection of private collectors, and the government does not have to pay to acquire, house or restore them.

This is how Cagan, the conservator at the Rezan Has Museum, justifies the fact that almost all the items in his collection have come from treasure hunters. The objects, which he personally restores, fill not only the glass display cases on the museum’s floor, but also filing cabinets and shelves in his workshop. A provision in Turkish law allowing museums to register antiquities without declaring provenance means that his collection is legal, even if some of the items are sourced illegally. Cagan is happy to grow his museum’s holdings by any means – better to keep antiquities in the country he told me, than let them be spirited away to Europe, as they have been for centuries.

Rack and ruins (from top to bottom) The pilfering has inspired greater advocacy for heritage protection. Plundered stones often turn up in gardens and farms. Many worry that what’s left of the country’s heritage will be destroyed

This system, however, offers few protections to heritage sites valued by Armenians. Not a single Armenian church I saw in Turkey had any security, making it easy for hunters or acquisitive locals to enter the grounds. An Islamic cemetery that dated back to the 12th century, on the other hand, was protected by heavily armed police officers and a team of watchmen.

Paylan, the former mp who has fought for the protection of Armenian churches, believes that the destruction of these sites amounts to the erasure of Armenian culture in Turkey. In the summer of 2022, he held a press conference in front of a decrepit monastery near Van. “This monastery has stood for 1,600 years, but in the last century it has been left to ruin. It is being deliberately destroyed,” he told an audience of reporters, his voice shaking with anger. “When we destroy these places, we become rootless. Memory-less. We become a corrupted culture.”

Once, there were more than 600 churches around Lake Van. Now, fewer than 100 are left. Those that remain standing look like skeletons, their interiors pillaged by treasure hunters. Armenian engravings have been gouged out, and domes and columns have collapsed into piles of rubble. One church, high in the hills above the lake, has been used to house goats and is now full of manure. At another church, an old man told me he chases away treasure hunters whenever they come to dig. He was worried about what would happen to the building when he died. Walking around the area, I found stones plundered from the churches in unexpected places – as part of a garden wall, or patching up a farm building.

One afternoon, Zafer took me to the town of Salmanağa, which was once home to an Armenian monastery. A farmer named Gultekin led us through the long grass of his garden to the ruins of a church that had once been part of the complex. Nearly all the carvings that had once adorned the building had been removed by hunters – Gultekin said they had ended up in private hands or in museums. The ground around the church was riddled with holes. Gultekin had been digging there for as long as he could remember. He hadn’t found much, aside from a few skeletons.

We stepped into what remained of the church. Looking up, we saw blue sky where a dome should have been. Before us, in the center of the nave, was a hole at least four meters deep and three meters wide. We stepped gingerly around it, careful not to fall in. “I’ve been digging this for more than ten years,” said Gultekin. Every few months, when he has the time, he digs a little deeper.

It was getting dark. The last rays of sun stretched lazily through the clouds, over fields filled with piles of hay waiting to be baled. In the garden next door, two old men had dug holes into what they believed to be the monastery’s cemetery. Somewhere beneath, they said, was treasure. Zafer asked the men if they’d found anything yet. Nothing, they said, just some bones. They gestured towards where I was standing.

I looked down. There, at my feet, was a neat stack of femurs and what looked like bits of humerus. I asked the men if they were planning to rebury them. The men shrugged. Once, they said, they had reburied a skeleton. But these days they mostly tossed the remains aside.

Erin O’Brien is a freelance writer in Istanbul. Reporting for this piece was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Kim Wall Memorial Fund