Nine thousand years ago, people here lived in a town with no streets. Çatalhöyük is a pair of low mounds on the Konya plain, and what makes it famous is how its houses were packed together wall to wall, entered by ladders through the roof, with the dead buried under the floors and bulls' horns plastered into the walls. It is one of the earliest large settlements anywhere and has been a World Heritage site since 2012.
Getting there from Konya is easy and very flat. You head south-east on straight roads through irrigated fields and sugar beet, with the town of Çumra eleven kilometres away, and the Taurus mountains standing as a faint blue wall on the horizon. This is the great Anatolian steppe, where the sky does most of the work. There is little to challenge a rider except wind and the occasional tractor, so it is a day for relaxed cruising rather than corners. Spring is lovely, when the plain is green and the far mountains still carry snow, whereas high summer is dry, dusty and hot by midday.
The site itself is more understated than people expect. There is no pile of monumental stone, because everything was built of mud brick, so you walk on raised walkways above the excavations while a large protective roof shades the digging area. A reconstructed house helps you picture the thing: a single room, a hearth, platforms for sleeping, painted plaster. The finds, among them the seated figurines of heavy-hipped women, are mostly in the museums in Konya and Ankara, but the setting explains why a settled farming community chose this place, with the ancient wetlands and fertile alluvium of the old Çarşamba river delta.
A few things are worth knowing. The little town beside the mound is small, and Çumra is the better choice for fuel, a hot meal and a cold drink. Konya itself, with its whirling-dervish heritage and its fine Seljuk buildings, is the natural place to eat in the evening, and the local speciality of slow-baked mutton, etli ekmek, a long thin meat flatbread, is worth hunting down.
Give it an hour or so, wear a hat, and carry water, since shade is rare. The reward is the odd sensation of standing on the spot where something very close to our own way of life, with its houses, its neighbours and its ancestors in the floor, began to take shape.