The Red House of Tarsus

There's a small, unremarkable red house in Tarsus, a city in southern Turkey. Or rather, there was. It's a gas station now. And that's kind of the whole problem because for about a year, that house was surrounded by snipers, sealed off from elected members of parliament, wrapped in blue tarps, and guarded by special operations police. 

 

For a solid six months, the entire neighbourhood watched their walls slowly crack and their ceilings slowly droop while the government dug  deeply, obsessively and in complete silence beneath a building that, from the outside, looked like it cost maybe forty thousand euros. Nobody was ever told what they found. And then the house disappeared.

 

The year is 2011. A woman of Armenian descent shows up in Tarsus with a very old map that she claims belonged to her ancestors. She tracks down a group of local amateur treasure hunters  the kind of guys who probably own metal detectors and have strong opinions about Roman-era pottery  and makes them an offer they really can't refuse. 

"There's a fortune buried at this location," she tells them. "Help me dig it up, and you can keep all the gold and valuables. I only want the old papers and books." Now, to the treasure hunters, this sounded fantastic.

 

 She wants worthless scraps of paper? Fine by them. They agreed immediately, because of course they did. They rented the red house from its owner  at roughly ten times the market rate, which tells you something about how confident they were  and started digging. Things went well until they didn't. A falling-out among the crew led one of them to go to the police. The regional police chief at the time decided the smart move was to plant an undercover officer inside the group. 

 

Mithat Erdal spent nearly a year embedded with the dig team, reporting back everything he saw. Then the crew hit something significant a small portion of what appeared to be a much larger buried treasure. Erdal reported this to his superiors. Police raided the site. Everyone was arrested.

 

Here's where it gets weird: the official police reports from the raid stated that nothing was found at the site. Zero. Empty hole. Nothing to see here. Mithat Erdal had been there. He had seen what came out of the ground. He knew the reports were false. He told his wife everything. He said he was going to take the evidence to higher authorities in Ankara.

 

He never made it to Ankara. His service weapon was confiscated. Shortly afterwards, he was shot in the back of the head. The official cause of death was recorded  and this is real  as "shot while joking around." The case went cold. Four years passed. Nobody talked about it.

 

In 2016, the attempted military coup in Turkey led to a massive wave of government purges. Thousands of officials were dismissed on suspicion of belonging to the Gülenist network (FETÖ). Among those fired and arrested: the police chief who had sent Mithat Erdal on his unofficial, verbal-only, suspiciously undocumented undercover mission. Along with most of the other officials connected to the original dig.

 

For Sibel Erdal, Mithat's widow, this was the opening she had been waiting four years for. She filed her complaint with the prosecutor's office and then wrote a letter directly to President Erdoğan asking for justice  and for her family to receive the official status and benefits due to the widow of a police martyr. Her letter worked. But perhaps not quite in the way she expected.

 

The year is now 2016 and the Turkish state has decided to take the Tarsus situation very seriously indeed. Special excavation teams were dispatched from across the country. Snipers were positioned on surrounding rooftops. The entire site was wrapped in blue tarps. A gate was installed and guarded around the clock.

 

CHP Member of Parliament Aytu Atıcı tried to get in multiple times. He was turned away every time. He filed a parliamentary question about the dig. The government didn't answer it. He filed a Freedom of Information request. The response he eventually received stated that only "test pieces" had been recovered — an answer so vague it barely qualifies as a sentence.

Atıcı went to the press. "What is being hidden from the public?" he demanded. "What are they actually looking for? Is it true that a Roman-era treasure worth millions of dollars has been removed from the country?"

 

Nobody answered that either. Meanwhile, residents within 300 metres of the site watched their walls crack and their houses slowly separate from their foundations, which  if you believe the government's claim that this was a modest little research dig  raises some fairly pointed engineering questions.

 

Here is the thing about Tarsus that makes all of this slightly less absurd: it is not a normal city.

Tarsus has been continuously inhabited for roughly 6,000 years. It sits at the exact point where Eastern and Western civilisations met and traded and fought and intermingled for millennia. It is, historically, one of the most significant crossroads on earth.

And it is, famously, the birthplace of Saint Paul.

 

Yes. That Paul. The man whose letters make up a substantial portion of the New Testament. The theologian whose thinking arguably shaped Western Christianity more than any other individual. The guy with the road to Damascus. Tarsus is where he was born.

Which brings us to Theory Number Two.

 

Some historians have long argued that the New Testament as we have it today is not quite the original. Paul wrote letters  many letters. Some made it into the canon. The question of which texts were included, excluded, or altered during the early centuries of Christianity is one of the most contested areas in religious scholarship.

 

So what if there were additional Pauline texts? Texts that didn't make it into the official Bible? Texts that, if authentic, would overturn centuries of established Christian doctrine?

And what if those texts were buried under a red house in the city where Paul was born?

The Armenian woman's story slots into this theory quite neatly. She didn't want the gold. She wanted the papers and the books. It's a theory. It is not proven. But it's the kind of theory that makes you set down your coffee and stare at the wall for a moment.

 

Theory Number Three is the one that went truly viral in Turkey, and it goes like this:

In 2018 President Erdoğan visited the Vatican. This was the first such visit in 59 years. It happened shortly after the Tarsus excavations concluded. Make of that what you will.

Two years later, Hagia Sophia, the Byzantine basilica in Istanbul that had been a museum since 1934 was reconverted into a mosque. The Vatican, representing the interests of a billion Christians who consider Hagia Sophia a sacred site of immense historical importance, raised some objections and then... didn't push it very hard.

 

At the opening ceremony for Hagia Sophia's reconversion, various symbols were projected into the sky. One of those symbols was the Ark of the Covenant.The Ark of the Covenant, for those who need a refresher: it's the gold-covered chest described in the Hebrew Bible as containing the original stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. It is considered by many traditions to be the single most sacred object in human history. It has been missing for approximately 2,500 years. Indiana Jones looked for it once.

 

The theory is that whatever was found beneath that red house in Tarsus was significant enough to bring the Vatican to the negotiating table. That Turkey emerged from those digs holding something that gave it enormous, quiet leverage over the Christian world. That's why the Hagia Sophia conversion went so smoothly. That's why the Vatican meeting happened after 59 years of silence. That's why nobody will tell you what was in the hole.

 

What happend then? Honestly nobody knows. The excavation wrapped up. The blue tarps came down. The special forces left. The house was quietly put up for sale at a price that could charitably be described as "ambitious for a structurally compromised building in a provincial city." Nobody bought it.

Then it was demolished.

 

The neighbourhood muhtar (local official) confirmed to a journalist investigating the story that the building is simply gone. A satellite check on Google Earth confirms it: the address now shows a petrol station. Whatever was under that house  Roman treasure, lost gospels, the literal Ark of the Covenant, or possibly just a very deep empty hole, is someone else's secret now.