International and Turkish residents of Bodrum have shown strong support for Andrew Osborn’s 24-day walk from Bodrum to Fethiye to raise awareness of Down syndrome in Turkey and support for the children and families. 

Osborn started the walk from the Mariners’ Cafe on Bodrum Harbor Square on April 28 after meeting supporters and distributing t-shirts. A fluent Turkish speaker, Osborn and Fery Elhadef, two of the three co-founders of the Turkish-registered association Down Türkiye, also met local press and television representatives and outlined the association’s aims and the Step-by-Step project.

On the previous day, residents of Yalıkavak gathered for a special brunch at the local restaurant Musti’s to focus attention on the project and give information on Down syndrome. Restaurant owners Brenda and Mustafa Ancin have an eldest son, Eli, aged 4, with Down syndrome and until this month they did not know about the support group for parents of children with Down syndrome in Turkey.

“This group is needed,” said Brenda, emphatically in her strong Irish accent. At that point she had only spoken to Andrew and Gün Osborn over the phone or by e-mail and heard how the Osborns struggled to find support when their eldest son Robert Cem, 17, was born in Istanbul.

“The attitudes haven’t changed in 17 years,” said Brenda. “I was criticized by some health professionals here when our baby was born for not testing for Down syndrome. I was told he had Down syndrome when we went for a checkup 10 days after he was born. I found myself alone in the hospital foyer falling apart after hearing the news and nobody wanted to help. They were totally negative about his condition. God knows how people in the villages get treated.”

Eli is a happy child running around the restaurant, evidently very comfortable with regular visitors and guests there. There is evidently strong support group for the family. “We had no support except from friends, customers and family around us,” said Mustafa.

“We now send him daily to the Turgutreis Center for disabled children where he has a great time with everyone. They are wonderful with him,” Brenda said, as she watched Eli pushing a baby chair around.

Mustafa and Brenda met Andrew Osburn on the morning of April 28 at the breakfast gathering in Bodrum Harbor, to see Osburn off for the start of his walk. Among the group were others with personal experience of family members with Down syndrome, including British woman Carol Wood, whose sister had Down syndrome. Karen and Tom Cree were there with one of their three daughters, 21-year-old Natalie, who has Down syndrome. Karen said the United Kingdom has systems to support families and children, but now after reaching the age of 18, adults with Down syndrome have less support and with the current economic cutbacks, they are losing their “incapacity to work” social benefits and being pushed to find work. “Natalie could work, if she has training in jobs that would suit her and people like her: jobs that are routine and repetitive and in a safe, secure and known environment,” Karen said, but added that training has also been cut. Karen said even in the U.K. the responsibility for care is being pushed back onto volunteers and family.

Route to show beauty of the southern shores

Thirty people gathered to meet Andrew Osburn and to walk the first kilometer with him. The Bodrum Hashers recreational running group was strongly represented, some members having known Osburn from his involvement in the same group in Istanbul. He said he has probably run over 425 runs and set 110 runs. “I reckon that is around 5,000 kilometers in hashing,” he said. He pointed out that he was taking the planned route at a far gentler pace, expecting to walk around 20 kilometers a day, and will be blogging and Facebooking along the way.

Osburn has researched much of the 400 kilometer route from Bodrum to Fethiye on foot, by car and with Internet mapping, as he intends to keep as close as possible to the shoreline and show the beauty of the route with photographs posted on the website and blog.

He has also been contacted with route suggestions and help from people along the way who will accompany him. From Marmaris he will actually be taking a boat trip from Marmaris to Sarıgerme, past where a seashore route was deemed impossible. A Gümüşlük resident, Colin Crabbe, said at the farewell breakfast that he and others planned to meet Osburn in a few days to walk a day or two with him. Osburn will meet Fethiye Hashers who will walk with him when he is expected to finish in Fethiye on May 21. A party will be held in Çalış on May 22.

The walk named “Step-by-Step project” is the first step of a program called “7 Years 7 Seasons” and the pioneering walk for all the other walks planned within that program. Andrew Osburn, in parallel with the mission of the association, which aims to reach out to all over Turkey and all the children with the syndrome in Turkey, will walk in seven different regions of the country within the next seven years. The association is also building up via the website an information bank in Turkish for families and health professionals, and organizing seminars and meetings.

Source: Hurryet Daily News

A massive block of marble covered with a detailed inscription in Latin, a complete square of mosaic floor and an ancient drainage system have been found recently by archaeologists from the Bodrum Museum in the southwest town of Bodrum. They have been working over a second winter on a painstaking rescue excavation of a historical site close to the town center of Bodrum.

The former vegetable plot was first revealed to have ancient foundations when survey trenches were dug by the museum’s archaeologists for a new building permit application last winter, along with the adjoining parcel of land beside it. After concentrating on the adjoining site last winter, the original plot has been the subject of continuing rescue excavations over the past three months. The Bodrum Museum archaeologists’ team of Ece Benli Bağcı, Bahadır Berkaya and archaeologist Gursans Uzala has continued to delve deeper beside the grid of ancient wall foundations which they have uncovered over a 20-square-meter area. To their astonishment and excitement, a massive block of marble was uncovered that bears a whole side of uniform inscriptions in ancient Latin including numbers.

According to the archaeologists, the marble block bears fragments of the total edict of Roman Empire Diocletian (AD 284-305). The details give an intriguing glimpse of daily life in ancient Halicarnassus under the Roman Empire, and gives evidence that the city was a more important commercial center during that era than previously recognized.

One part of the inscription lists several different categories of prices set for leather and sandals according to their origin and the status of the customer ranging from senator to courier. Another part lists prices set for different harness and saddles. It also includes a list of the monthly wages that teachers of different disciplines – reading, writing and geometry – could demand and how much a lawyer could charge for different services. Even in Roman times it shows a pleading by a lawyer was charged at five times an average teacher’s monthly wage!

Archaeologist Berkaya said the block of marble seems to be worn on the edges and may have been re-used in later centuries as a capping stone to protect the drainage pipes as it and other smaller marble blocks have been laid flat in a similar way around the site.

During the many excavation seasons carried out by Bodrum Museum and Danish teams from the University of Southern Denmark’s Halicarnassus Studies Department, the department head Professor Poul Pederson said, there have been small fragments of the edict found on the site of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, less than one kilometer from the new site. The Bodrum archaeologists are now looking through records of other Aegean ancient city sites to find more, as the edicts were proclaimed throughout the whole Roman Empire.

Roman Mosaic fragment

Within the same excavation area, 2.80 x 2.80 square meters of what would have been a larger mosaic floor patterned with classical ivy leaf motifs has been also found. It has been tentatively dated as 2nd century AD (Roman Imperial era). Complete pipes of a drainage system bisecting the wall foundations have also been revealed and with the walls themselves indicate structures of later centuries in the Byzantine era.

In the building site excavated last winter, the archaeologists revealed finds of great interest – five plain terracotta coffins with skeletal remains, water and drainage pipes and a single ancient terracotta medicine bottle. Those finds as well as that of remnants of walls around a still-viable spring of water were first reported by the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review in May 2010.

At that time archaeologist Bağcı said, “This the first known finding of a medicine bottle from the Hellenistic period in ancient Halicarnassus [present-day Bodrum city center],” and the two archaeologists working on the excavation, Bağcı and Berkaya dated the finds as from the Hellenistic period (330 to 30 BC)

The many objects dated from the Hellenistic period and the Roman Empire era among later-era walls and stones indicate a rich jigsaw of archaeological remains from different centuries in the block and in the immediate area which borders the whole protected heritage site of the Mars Temple field.

Bodrum Museum Director Yasar Yıldız said the museum is excited by the finds and glad to find more of Bodrum’s ancient history to share with the public.

The protection and preservation of the site will be determined by the Muğla Protection of Natural and Cultural Assets Committee.

Who was Diocletian?

He was the ruler of Rome, the last pagan emperor of the entire Roman Empire (reigned from 284 until abdication May 1, 305). Early in his reign he divided the empire into two administrative regions, East and West. “During 19 years of rule, he had worked towards creating a vast military state in which provincial organization, buildings, coinage and prices of every type of goods and services would be on a uniform basis inspired by the virtues of the Roman past” (William H.C. Frend).

“As part of his economic reforms, the Emperor Diocletian made a revision of the taxation system and a revaluation of the currency (in 301 AD). Shortly after this attempt to stabilize the coinage, he tried to stop the inflation by sending out a Price Edict, in which he fixed the maximum prices for goods and wages. This price edict was distributed in the eastern part of the Roman Empire and published in stone in many cities there. In the province of Achaia in Greece fragments of the price edict have been found in both a Latin and a Greek version. In Asia Minor, the fragments known to us at present indicate that there only a Latin version was presented.” (University of Southern Denmark, Halicarnassus Studies Department)

Diocletian’s eventual successor as sole ruler of the Roman world was a co-emperor of the West, Constantine, who fought the other governors after 306, and finally won the civil war with a battle on the shores of the Bosphorus in 324 AD. Afterwards Constantine declared himself a Christian and renamed the city on the Bosphorus after himself.

Source: Hurryet Daily News