Remzi Oğuz Arık: The Archaeologist Who Never Landed — Adana, 1954

In the summer of 1935, on a low mound in central Anatolia called Alacahöyük, a Turkish archaeologist began to dig.

His name was Remzi Oğuz Arık. That season, he led the first national excavation at the site — a dig the young Turkish Republic wanted the world to see.

Nineteen years later, he boarded a plane that never reached Ankara.

Arık was born in 1899, in Kabaktepe, a village near Kozan, in the province of Adana.

In 1926, he went to Paris. For five years, he studied archaeology and art history. When he came home in 1931, Turkey had very few archaeologists of its own. He became one of the first.

He dug at Karalar, near Ankara. At Göllüdağ. And at Alacahöyük — a site that would go on to yield some of Anatolia's most famous Bronze Age treasures.

He founded a museum in Manisa. He taught at Ankara University. And in the nineteen-forties, he ran the city's archaeology and ethnography museums.

Then, in 1950, he left the university for politics. His home province, then called Seyhan, elected him to parliament for the Democrat Party.

Two years later, he broke away. In May 1952, he founded a party of his own: the Turkish Villagers' Party.

By the spring of 1954, a general election was only weeks away. And Arık was campaigning in Adana, the region where he was born.

On Saturday, April 3rd, 1954, he boarded a flight back to Ankara.

The aircraft was a Douglas DC-3 of Devlet Hava Yolları, Turkey's State Airlines — the company that would be renamed Turkish Airlines a year later. Registration: TC-ARK.

It left Adana at 1:40 in the afternoon, with twenty-five people on board.

Less than ten minutes later, still climbing, it exploded in mid-air.

The wreckage came down near the village of Kurttepe, just northwest of the city, scattered across some fifteen kilometers.

There were no survivors. Three crew. Twenty-two passengers.

What caused the explosion was never determined. Not then. Not since.

It was the first major disaster in Turkish civil aviation.

Four weeks later, Turkey went to the polls. Without its founder, the Turkish Villagers' Party did not win a single seat.

Remzi Oğuz Arık was buried in Ankara. His gravestone records where his life began — Kozan, Kabaktepe. And where it ended — Adana, Kurttepe. April 3rd, 1954.

Today, schools in Adana carry his name. So does a neighborhood in Ankara.

He spent his life uncovering Anatolia's past. His own story ended in a field outside Adana, not far from where it began.