The life of the famous photographer Ara Güler, who made a great contribution to the promotion of the ancient city of Aphrodisias, will be made into a movie.

The Ministry of Culture and Tourism has announced 30 new films that it will support. Among these films is a scenario that tells the story of Ara Güler’s life.

It was learned that Doğuş Group will also support the film, which will be directed by Fatma Ela Alyamaç and Aren Perdeci. It has been a matter of curiosity whether Aphrodisias will be included in the film that tells the story of Güler’s life.

While he was alive, Güler related in various TV programmes how he came to Afrodisias and the landscapes he encountered. He also related his meeting with Kenan Erim, who had a very important role in the beginning and continuation of the Afrodisias excavations, in these documentaries.

Güler, who stated that Afrodisias was as important as Ephesus, had said, “Whatever Ephesus is, Afrodisias is a place more or less like that. Afrodisias is a big place like that.”

The story is told by Güler, who recounts those days moment by moment in the documentary I Was There, published by Soner Yalçın: “The period is 1958. It was the time of the Adnan Menderes government. I was working at Hayat Magazine. Since we needed paper, we were also reporting on the government’s affairs.

“It was one of my duties to follow Adnan Menderes wherever he went and report on him. Again, Menderes was going to attend an opening. A dam called the Kemer Dam. It is somewhere between Denizli and Aydın Nazilli, between the mountains.

“The Editorial Office told me to attend the opening of this dam. I went to İzmir. From there, I went to Aydın. I went to the governor’s office and explained the situation. They helped me. The governor gave me a driver and a car from the municipality. We went. The light was a little wrong. I waited for the sun to set. I climbed up quite a bit so that the water would come out clearly.

“The driver started to argue with me. He says, ‘If I had known it would take this long, we would have sent someone else’ and so on. We argued a lot. I finished my work and started to return. The driver “I know a shortcut,” he said. “We set out on the road, and I saw that we were constantly encountering rocks. We had lost the way. The night became pitch dark. We go on and on, and we come to the same rocky places. We argue from time to time.”

 “I said, my child, it can’t be like this. I said, we’ll stop at the nearest village, spend the mornings there, and then set off. We found a village. Of course, there was electricity and all that. They were stopping with gas lamps and such. I saw a light. We went into the café. The men were playing a game. Our eyes got used to it. The café was lit by its luxurious lamp. After my eyes got used to it, I looked. There were no tables in the café. They had put the column headers instead of tables and made a table and were playing dominoes on it. Well, a nation playing games using history within history. I started taking pictures.

“The Romans had such a column that holds up the ceiling of the café. What kind of place is this, what is this, etc. I said, there is something here. We’ve come to a historical place.”

“I woke up early next morning. I went out to the street. I got the machines. For example, I see a sarcophagus on the street. A woman doing laundry. In another place, they had made a hole in the middle of the sarcophagus. In another place, they were making molasses inside the sarcophagus. History and today live side by side.

“I have never seen such a strange place in my life. It is not a ruin or anything. It is a very strange place. I found a city living in history. I looked inside the stones and saw faces looking at me. The title of the interview came to my mind. The Scream of Aphrodisias. Aphrodisias is screaming and screaming to save me from here. I took a lot of pictures like this but there are no colored pictures.

“The villagers showed me around. We visited the stadium and all of them. I took all of these. Take after take, it never ends. It is a big place.”

He added: “”I finished my job. I came to Istanbul. There weren’t many intellectual people in the press at that time. They said, ‘You find a place like this, you can only shoot stones.’ They wanted tabloid news. They made fun of me because I shot these. I got angry at them. I showed it to Sabahattin Eyüboğlu. He said it was the Roman period. I showed it to others as well. But I want someone to write an article. It should be published in the magazine. There’s no work in our magazine. Our magazine doesn’t understand this business. It wants me to shoot a movie star.

“I wrote this story I told as a text. My wife translated it into English. I sent it to a magazine in England. It was published in 4-5 pages. It also became the cover. Then our people saw it and said, ‘What kind of pictures did that guy take?’ I said, “These are my photos.”

He said a high-quality magazine from America was interested in printing what hae had, but asked for colour images and so he went off back and spent three days on the shoot.

“I went to the Director General of Museums. I told him to find someone to write about these photographs. He suggested someone who was working on Rome at the university. His name was Kenan Erim. I went to Aphrodisias again with him. Before going with him, I had gone for other magazines in England, France and America.

“Then I did interviews for countless institutes and magazines. Kenan Erim took his students to Aphrodisias to take classes. This was also a first. Aphrodisias is more or less the same as Ephesus. Aphrodisias is a place where the sculpture school was founded. All the sculptures in Rome go to Aphrodisias. They are made from the stones in Babadağ. The sculpture is made here. It is completed while on the ferry. When it arrives in Rome, it is put in its place.”