Under the garlic fields of Taskopru, a Roman floor comes back into the light

In a valley in northern Turkey better known for its garlic than its ruins, a team of forty-five has spent four months lifting soil from the nave of a late Roman basilica. What they found beneath it was <strong>105 square metres</strong> of geometric mosaic, laid in the <strong>4th century AD</strong> and still holding its pattern. The floor is not yet fully uncovered.

The city was never meant to be modest. Pompey the Great founded it after defeating Mithridates VI, in the reorganisation of Asia Minor that followed the wars, and left it his name. It became the metropolis of Roman Paphlagonia — a province otherwise known for timber, boxwood and horses rather than for cities. Its coins counted their years from that founding.

The basilica whose floor is now emerging went up in the second half of the 2nd century AD, during the building boom of the Antonine years. What came later is written into its stones: alterations that mark the town's Christianisation, and by the 5th century its standing as a bishopric seat. Bishops of Pompeiopolis appear in the attendance lists of church councils.

The same season produced something smaller and more startling. From the pastophorion, the room where the liturgy was prepared, the team lifted a sculpted head of Eros, carved around 150-160 AD — the god of desire, recovered from a Christian preparation chamber, both belonging to the same building at different points in its long life.

Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy announced the mosaic and confirmed that work continues. It will have to. Beyond the nave lies the villa complex, built in the 2nd century and lived in until the 6th, where the restorers advanced ten square metres of dining-room floor across an entire previous season. At that pace the triclimium alone is the work of years.

Fifteen of the specialists on site come from Italy. The funding is stitched together from the ministry, the Kastamonu provincial administration, the Taskopru district and its municipality, with a mining company as principal sponsor — the kind of arrangement that keeps a twenty-year excavation running in a district whose registered export is garlic.

Locals call the place the Ephesus of the Black Sea. The comparison is generous, but the floor now under the brushes was laid by people who would have thought it fair.