The Battle for Girê Mirazan: Genetics, State Censorship, and Cosmic

The Battle for Girê Mirazan: Genetics, State Censorship, and Cosmic Myths at Humanity's Oldest Temple

Recently, Amîda Kurd highlighted the launch of the new book by Swiss physician and researcher Dr. Diogo Sennfelt, "The Gobekli Gates: The Doors of the Old World". The book has once again directed the international spotlight onto the more than 11,500-year-old temple complex near the city of Riha (Şanlıurfa). Yet, behind the glittering theories of stellar alignments and lost civilizations lies a deeper struggle: the battle for truth, language, and the genetic heritage belonging to the actual builders of the site. To understand the monumental legacy at what is officially called Göbekli Tepe, we must examine history through three prisms: the living local memory, pioneering DNA research, and the radically different approaches that characterize the authors who have written about the site.

The Name the State Erased: The Living Memory of the Hill of Wishes

In global popular science and the tourism industry, the site and its neighboring areas are referred to exclusively by their modern, Turkish names. These names, however, are modern bureaucratic constructions without any historical, linguistic, or cultural connection to the people who actually carved the stone monoliths during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic era. The Turkic peoples migrated from Central Asia to Anatolia only during the Middle Ages—more than 10,000 years after the structures were buried.

During the aggressive Turkification policies of the 20th century, the Turkish state carried out a systematic erasure of history, whereby thousands of Kurdish, Armenian, and Assyrian place names were wiped from the maps. Yet, in the collective folk memory, the truth survived. For generations, the local population has called the surrounding area of the main sanctuary Xerabreşka (The Black Ruins), due to the dark flint stones and basalt blocks that plows constantly struck in the soil.

The hill itself, where the temples lay buried, has throughout time borne the name Girê Mirazan ("The Hill of Wishes"). Long before the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt began the first official excavations in 1995, the hill was regarded as a deeply sacred site. At its summit stood a solitary mulberry tree where local people—especially women suffering from childlessness who prayed to become pregnant, or the sick seeking healing—made pilgrimages to tie wish-ribbons and perform prayers. This multi-millennial spiritual continuity demonstrates that the population carried an intuitive memory that the hill hid a sanctuary, even though the monumental stone circles had lain hidden beneath the ground for eleven millennia.

This pattern of state erasure has been repeated at the neighboring sanctuary within the Taş Tepeler network, which today is officially called Karahan Tepe. In local folk memory, this site has always been named Girê Keçel ("The Bald Hill"), a logical and nature-bound description of the hill's barren, rocky, and completely vegetationless appearance before excavations exposed its interior. By systematically replacing these ancient, descriptive names with Turkish administrative designations, the central power has attempted to sever the historical bonds between the sites and their indigenous population.

Klaus Schmidt's Theory, His Sudden Death, and the DNA Breakthrough

The first excavation director, Klaus Schmidt, early on suspected that the people inhabiting the region today are the direct, biological descendants of the Neolithic masters who erected the T-pillars. Schmidt was open about this anthropological continuity. When he suddenly passed away from a heart attack during a swim in Germany on July 20, 2014, at just 60 years old, it immediately raised strong suspicions in the region. In a political landscape where the indigenous population's historical and moral rights to their own geography are systematically opposed, many interpreted his sudden death as a sign that he had been silenced just as his research threatened the official state narrative.

For a long time after Schmidt's death, archaeogenetics encountered major biological challenges. The region's extremely hot climate, combined with the fact that bone fragments had lain unprotected in backfill material for millennia, meant that the DNA molecules were severely degraded. Researchers could initially only establish ritual patterns, such as the "skull cult" identified in 2017.

The scientific breakthrough, however, came in September 2026. The German Archaeological Institute (DAI) then published a pioneering study in the journal PLOS ONE. For the first time in history, archaeologists managed to locate completely intact human graves deep beneath the floors of the complex (dated to circa 8700–8000 BCE). By extracting genetic material from the rock-hard petrous bone (os petrosum) behind the ears of the buried individuals, scientists have finally been able to secure high-quality genomic DNA directly from the people who lived and died at the site.

This breakthrough complements the extensive regional findings published in the journal Science (2022). By analyzing ancient DNA from Neolithic settlements across Upper Mesopotamia, geneticists have been able to establish and prove the existence of a unique, local genetic continuum (an unbroken genetic line). The genetic heritage of the hunter-gatherers who first laid the foundations of civilization in the Fertile Crescent remains very much present in the historical indigenous population of the area, long before any external migration waves altered the region's demographic landscape.

The Authors Under the Loupe: Objectivity Versus Manipulation

To understand how the history of these Mesopotamian sanctuaries is portrayed internationally, we must analyze the approaches and reliability of the three most prominent authors who have tackled the subject.

1. D. Sennfelt: The Mathematical Archaeoastronomer

In his new book "The Gobekli Gates", Swiss psychiatrist and independent researcher Dr. Diogo Sennfelt approaches the complex from the perspective of architecture and astronomy. His central thesis is a synthesis of two previously active schools: he claims through astronomical calculations that the central T-pillars in the stone rings were aligned in a bidirectional line during the same epoch—facing the rise of Sirius at the southern horizon and the setting of Deneb in the north.

·       Objectivity: Sennfelt's approach is partially objective because he uses pure astrophysical mathematics to calculate the precession of the Earth's axis and the actual positions of the stars 11,000 years ago.

·       Flaws and Speculation: Sennfelt's objectivity ceases when he attempts to force these data into a grander, alternative-historical narrative. In his other writings, including the Memories of Atlantis trilogy, he tries to prove that Plato's Atlantis was a real place in the Afar Depression and that the knowledge at Girê Mirazan originates from a global, lost civilization. Established field archaeologists dismiss this as pseudoarchaeological speculation, as the site demonstrably developed gradually by local groups on the ground.

2. Andrew Collins: The Mystery-Seeking Manipulator

The Englishman Andrew Collins represents the so-called "Deneb School" and has written several popular books about the site. Collins knew Klaus Schmidt personally and visited the excavations, where Schmidt, among other things, shared his predictions that even older settlements lay hidden beneath the earth.

·       Objectivity: Collins initially bases his geometric measurements on solid data, developed in collaboration with technical engineers, to show how the monoliths point toward the constellation of Cygnus.

·       Flaws and Speculation: Collins's approach is characterized by a deliberate manipulation of timelines and datings to sell a predetermined mystery. In a written dialogue with Amîda Kurd, Collins openly admits that the sophisticated underground structures in the immediate vicinity (such as at Karahan Tepe and Sayburç) are dated by professional archaeologists to be at most 2,000 years old. Despite this, Collins chooses to ignore the science and claim they are over 11,000 years old. He cuts and pastes the chronology in order to assert in his books that local Mesopotamian finds are linked to underground cities in Cappadocia, extinct Denisovans, biblical "Watchers," and the pyramids of Giza. This approach is entirely subjective and speculative.

3. Cemal Özçelik: The Scientific and Locally Relevant Pioneer

Standing as a sharp counterweight to the Western mystery-makers is the Kurdish archaeologist Cemal Özçelik. Through his two extensive works on Girê Mirazan, he offers a deeply scientific analysis that combines academic rigor with a unique understanding of the region's anthropology.

·       Objectivity: Özçelik is highly objective and works strictly on the basis of material and scientific data. He uses his expertise to shatter the traditional, Eurocentric "scholasticism" within Western archaeology, which for decades viewed the complex as an inexplicable anomaly. Instead, Özçelik demonstrates how the sites' symbolism surrounding cosmic birth, sacred marriage, and death rites is a logical extension of the Neolithic human's cognitive and spiritual development in Mesopotamia.

·       Anthropological and Political Insight: Özçelik highlights the deep anthropological value in the fact that the adjacent excavation site of Girê Keçel ("The Bald Hill") has also been preserved in local traditions and in his research under the name Girê Keçlê ("The Girl's Hill"). This testifies to a living, multi-millennial tradition where these monumental hills were often linked to female archetypes and spirituality, just as with Girê Mirazan. Furthermore, Özçelik has the courage to point directly to the political dimension. He has openly stated that the fundamental problem with how these world heritage sites are handled internationally stems from the statelessness of the Kurds (bêdewletbûna kurdan). Because the people who inhabit and have preserved the spiritual memory of the sites lack their own sovereign state, the Turkish regime is permitted to exercise historical censorship, change names, and allow foreign authors to manipulate the narrative without facing official resistance on the global stage.

Direct Comparison of the Authors' Approaches

Conclusion: The Truth Lies in the Soil

The academic review of Girê Mirazan and its neighboring sanctuaries shows that we do not need to turn to Andrew Collins's tales of cosmic watchers or D. Sennfelt's theories of sunken continents to be fascinated by the grandeur of history. The true explosive power of the site is not science fiction; it is entirely real and deeply rooted in the Mesopotamian soil.

Both the living linguistic heritage in the names Girê Mirazan and Girê Keçel, the folk memory of women's prayers at the mulberry tree, and the indisputable DNA breakthroughs of 2026 confirm the same thing: humanity's oldest and most magnificent architecture was erected by the direct ancestors of the local population. Despite millennia of occupation, name changes, and deliberate state erasure, both biological genetics and intangible cultural heritage bear witness that the true builders of history never left their land.

References:

1.    Gresky, J., Clare, L. et al. (2026). "Human remains and burial practices at Göbeklitepe". PLOS ONE / German Archaeological Institute (DAI).

2.    Lazaridis, I. et al. (2022). "Ancient DNA from Mesopotamia suggests distinct Pre-Pottery and Pottery Neolithic migrations into Anatolia". Science, Vol 377, Issue 6611.