Currently teaching ancient Near Eastern archaeology/architectural history/material culture at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World in Providence, Rhode Island, a city of dogs. Born March 25, 1971, a snow-stormy night in Konya, that conservative town, of all places in Turkey, as the first child to a middle class Turkish family from Cappadocia (or better Tabal with Iron age toponymy, Bahceli to be precise), an agricultural engineer father and a library scientist mother, who wandered across the country, working for the state farms, dragging their 3 children with them. Omur ended up studying architecture in Middle East Technical University, Ankara, who knows why, stuck between a naive desire to become a poet and being good at math. Ankara's modernist landscapes captured his imagination. His desire to write about buildings rather than designing them, put him inevitably into the field of architectural history (MA in architectural history, METU, Ankara). His arrival at University of Pennsylvania, threw him to the world of the Ancient Near East and saved him from becoming a boring classical archaeologist and drawing marble pieces forever (he now draws cruder varieties of stone). His last mistake in that sense was to contribute to the Mapping Augustan Rome project with a series of entries, published as a JRA supplement (2002). He wrote a dissertation (which always seemed never-ending) on the utterly esoteric topic of founding new cities in the Ancient Near East. And spent three semesters at Reed College, in Portland Oregon (a city of coffeehouses) teaching at the Art Department all sorts of weird classes. He shares his life with Peri Johnson, and their little daughter Nar (a pomegranate). His favorite place in the world is Taskahve in Ayvalik.
Read a poem on exiles. Listen to a song on Ayvalik.
See 
Ankara, the city I grew up...
Most of the images used in this presentation are from Dick Osseman's rich and generous archive of photographs. I would like to extend him my gratitude here.
